The Point From Radiant Law Founder Alex Hamilton’s brief interview video contained within LexisNexis’ lengthy new report, Calling Time on the Billable Hour: “When we started Radiant, what was absolutely clear to us was that the incentives were all messed up within law firms … If you’ve worked … like…
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 Where corporate Legal needs the services of a specialist, it should look primarily among law firm partners for the practitioner who has spent years — more typically decades — focused on the narrow legal area in which the company’s need arises (more on this here and here). Surprisingly,…
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 1. High-stakes corporate legal services call for optimum performance from the attorneys who provide them. 2. But long hours to the point of fatigue are the default mode for both in-house and law firm attorneys. (Stresses on in-house lawyers are such that a 2022 Wolters Kluwer survey finds…
The Point 1. After two years of white-hot demand for their services, Bloomberg Law’s recent headline says demand for the junior lawyers who work as employees of big law firms (“associates”) is taking a sharp downward turn. 2. Even without the Pandemic’s boom / bust impacts on the legal market,…
The Point 1. If you don’t know the quality of what you’ve bought, no amount or kind of cost data can tell you if it’s money well spent. 2. The Thomson Reuters’ 2022 Legal Department Operations Index reported that 70% of corporate legal departments track total spending by law firm,…
The Point On September 19 Ron Friedmann, a highly regarded authority on law practice management processes and technology at Gartner, posed the following question to other legal experts on Twitter: “If you could magically make stick one change in each of #BigLaw [large law firms] and corporate legal departments to…
The Point 1. With the launch of its new “Precision Research” platform, Westlaw promises to cut in half the time lawyers take to do their legal research, and offers more precise results. 2. Law firms bill hundreds per hour for legal research by junior / trainee associates who are only one,…