When Amazon announced a group of selected law firms to provide trademark registration services at pre-negotiated rates for small- and medium-size businesses with whom it works, it featured law firm FisherBroyles — what one commentator last year called, “The Most Important Law Firm You’ve Never Heard Of”. Amazon’s goal, according…
Too many businesses find that they spend too much on lawyers — and get too little risk protection in return. But their executive management should not look to attorneys — outside or inside their companies — to fix this on their own any time soon. At least not without relentless…
A final installment in this three-part post. What’s a practical basis for placing a value on attorneys’ work for the business? In Part 1 I addressed the legal profession’s prevailing measure of lawyers’ work: How long did the attorney decide to take doing the job? Cost-plus. Bill the client company…
In Part 1 I addressed the need for reliable numbers relating to the value of legal services. If what gets measured gets managed — and if measuring the wrong thing is worse than measuring nothing at all — then client company executives need a reliable measure of the value of…
“What gets measured gets managed.” This proverb, widely attributed to Peter Drucker, presents a tough question in the context of a company’s legal budget:Measure what, exactly?The cost-plus pricing method of the legal profession’s business model — charging the client company according to hours billed — offers the following answer:You should measure…
This four-part post’s premise: A company’s “legal” problems are likely to be — in functional terms — business problems that have a legal aspect. The traditional impulse to call in a licensed attorney from a law firm or in-house counsel department doesn’t always lead client companies to the most practical…
OK. Review of Part 1 and Part 2 of this four-part post: 1. In your company, many “legal” problems are more accurately viewed as business challenges that raise legal issues (as Mark Cohen put it). 2. Delivery of many of the legal services that respond to such business-challenges-that-raise-legal-issues now requires process…
I interrupt my four-part post on how a company can achieve higher quality legal services, that are faster, more accurate — and cheaper — by “disaggregating” business challenges that raise legal issues into tasks that (often) someone other than an attorney can do better than a lawyer (“Clients Need Legal…
Part 1 of this four-part post introduced a February 19, 2019 Forbes article, “Clients Need Legal Services But Not Necessarily Lawyers” — by Mark Cohen, both an accomplished business attorney and former chief executive of his own (non-law firm) business. Part 1 introduced Cohen’s observations about the process management and technological…