The Point 1. High-stakes corporate legal services call for optimum performance from the attorneys who provide them. 2. But long hours to the point of fatigue are the default mode for both in-house and law firm attorneys. (Stresses on in-house lawyers are such that a 2022 Wolters Kluwer survey finds…
The Point 1. After two years of white-hot demand for their services, Bloomberg Law’s recent headline says demand for the junior lawyers who work as employees of big law firms (“associates”) is taking a sharp downward turn. 2. Even without the Pandemic’s boom / bust impacts on the legal market,…
The Point 1. If you don’t know the quality of what you’ve bought, no amount or kind of cost data can tell you if it’s money well spent. 2. The Thomson Reuters’ 2022 Legal Department Operations Index reported that 70% of corporate legal departments track total spending by law firm,…
The Point 1. For decades, corporate Legal has offered two responses to spiraling costs: (1) “Bring more work in-house” — substitute less expensive, generalist lawyers as full-time employees to whom you pay salary & benefits, for more expensive, specialist law firm attorneys who you pay by the hour, and (2)…
The Point 1. A good business strategy: Accelerate revenue by making the order-to-cash cycle as short as prudently possible. 2. Tactically: (1) Have lawyers draft pre-approved risk protection terms for sales contract templates before any discussions with customer, (2) Agree in advance on the terms of all other standard risk…
The Point 1. The corporate law function costs too much and takes too long. 2. Most corporate law functions knowingly accept material amounts of waste in two major forms: (1) Rather than fixed fees agreed between lawyer and client in advance of the work, most pay outside lawyers by the…
The Point 1. Corporate Legal has a lot more work to do than budget to do it with. 2. In-house and in law firms, corporate Legal persists in its decades-long emphasis on custom work, done manually by one or more attorneys, in response to a one-off request. 3. Corporate Legal…
The Point The default mode for law firms consists of custom-made work, done manually by one or more attorneys, in response to a one-off request. That’s been true for decades — and it remains true as law firms deploy recent law graduates at hundreds per hour to do low-level grunt…
The Point Attorneys view contracts primarily through the lens of risk management. And only in a very specific context: Protecting the business in case of litigation. There is, of course, some merit to this focus. But only a tiny percentage of contracts actually end up in court. The contracting process…
The Point Demand for large law firm services, after recovery from 2020’s Covid-induced setbacks to the economy, led to eye-popping rate rises in 2021, and record revenues for the firms. Whatever market forces caused those rate increases and record revenues, they look like they may well be on the wane…