Conventional law firms working to their profession’s prevailing business model — with its various forms of built-in waste — often claim to have a “customer focus”. And the in-house law departments who hire these conventional law firms may make the same claim. But creating waste — or tolerating that waste…
My most recent post — about a December 17, 2019 article entitled “10 Ways That Outside Counsel Disguise Overbilling” — cited a case where an expert in auditing law firms’ bills for inaccuracies found this: “The law firm charged 5.1 hours for work on a confidentiality agreement where opposing counsel…
“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…
This morning The Boeing Company announced that Dennis Muilenburg had resigned as its Chief Executive Officer. This follows the loss of 346 lives in two separate crashes in 2018 and 2019, and allegations that Boeing had withheld from FAA regulators, and from airline customers and their pilots — vital information…
How to cut legal costs and equip front line employees to avoid basic risks? Automate as much as possible of the otherwise clumsy, slow, and (traditionally) manual process of creating and negotiating contracts; Then automate use of those contracts’ terms to execute what you agreed to do for your customers;…
So says Alex Hamilton, describing the gist of his recent speech to a conference about innovation in law practice — specifically about the role of artificial intelligence in companies’ creation and management of contracts. A former partner at Latham & Watkins’ (2nd highest earning law firm worldwide in 2019 according…
The key to cutting your company’s legal spending is not finding a lawyer who’ll work on-the-cheap. To cut legal spending (intelligently), pay – and don’t be afraid to pay well – for the legal help that you need. Then ruthlessly avoid paying for what you don’t need. … The legal profession’s…
Technology that improves the quality and efficiency of legal work will be stymied as long as hourly billing prevails among attorneys. At least that’s my belief. Why do I say that? Hourly quotas for attorneys encourage more lawyer time per task; This motivates a proliferation of lawyers on any given…
10 years into my legal career I accepted a corporate client’s offer to run one of its divisions as a general manager. Only by leaving law practice and becoming an executive did I learn how to protect a company from its legal risks. This protection has two elements: First Element:…
No sector in 2019 is entirely isolated from the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes like higher accuracy or greater cost efficiency. But the legal profession tends to resist such moves when they might result in fewer hours billed by attorneys. Consider an artificial intelligence company whose founder I…