The Point You have two important, but different, types of resources to address legal issues facing your business: 1. LAWYERS: For advice that requires legal judgment to guide business decisions, your company needs accomplished individual attorneys (see July 27, 2022 post). You can’t get legal judgment from an automated platform.…
The Point It’s up to your company’s lawyers whether businesspeople really trust them to be helpful, or not. And it looks like those lawyers need to do a better job in that department. This Matters to Your Business On my first day as Associate General Counsel in a Fortune 500…
The Point Recently a member of a West Coast media company’s board of directors asked me this question: Our CEO wants to reduce the number of his 13 direct reports, one of whom is the General Counsel. What do you think of having the General Counsel report to the Chief…
The Point Yesterday, the American Bar Association (ABA), the Country’s leading organization of practicing attorneys, reinforced the legal profession’s longstanding opposition to anyone other than a licensed lawyer having an ownership interest in a law practice. Future adherence to this policy would prevent the Big Four and tech-adopting / process-implementing…
The Point On July 27 I posted a blog piece entitled “Sometimes Only an Experienced Lawyer’s Judgment Can Make the Difference Between Business Catastrophe and Success”. Here’s a corollary: It’s usually not the law firm in which that attorney practices that makes the difference in this selection. It’s usually the…
The Point There’s a lot more to the corporate law function than what lawyers do. But most of the legal profession doesn’t recognize that, and client companies suffer the resulting costs of Legal’s labor-intensive, technology-averse work methods. This Matters to Your Business Jeff Carr is a legendary general counsel who…
The Point Consistent with my firsthand experience on both sides of the client / lawyer table — recent survey data reflect how businesspeople and corporate Legal view each other: 1. A majority of businesspeople think that attorneys don’t understand their work, and are unsupportive of that work. 2. A majority…
The Point For legal judgment on truly consequential business decisions, it’s imperative to get the very best (and often the most expensive) lawyer you can find. Please note: in referring to the provider of such legal judgment, I use the singular. This Matters to Your Business One day the phone…
In about 60% of legal matters, the law firm doing the work fails to estimate the amount of money needed to complete the task, according to a recent BigHand technology survey described in The Artificial Lawyer June 28, 2022 issue. This has two harmful implications: 1. Lax cost control:…
The Point Last Friday, Bloomberg Law reported survey findings supporting the same conclusion I reached in a post two weeks ago: “While these results indicate that most respondents are using ALSPs [“alternative legal services providers”, or “law companies”], it’s interesting that they’re being used for a relatively small proportion of an…