Business people care about results. That was the biggest lesson I learned upon crossing to the client side of the lawyer / client table. After spending a decade as a practicing attorney. Kind of a “duh” factor for my friends who’d lived and died by the P&L all their careers.…
Part 1 of this three-part post described software engineer-turned-attorney Jason Barnwell’s introduction — two months into his first law job after graduating from USC Law School — to the legal profession’s idea of “productivity”. As the junior lawyer on a deal team, he offered to automate the process of creating…
This is a tale of two definitions. Two definitions of what “productivity” means in the delivery of legal services to a company. It’s about an MIT-trained software engineer named Jason Barnwell who worked in one of the country’s major corporate law firms right out of USC Law School. The tale…
In the Financial Times article which concludes with the above statement, English lawyer David Allen Green reminds the reader that the value of legal work depends on quality — not quantity: “… To assess the value of legal advice purely on the basis of cost or volume of output is…
In business getting “results” is basically a management question. So is getting artificial intelligence (AI) or any other tech innovation right. But it’s vital to begin with a management approach that can achieve those results — only thereafter does it make any sense to pick AI or any other tech…
In Part 1 of this three-part series, I wrote that business people care about results. And that 99.9% of a lawyer’s education and focus are devoted to analytical preoccupations and time-honored how-to methodologies — “lawyer tasks” — not so much to the results their clients really care about. Lawyers are…
Business people care about results. That was the biggest lesson I learned upon crossing to the client side of the lawyer / client table. After spending a decade as a practicing attorney. Kind of a “duh” factor for my friends who’ve lived and died by the P&L all their careers.…
One of this blog’s goals is to help business owners and managers understand why their lawyers act the way they do. My question in this two-part series: Why don’t more law firms treat the businesses that pay their bills like customers? In my post a week ago I quoted Forbes’…
In posing the above question last Monday, lawyer and law firm consultant Bruce MacEwen quoted Peter Drucker: “There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.” Having consulted to law firms on their business strategies — MacEwen argued that law firms’ “real clients” too often consist…
My most recent post introduced an explanation for the question posed above: The legal profession is an industry managed by committee. There are no outside boards of directors to step in with an “outside view” when things aren’t working. Law firms are run by — and answerable to — no one other…