I’m back from a hiatus in my blogging after two months of traveling back East on family medical and elder care duties. This blog, like my law practice, remains focused on a dilemma faced by business owners and executives: How to manage legal and regulatory exposure where your attorneys (outside…
In a recent blog post Ron Friedmann responded to a question posed in a legal technology publication: “‘How do you envision the legal team of the future changing?’ The thesis of my answer: multidisciplinary teams …. ” … The complexity of the modern world makes many problems multifaceted. How many…
This past Monday (July 2) Mark A. Cohen wrote the following in Forbes online: “Law is staging its own version of ‘every kid gets a trophy’ … Every week, all over the globe, the legal industry throws gala dinners to celebrate its ‘innovators,’ ‘visionaries,’ and ‘pioneers.’ These gatherings afford attendees…
In Congress, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and…
My last post was discouraging: “Business Leaders Need to Drive Better Legal Pricing and Services Delivery Because Lawyers Won’t or Can’t”. Discouraging, but proven. Among law firms: 69% of leaders surveyed said that, “partners resist most change efforts”, and 59% gave this reason: “We are not feeling enough economic pain…
The message of this blog, and what I do for my clients, is based on a single guiding conviction: American businesses large and small pay increasing (never decreasing) legal costs – and miss opportunities to prevent liability before it happens. Because owners and executives let the legal industry and its…
Some times a character test presents itself in the guise of a legal question. And when that character test presents itself it’s the duty of general management — not their lawyers — to decide with wisdom and discernment. Because — except where there is an actual violation of law or…
As we both awaited the start of a meeting, I struck up a conversation with the general counsel of a publicly traded company with $2BB in annual sales. We agreed that great law firms and attorneys are available beyond the most prominent brand name law firms. But my friend was…
74% of respondents cited “regulations and enforcement” as their top concern in the most recent Morrison Foerster General Counsel Up-at-Night Report. Coming at regulatory burdens from a different direction, legal scholars Michael Bommarito II and Daniel Martin Katz found that regulatory references in 10-K filings had increased 4X between 1994 and 2014 (after…
Lola v. Skadden, Arps arose from a lawsuit in which a plaintiff demanded massive disclosures of documents of a specified description. This meant that the defendant had to review thousands of documents to respond. David Lola was a licensed lawyer hired on contract by the law firm Skadden Arps to perform…