“Law.com Radar” is a dry-sounding technology and services combination that could help your company dodge bullets in its litigation exposure.
It combines court data, algorithms, and human expertise to give attorneys a fact-based heads-up to management about how their client companies are likely to be treated in court. Continue reading
Too often, in-house law departments and law firms use licensed lawyers (Category #1 below) to perform routine, recurring tasks that an alternative legal services provider (ALSP) or law company (Category #2 below) could do more cheaply, faster, and with higher accuracy.
CFOs and others in the C-suite should take a hard look at using ALSPs and law companies for routine, recurring legal tasks. Because in-house law departments and law firms, for the most part, are not doing so. Continue reading
The last few years witnessed headlines announcing a legal technology investment boom (here, here, and here).
But — for all the publicity on the investor side — actual technology adoption among law firms remains slow.
A survey of 560 law firm attorneys taken in May 2022 for Dashboard Legal asked them: “Are you satisfied with the technology at your firm?”
Only 37% answered “yes”. Continue reading
Corporate law functions perennially experience chronic shortfalls between the capabilities they have and the ones they need. Meeting these shortfalls requires Legal capability increases at scale. But, as illustrated by Microsoft’s / Jason Barnwell’s experience described in Part I of this two-part series, most law firms resist cooperation with “law companies” or “alternative legal services providers” who provide the software, data analysis, and business process expertise needed to do routine, recurring “process work” (or “efficiency work” as Elevate Services’ Liam Brown refers to it below) at-scale.
Elevate Services is an outlier among U.S.* legal services providers which has organized itself to offer corporate clients both (1) legal advice of licensed attorneys like that found in a traditional law firm, and (2) software, data analysis, and business process expertise offered at the high standards offered by law companies or alternative legal services providers.
The result: Elevate Services offers its corporate clients at-scale responses to skyrocketing legal and regulatory demands at lower cost, greater speed, and greater accuracy than a traditional law firm can offer. Continue reading
1. Regulations are technical: thousands of pages filled with minutiae.
2. Regulations are human: the minutiae is enforced by people — people who have their own personal traits, good and bad.
3. Regulatory compliance is often as much about the personal traits of those who enforce the rules as it is about the rules’ specific terms. Continue reading
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 to the CEO, COO, or CFO (or some other senior executive who possesses proven management capability), not to a general counsel or other practicing lawyer who lacks proven management capability.
One lesson of the Boeing 737 Max crashes, General Motors ignition switch tragedy, Blue Bell Creameries listeria outbreak, and dozens of similar compliance misses (see Part II of this IV-part series): in each case the C-suite was blindsided by a devastating legal or regulatory surprise, and Legal was excused from accountability for that surprise by an “ignorance defense” (Part III).
The corporate law function is disinclined to manage the sorts of systems and processes that offer a reasonable chance of nipping such incipient dangers in the bud. So business executives need to be put in charge of this management task by having Legal report directly to one of them. General counsels and other practicing lawyers should be called upon to support legal and regulatory compliance aspects of that task by providing advice as subject matter experts. Continue reading
Business analyses — and decisions to which they can lead — are no better than the data on which they are based.
Part I of this two-part series considers the tiny minority of legal matters priced to client companies on a basis other than attorney hours (a reported 16.8%), and then asks if more resolute negotiation by the corporate law function might wean outside counsel from hourly billing. LexisNexis / CounselLink, source of the 2021 report and that 16.8% number, is a superlative provider of data concerning legal services delivery.
But data about legal services delivery are usually of less precision and less transparency than, for instance, data on which audited financials are based. In particular, two flaws in the empirical findings behind the “16.8%” figure limit that report’s utility for understanding the true extent of AFA’s in U.S. legal practice. Continue reading
“In 2020, 16.8% of [corporate legal] matters had some portion of their billing under an arrangement other than hourly billing”, according to the most recent LexisNexis / CounselLink trends report on U.S. law firms’ charges to U.S. corporations (2021 report based on 12 months of data between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2020).
Which invites a working hypothesis, or at least a question:
Where a business finds the gumption to negotiate robustly with outside counsel on price, might corporate purchasing power prevail over lawyerly inertia? Continue reading
Managing Legal