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The Point

A company’s legal needs can be short-term or long-term, steady or fluctuating, recurring or one-off. But whatever they are, quality is non-negotiable.

Sadly, the legal profession’s traditional offerings for business have been of just two types: Retain a law firm for a time-limited engagement at excessive hourly rates, or hire in-house attorneys as full-time, permanent employees.

Recently, firms like Axiom, Elevate (ElevateFlex), Eversheds Sutherland (Konexo US Legal Resourcing), Fenwick (Flex by Fenwick), and Peerpoint (Allen & Overy) are making high-quality, on-demand lawyer support available. Continue reading

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The “2022 Report on the State of the Legal Market“, most recent in a series of highly regarded annual reports on that subject, issued by Georgetown University Law Center and the Thomson Reuters Institute, came out in January.

For the business client, I see three main takeaways for 2021:

1. Demand for legal services increased, driven by real estate and corporate practice; each made up for losses in 2020, and, in 2021, went above pre-Covid levels.  Litigation was below pre-Covid levels in 2021.

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The Point

My posts of February 16, 2022 and February 19, 2022 quoted Microsoft’s Jason Barnwell on how to allocate — or “segment” — law function resources:

First Class: “There will always be a slice at the top that is premium work, and it’s always going to make sense to go to the law firms for that.”

Economy Class: “We need to get lawyers out of the middle of stuff when it’s a low-value thing.”

In-between: “Success for me is not getting limousine service for every task and need that Microsoft has.”

Sound advice from Mr. Barnwell. But unlikely to work without the right incentives. Continue reading

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Further to my post of February 16, one more insight conveyed by Microsoft’s Jason Barnwell in his keynote at the Strategic Knowledge & Innovation Summit for the legal industry on January 13:

“Honestly, we need to get lawyers out of the middle of stuff when it’s a low-value thing“.

A corporate law function needs a lawyer’s knowledge for every service it delivers to the business. But it doesn’t need a lawyer’s personal involvement every time it performs a routine task. Continue reading

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Three years after my posts describing Jason Barnwell‘s personal journey from MIT-trained enterprise software engineer to Assistant General Counsel of Microsoft (in three parts: here, here, and here), he gave the keynote (begins at 9:30 and ends at 40:20) January 13 at the Strategic Knowledge & Innovation Summit (SKILLS).

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Barnwell, now General Manager for Digital Transformation of Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs at Microsoft, described how he got to Microsoft’s legal department from a large Silicon Valley law firm .

In his keynote, Barnwell recounted the experience that prompted him to leave the large law firm:

“A good engineer is a lazy engineer, which means that you don’t want waste. You don’t want to do extraneous work that doesn’t deliver value. And my experience in the law firm was not that.” Continue reading

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Three and a half years after my earlier post describing their work, lawyers Nicole Auerbach and Patrick Lamb continue to transform pricing and service delivery for corporate clients at their law firm, ElevateNext.

Together with their affiliated law company, Elevate Services, they are making some history.

Here’s how Reuters put it on January 13:

“Elevate, which bills itself as a ‘law company’ serving legal department and law firm customers, said on Thursday the license from the Arizona Supreme Court unifies Elevate and its affiliated law firm …. Continue reading

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The Point

A surgeon friend of mine once explained to me how her profession’s CPT Codes describe specific medical procedures in a way that’s commonly accepted across the medical industry. For each such procedure a fixed fee is charged — regardless of the time consumed or complications encountered in performance of the task.

Though there is a noble effort underway toward a legal industry counterpart to medicine’s CPT Codes, don’t expect its widespread adoption any time soon.

Why not? Because the fixed fees those codes make possible in medicine undercut attorneys’ billable hours business model. Continue reading

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The Point

EY Law, the law practice division of the Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young, has just announced (subscription required) that it’s adding up to 800 lawyers in the next 3 years.

Patrick McKenna identifies the Big Four’s chief advantage in law practice over law firms: “A strong industry focus“.

This Matters to Your Business

Patrick McKenna’s competitive diagnosis:

“One of the major problems is that law firms and lawyers DO NOT UNDERSTAND the intricacies of industries.”

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The Point

From The American Lawyer, January 31 edition (subscription required), reporting on an annual survey of U.S. law firms by Wells Fargo Private Bank Legal Specialty Group:

“Firms also told the Wells Fargo researchers that they expect to implement standard rate increases of between 6% and 7% this year, on average, which would be a ‘modest increase’ over the 5.7% that Wells Fargo tallied for 2021.”

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News Item

From the American Bar Association Journal, January 27, 2022:

“Goodwin Procter is providing ‘thoughtfully curated weeklong’ trips to associates and some other billers, so they can get relaxation time on the law firm’s tab … The trips are valued at $5,000 to $10,000, depending on lawyer seniority.

“Those eligible for the program include associates, professional track attorneys, science advisers and science law clerks who billed at least 1,950 hours last year, according to Reuters.”

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