OK. Review of Part 1 and Part 2 of this four-part post: 1. In your company, many “legal” problems are more accurately viewed as business challenges that raise legal issues (as Mark Cohen put it). 2. Delivery of many of the legal services that respond to such business-challenges-that-raise-legal-issues now requires process…
I interrupt my four-part post on how a company can achieve higher quality legal services, that are faster, more accurate — and cheaper — by “disaggregating” business challenges that raise legal issues into tasks that (often) someone other than an attorney can do better than a lawyer (“Clients Need Legal…
Part 1 of this four-part post introduced a February 19, 2019 Forbes article, “Clients Need Legal Services But Not Necessarily Lawyers” — by Mark Cohen, both an accomplished business attorney and former chief executive of his own (non-law firm) business. Part 1 introduced Cohen’s observations about the process management and technological…
My client was an Amsterdam-based investor who wanted to build an aviation services business in the United States. As a corporate and commercial lawyer whose practice largely emphasized the transportation sector, I needed to get this client the best advice possible on positioning its new business from a U.S. federal…
I ended Part 2 of this three-part post with this: “Naysayers contend that Big 4 accounting firms cannot enter the U.S. market for legal services due to ‘regs and laws’ the ‘preclude Big 4 entry’. “Is that really true?” No, it’s not. … First — Big 4 accounting firms’…
I concluded Part 1 of this three-part post by asking: For business owners and managers, what could the Big 4 accounting firms offer to client companies that a conventional law firm does not? In his U.S. Law and the Big Four: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?“, Stephen Embry,…
My most recent post urges business owners and managers to seek terms of service from their legal services providers that are consistent with the basic management disciplines that they require in every other part of their companies — other than legal. That means finding alternatives to the terms of service that…
In Part 1 of this two-part post I wrote that the conventional business law firm does not compete on the terms of service — does not adhere to management disciplines — that best serve client companies: Know what the price will be before you agree to pay it. Don’t accept…
Competition creates the value that the customer gets. There’s no substitute for it. Take a look at this morning’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required): “Charles Schwab, Fidelity Escalate Brokerage Price War”. Featuring a picture’s-worth-a-thousand-words chart showing Schwab’s average commission per trade going from $12 in 2015 down to a little more than…
Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities famously begins: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness ….” On one hand, the legal profession’s hourly billing-based business model rules the day in most law firms. And…