A few years ago the Washington Post published an article entitled, “There Really are 50 Eskimo Words for ‘Snow'”: ” … ‘Aqilokoq’ for ‘softly falling snow’ … ‘piegnartoq’ for ‘the snow good for driving sled’ ….”, etc. An Inuit living above the Arctic Circle needs to be precise in describing something…
The law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy recently announced that it was raising the annual salaries of its first year associates to $190,000. Other large law firms are doing the same. Instead of a business-like, matter-of-fact, decisive refusal to pay lawyer rates for the work of brand-new law…
I’ve long admired the work of Jordan Furlong, a distinguished Canadian lawyer who analyzes and forecasts changes in the legal services market for law firms and legal organizations. His twitter post yesterday: “Most invoices from law firms aren’t really ‘bills’ — they’re lists of claims against the client made by any…
In my most recent blog I considered the respective entries by PwC (the former Pricewaterhousecoopers) and by Deloitte into the U.S. market for legal services as an initial and expanding “crack” in the “wall” that protects U.S. law firms from Big Four competition. And because this blog and my law…
After offering legal services for two or three decades elsewhere in the world — the Big Four accounting firms (PwC — the former Pricewaterhousecoopers, Deloitte, EY — the former Ernst & Young, and KPMG) are now taking tangible steps to move into the U.S. legal industry. Last Wednesday (June 6)…
In my most recent blog I recounted an interview with BASF Corporation’s General Counsel, Matt Lepore. In that interview Mr. Lepore described how he went about ditching the arbitrary taxi meter of hourly billing. And he described how he secured lower costs and client-friendly incentives through alternative fee arrangements. I invite your…
I’ve said many times that the legal industry’s business model is based on the sale of attorneys’ hours: The value of lawyers’ work depends on how much time they take to perform a task. This model benefits law firms’ economics but it’s bad for the client. It results in unnecessarily…
Yes — but you need to know where to look for the innovation. And it’s early days. … My last post cited the numbers in two recent empirical studies to show that law firms are not innovating (with exceptions distinctly in the minority). But that doesn’t mean that there is…
Among law firms, the innovations in service delivery needed to help business clients do more to protect themselves from legal risk with less expenditure — just aren’t happening. So say the numbers in two recent studies. My own reading of those numbers: Law firms aren’t innovating much in legal service…
“On average, lawyers spend 60 per cent of their time drafting documents. If there is a tool that allows them to do that faster and better, then it is an obvious choice.” Thomson Reuters / Catherine Bamford … Here’s another post about the promise of Legal Document Automation for both time…