This is a tale of two definitions. Two definitions of what “productivity” means in the delivery of legal services to a company. It’s about an MIT-trained software engineer named Jason Barnwell who worked in one of the country’s major corporate law firms right out of USC Law School. The tale…
I will be traveling out of the country, and will resume blogging January 21, 2019 — after I get caught up in my day job.
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…
In the Financial Times article which concludes with the above statement, English lawyer David Allen Green reminds the reader that the value of legal work depends on quality — not quantity: “… To assess the value of legal advice purely on the basis of cost or volume of output is…
So wrote English lawyer David Allen Green in the Financial Times the other day to conclude his op-ed on how to cut legal costs: “The best way for a business to manage legal costs is to be clear about what it wants from lawyers and to force them to be clear about…
In business getting “results” is basically a management question. So is getting artificial intelligence (AI) or any other tech innovation right. But it’s vital to begin with a management approach that can achieve those results — only thereafter does it make any sense to pick AI or any other tech…
In Part 1 of this three-part series, I wrote that business people care about results. And that 99.9% of a lawyer’s education and focus are devoted to analytical preoccupations and time-honored how-to methodologies — “lawyer tasks” — not so much to the results their clients really care about. Lawyers are…
Business people care about results. That was the biggest lesson I learned upon crossing to the client side of the lawyer / client table. After spending a decade as a practicing attorney. Kind of a “duh” factor for my friends who’ve lived and died by the P&L all their careers.…
One of this blog’s goals is to help business owners and managers understand why their lawyers act the way they do. My question in this two-part series: Why don’t more law firms treat the businesses that pay their bills like customers? In my post a week ago I quoted Forbes’…