The Point The above from a headline in Corporate Counsel (subscription required) last week. Nathan Cemenska is an attorney who is Director of Legal Operation and Industry Insights at Wolters Kluwer ELM solutions. In a report issued earlier this month, LegalVIEW Insights volume 2023-1: Law firm rate increases, he contends…
The Point My previous article reported that an internationally prominent alternative legal services provider (ALSP), Axiom, had launched a law firm as its wholly-owned subsidiary in Arizona — with operations and offerings of both ALSP and law firm fully integrated into each other. Last year, Elevate Services, another internationally prominent…
The Point In every U.S. jurisdiction except Arizona and Utah: “A lawyer or law firm shall not share legal fees with a nonlawyer ….” (With exceptions set forth here that don’t apply to this discussion). In plain terms, American Bar Association Rule 5.4, and its counterparts in the legal “ethics”…
The Point I once asked Ben W. Heineman, Jr., legendary GE General Counsel under Jack Welch during the years I served as an executive at GE: “What’s the one key to managing resources in a company’s law function?” Heineman’s unhesitating reply: “Segment! Segment! Segment!” As he explains in his book,…
The Point From a November 28 report in American Lawyer Media / Law.com (subscription required): “‘Surprised, Angry, Dismayed’: Legal Departments Vow to Fight Law Firms’ Rate-Hike Plans … The in-house legal community is expressing outrage that law firms will be pressing for aggressive rate hikes in 2023, even though they…
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…
The Point Corporate law functions perennially experience chronic shortfalls between the capabilities they have and the ones they need. Meeting these shortfalls requires Legal capability increases at scale. But, as illustrated by Microsoft’s / Jason Barnwell’s experience described in Part I of this two-part series, most law firms resist cooperation …
The Point Corporate law functions perennially experience chronic shortfalls between the capabilities they have and the capabilities they need. Absent an unlimited budget that can simply add lawyers in response to each new legal and regulatory demand, Legal must increase its compliance capabilities at-scale just to keep up. In a…
The Point My posts of February 16, 2022 and February 19, 2022 quoted Microsoft’s Jason Barnwell on how to allocate — or “segment” — law function resources: First Class: “There will always be a slice at the top that is premium work, and it’s always going to make sense to go to the law…