The Point In turning from the current reactive, makeshift approach to Legal, to a financially sustainable and operationally coherent strategy, what options does the business have? I suggest three kinds. This Matters to Your Business 1. Where a task is best done by a lawyer, get one deeply experienced in…
The Point Part I of this series concluded: ” … In most companies, corporate Legal is a business function without a strategy … without objectives and metrics by which to assess its effectiveness .” In other words, most corporate Legal functions neglect to target specific results for which executive management can…
The Point In most companies, corporate Legal is a business function without a strategy. Executive management needs to fix this. Because neither attorneys in law firms nor those in-house have defined what is — and is not — within Legal’s scope of responsibility. And, apart from generalized concern about cost,…
The Point Since I first met him 5 years ago, I’ve come to regard Mark Cohen, along with the UK’s Richard Susskind, as one of the world’s two leading authorities on the legal profession’s future. Here’s what he wrote in his most recent regular column for Forbes, entitled “Law’s Delayed…
The Point Over the past four decades, the constant law department refrain, in response to rising costs, has been: “bring more work in-house” (see here, here, and here). Swap out on-demand law firm specialists who charge (high) fees, for full-time in-house generalists who receive (lower) salaries and benefits. This “cost-saving” method…
The Point In a recent post, this blog covered the FisherBroyles law firm, which recently won acclaim for becoming one of the 200 highest revenue U.S. law firms (“AmLaw 200”). It has no offices, no associates, and no secretaries—what partner James Fisher calls, “the headwinds of profitability.” As to “no…
The Point In a recent article, Bruce MacEwen, one of the three or four leading experts on lawyers and law firms, explains that those firms and the in-house law departments who hire them can’t keep up with the U.S. legal system’s increasing demands. Not at the current rate of increase.…
The Point Earlier this month several top U.S. law firms announced that they’d be paying 2021 law graduates $200,000 per year (Wall Street Journal: “Entry-Level Lawyers Are Now Making $200,000 a Year”). Whether the law firms account for this as overhead (very unlikely), or pay for it by charging clients…
Speed-to-contract is vital to your revenues. As a P&L executive you know that. As a former P&L executive — now practicing law — I know that. But too many lawyers just don’t. They focus on verbal tweaks and “improvements” that hold up the process. … It was only after I…
This four-part post’s premise: A company’s “legal” problems are likely to be — in functional terms — business problems that have a legal aspect. The traditional impulse to call in a licensed attorney from a law firm or in-house counsel department doesn’t always lead client companies to the most practical…