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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.

2. AUTOMATED PLATFORMS: Fast, (relatively) cheap, and accurate performance of routine, recurring legal tasks calls for business process experts and technology of the sort operated by alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) (see August 3, 2022 post). Yet law firm junior associates and in-house counsel are the primary go-to sources for routine, recurring legal work. Not ALSPs and their automated platforms.

On routine, recurring legal tasks, the business faces a CATCH-22: The legal profession does everything it can to keep automated platforms and practicing lawyers from working together under one organization (see here). Outside of “reform” states Arizona and Utah, only licensed attorneys may hold an ownership interest in a law practice. So it’s no surprise that such automated platforms within ALSPs comprised only 1.5% of the global legal market last year (see here).

You can fix this. The marketplace affords workarounds to bar authorities’ protectionist impediments, if business leaders are willing insist on them. Continue reading

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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 Operating Officer?

I replied that “Legal” has two very different responsibilities — and reporting relationships between the corporate law function and the C-Suite should should be structured accordingly. Continue reading

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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 alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) from including the advice of licensed attorneys among their offerings.

To date this policy has already successfully barred the Big Four and ALSPs from including services of licensed lawyers from among their offerings — until, that is, ALSPs Elevate and Axiom Law availed themselves earlier this year of Arizona’s reforms. Continue reading

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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 individual practitioner who specializes in the area of law your company needs.

Continue reading

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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. Continue reading

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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 of corporate employees respond to this reality by sometimes simply bypassing Legal on deals or policy issues.

3. Most attorneys in the corporate law function are oblivious to these realities. Continue reading

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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. Continue reading

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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: there is no number against which to manage accumulation of ongoing charges while lawyers run up the bill. “Cost control” is left to the attorneys. Continue reading

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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 organization’s workflow, despite the specialized services and cost-saving potential ALSPs offer.” Continue reading

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