Lawyers have long engaged in loose and hopeful speculation that law firms will stop basing their charges on the time it takes attorneys to do their work, and that corporate clients will soon be able to pay legal fees based on a pre-agreed value of attorneys’ services. For instance, a…
The Point What’s wrong with the corporate law function? For the last 40 to 50 years C-suites and boards have taken a hands-off posture on managing Legal, leaving lawyers in-house to manage lawyers in outside firms. Most of these lawyers are pretty good at law, but they’re bad at cost…
A wonderful, but demanding, project keeps me from posting this week. Looking forward to resuming next week.
The Point 1. Corporate law functions perennially experience chronic, gaping shortfalls between the resources they need to do their job and what they actually possess. 2. Without an unlimited budget, a corporate law function must therefore scale its resources to keep up with soaring legal and regulatory demands. 3. To…
The Point As I suggested in Part I of this series, scaling a company’s resources to meet soaring legal and regulatory demands is, ultimately, a management challenge. Because at-scale impact — using limited resources — won’t happen without disciplined systems and processes by which colleagues work together to accomplish what…
The Point 1. In the last four decades, legal and regulatory demands on business have increased exponentially. 2. These demands trigger chronic, gaping shortfalls between what a company needs in order to achieve legal or regulatory compliance, on one hand, and the resources that Legal actually possesses, on the other.…
The Point “It’s the front-line people who know what’s going on, not the people with their feet up on the desks in their offices”. So writes Alan Weiss, the clearest thinker on professional services delivery I’ve ever met. Yet, in the context of critical enterprise risk management, the odds are…
The Point Legal journalists like to say that in-house counsel are much better positioned than outside lawyers to adopt labor-saving and accuracy-enhancing workflow processes, and the technology to support them, since they don’t have to maximize hours billed. Despite what one might expect, Thomson Reuters’ “State of the UK Legal…
The Point Many in the U.S. legal profession have long touted “pricing innovation”, promising corporate clients savings and cost certainty. As of 2022 these promises remain largely empty. Because in the U.S. corporate legal sector the billable hour continues to prevail. By a wide margin. So says the 2022 State…
Who Should Do What on Legal and Regulatory Risk? The enterprise needs compliance systems and processes that provide early warning of legal and regulatory dangers, that trigger timely actions against those dangers, and that, ultimately, can prevent them from mutating into something worse. Those systems and processes should report up…