Excerpt from the Financial Times article (subscription required) cited in my Wednesday, January 28 post: “A female partner at Skadden [Arps law firm] says: ‘When a lawyer has done 2,500 billable hours in a year the law firm goes ‘hurrah’. In many other businesses, she says, ‘management would be saying hang…
The Point The legal profession’s business model incentivizes physical and mental exhaustion by looking to hours billed as the yardstick by which an attorney is measured. This is bad for the lawyer and bad for the client. This Matters to Your Business A recent piece in the Financial Times documents…
THE POINT As former general counsel and legal innovator Jeff Carr tweeted the day after the above headline: “OMG!… Wait, didn’t this story run in 1998, and 2001 and 2008 and 2014 and, well every year there’s a survey? Oh well, might be a slow news day.” DISCUSSION This is…
Last Thursday (March 5, 2020) I was, for the umpteenth time, shocked to be reminded of how un-businesslike the legal industry’s billable hour-based business model really is. I say “un-businesslike” rather than “crazy” — or something more colorful — because the clients I serve are businesses themselves. And their businesses…
P&L executives concerned with managing legal risk and controlling legal costs should know that artificial intelligence (AI) promises greater accuracy and lower costs in litigation tasks. If and when the legal industry adopts the technology. And last month some of this promise appears to have been realized in some concrete,…
“10 Ways That Outside Counsel Disguise Overbilling“. Headline of a December 17, 2019 article in Corporate Counsel, a prominent publication directed to in-house lawyers. Citing the Association of Corporate Counsel’s findings in its “2019 Global Legal Department Benchmarking Report”, the article begins with this statement of fact: ” … Large…
The case of Cass v. 1410088 Ontario Inc. contains this one sentence written by an Ontario Superior Court judge in the course of disallowing from an attorney’s fee request the amount designated for “legal research”: “If artificial intelligence sources were employed, no doubt counsel’s preparation time would have been significantly…
Thus began an October 15 article in “Above the Law” — one of the leading news websites directed at lawyers — particularly lawyers employed by law firms as “associates”. Under the headline “Biglaw Firm Makes It That Much Harder to Get Your Bonus”, here’s the complete text of the first…