The Point
- Recently the Arizona Supreme Court granted Axiom Law authority to provide licensed lawyers and their legal advice directly to businesses that do not have a general counsel or other full-time attorney on their payroll.
- This matters because attorneys’ bar regulations in the U.S. (except in Washington, D.C.) have prohibited such a direct offering by any entity owned by persons who have not been licensed to practice law.
- In over 20 years of providing qualified attorneys to businesses that do have full-time in-house counsel, and currently generating in excess of $1 billion in annual revenue, Axiom Law is renowned for two traits:
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- The high quality of the lawyers it provides to companies; many of whom have practiced law with prestigious traditional law firms or Fortune 500 general counsel offices, lots of them with Ivy League pedigrees, etc., and
- Fair charges to their corporate clients. Unlike traditional law firms, Axiom Law does not bill by the hour.
This Matters to Your Business
Until now (and until the Arizona Supreme Court’s conferring on Elevate Services authority to practice law as described in Part II of this three-part series), businesses that needed to add legal staff for tasks large or small had just two choices:
- Hire a traditional law firm — most of whom bill by the hour, with the over-staffing and prioritizing of inexperience that business model imposes on the client company, or
- Hire a licensed attorney onto their payroll full-time, for an indefinite term, as in-house counsel.
…
A personal observation:
My own high opinion of Axiom Law comes from having worked directly with, and being personally acquainted with, Axiom attorneys.
For instance, when I was a Vice President of GE Rail Services I worked with its General Counsel, and came to respect (and like) him as a very accomplished attorney. Working at the top of the legal profession’s food chain at General Counsel of a GE business unit.
After leaving the General Counsel’s job, my colleague spent years practicing law with Axiom Law. He is precisely the sort of lawyer to whom I would entrust high-consequence corporate legal matters.
Because …
As corporate law functions experience capability shortfalls in the face of relentless, skyrocketing legal and regulatory demands, the legal profession’s business model and “ethics” rules impede efforts to achieve at-scale response and to get legal advice on client-friendly terms of engagement.
This three-part series addresses new and innovative ways of overcoming those impediments.
It’s the conventional lawyer mindset that came up with impediments to cost-efficiency, greater speed, and higher accuracy in what Legal produces for the business client. It takes a different mindset to remove those impediments.