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 Over the past four decades, the constant law department refrain, in response to rising costs, has been: “bring more work in-house” (see here, here, and here). Swap out on-demand law firm specialists who charge (high) fees, for full-time in-house generalists who receive (lower) salaries and benefits. This “cost-saving” method…
The Point In a recent post, this blog covered the FisherBroyles law firm, which recently won acclaim for becoming one of the 200 highest revenue U.S. law firms (“AmLaw 200”). It has no offices, no associates, and no secretaries—what partner James Fisher calls, “the headwinds of profitability.” As to “no…
The Point In a recent article, Bruce MacEwen, one of the three or four leading experts on lawyers and law firms, explains that those firms and the in-house law departments who hire them can’t keep up with the U.S. legal system’s increasing demands. Not at the current rate of increase.…
The Point Factor is a prominent “alternative legal services provider”, or “law company”. That means it offers technology and workflow process professionals to support delivery of legal services; but, unlike a law firm, it has no attorneys who offer legal advice directly to clients. In June Factor announced a “Legal…
The Point Earlier this month several top U.S. law firms announced that they’d be paying 2021 law graduates $200,000 per year (Wall Street Journal: “Entry-Level Lawyers Are Now Making $200,000 a Year”). Whether the law firms account for this as overhead (very unlikely), or pay for it by charging clients…
The Point This year FisherBroyles became the first virtual law firm to be included in the AmLaw 200 — The American Lawyer’s yearly ranking of the 200 largest U.S. law firms. What’s distinctive about this law firm: Its business model removes two key items of overhead from all of its…
The Point “Law department leaders report that one out of every five in-house [lawyer] hours is currently spent on low-complexity, repetitive or routine tasks, with 87% confirming that their department spends too much time on these tasks.” 2021 EY (Ernst & Young) Law Survey. In Legal, as in any other…
The Point Over the weekend I heard a veteran of a Silicon Valley-based, Fortune 100 tech company say this: “When I started, the legal department was 200 people … by the time I left it was 1500 people.” This Matters When its workload increases, the corporate law function has one…