Calendar of events

By Jordan Furlong | Published: February 23, 2010

The next few weeks are booked solid for me, as I prepare for a series of presentations and workshops throughout March. So in exchange for fewer posts over the next month, I thought I’d let you know what I’ll be doing, where I’ll be doing it, and what I recommend you look into doing as well. (Only public events are noted here, of course.)

On March 11, I’ll be in Chicago to deliver a plenary speech and moderate a roundtable discussion for the American Bar Association’s Bar Leadership Institute, an annual gathering of more than 350 new bar leaders from across the United States. The subject of the address will be the rapidly evolving nature of legal practice and its impact on bar associations. I’ll be fortunate to share the stage with two people whose work I admire: Edward Adams, editor and publisher of the ABA Journal, and Carole Silver, executive director of the Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown University and a member of the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20. Here are full details of the event.

On March 18, I’ll be returning to the ABA, but this time by phone. I’ll be co-hosting a webinar on alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) for the ABA’s Law Practice Management Section, along with my Edge International Consulting colleague Rob Millard and Valorem Law Group founding partner Patrick J. Lamb. The webinar, titled “Rethink Legal Billing: Align Your Firm to Alternative Fee Arrangements,” will open with an assessment of what AFAs are and why they’ve suddenly emerged as the hottest topic in lawyer-client relations. The discussion will continue with an in-depth look at the project management and business process engineering aspects of successful AFAs, and close with first-hand experiences with AFAs in real-world situations. Watch the ABA LPM home page for registration information.

And on March 22, I’ll be in Washington, D.C. at the afore-mentioned Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown University, which is sponsoring a symposium titled “Law Firm Evolution: Brave New World or Business As Usual?” I’ll be part of a panel discussing new lawyer training methods at some innovative U.S. law firms and contrasting them with Canadian law firms’ articling programs. But the real draw will be the luminaries at the podium throughout the event. Check out this partial list of panellists: Richard Susskind, Stephen Mayson, Dan DiPietro, Bruce MacEwen, Susan Hackett, Leah Cooper, Mark Chandler, Jeff Carr, Aric Press, and managing partners or senior partners from several global law firms. Here’s a downloadable PDF of the agenda.

(Also in Washington, on March 17-18, my colleagues Gerry Riskin and Karen MacKay will be hosting the first of a series of Law Firm Leaders Development Workshops designed to help managing partners and practice group leaders grow their leadership skills and perfect profitability and change management. Highly recommended.)

Finally, although it’s a few months down the road, I’ll also let you know that I’m speaking at the Law Society of Upper Canada’s 5th Annual Solo and Small Firm Conference and Expo in Toronto on May 14. Since I’m appearing there in my dual capacity as an Edge partner and a Stem senior consultant, I’ll speak once on strategic/future of law matters and once on social media opportunities for lawyers.

These sorts of events are always extremely interesting for me — speaking both with other panelists and with attendees is a great opportunity to take the profession’s pulse. If you or your organization would be interested in having me speak or facilitate at an event, by all means please drop me a line or read more about it. And if you’ll be attending any of the foregoing events, please let me know!

Posted in Edge, Law21, Stem | Leave a comment

Blawg Review at Law Firm Web Strategy Blog

By Jordan Furlong | Published: February 22, 2010

In case you’re interested, I authored this week’s Blawg Review (#252) with my colleagues at Stem Legal’s Law Firm Web Strategy Blog. The theme is technology run amok: the fear many people (and especially lawyers) seem to have about the things we create, as expressed in popular fiction from Frankenstein to Battlestar Galactica. I’ve always thought Frankenstein belonged in the science fiction genre more than in the horror aisle in the bookstore, and this Blawg Review tries to show how an influential strain of sci-fi can trace its lineage back to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, while also highlighting the best of the blawgosphere’s last seven days. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you emulate it — this is my second Blawg Review in the last year, and I strongly encourage more lawyers to take up the BR challenge: it’s important, it’s interesting, and it’s fun.

Posted in Stem | Leave a comment

The new rules of pricing

By Jordan Furlong | Published: February 11, 2010

Recently, I’m told, several GCs and senior lawyers of large law firms gathered in London for a high-level conversation about new billing mechanisms. One noteworthy observation to emerge from the meeting was the law firms’ insistence that whatever new mechanism was developed, it had to take into account chargeable time invested in the work. I wasn’t there to see the clients’ reaction, but if a few eyes were rolled, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Lawyers are going nowhere in this new marketplace unless they can lose this obsession with the effort-based valuation of work. At the heart of lawyers’ billable-hour infatuation, even beyond the attraction of low-risk pricing and the enablement of perfectionism, lies the basic belief that the harder you work, the more you should get paid. “It took me ten hours to do this, so I should be paid twice what another task took five hours to do.” The nature of the work, its relative simplicity or complexity, the knowledge resources it did or didn’t require, and the value or relative lack thereof to the client — all these variables are considered incidental to the effort exerted, the expenditure of the lawyer’s precious time, to accomplish the work.

Very few marketplaces, however, base price directly on effort and time.  Avatar cost 20 times what The Hurt Locker cost to make and took years longer to complete, yet my ticket to watch either Oscar contender costs the same. One real estate agent might make ten times more effort at finding the right buyers for a home than another, yet they both get the same commission upon sale. I can go to a global craft show and buy a beautiful hand-made shawl that an aged, arthritic, Guatemalan woman spent a painful three days to create for less than a family dinner at the local pizza joint will cost that same night. Price differences can emerge from expertise, or from quality, or from brand assurance, or from customer value — but they don’t emerge from how hard someone had to work to make something. Read More »

Posted in Billing, Clients | 2 Comments

The boutique exodus

By Jordan Furlong | Published: February 9, 2010

I was talking the other day with a partner in a large national firm. For a variety of reasons, including the nature of his practice area, his annual billings have been declining for a couple of years now, and he’s been contacted about it by some of the senior people in the firm. He’s been tempted, from time to time, to respond to their concerns by saying: “Have you ever noticed that every year, you raise my billing rates, and every year, I bill fewer hours?”

That neatly encapsulates what I think is a real and dangerous trend at a lot of the bigger law firms: week by week, rate increase by rate increase, they’re pricing themselves out of the market. The profit imperative is so strong at these firms, and the level of economic sophistication often so low, that rate increases are ordered up regardless of whether the clients want them, can afford them, or are screaming bloody murder about them. To the extent a firm thinks about its clients when raising rates, it often wagers that they have relatively limited options — they need to get the work done and they want it done by lawyers they trust — and that they aren’t prepared to make a radical and onerous move like switching firms (especially since almost all big firms operate the same and bill the same anyway). That gamble has paid off handsomely over the years, and so the firms have had little incentive to change their approach.

What’s happening now, however, is that the clients and their lawyers are teaming up and doing an end run around the firms. There’s been a barrage of reports over the past few months about lawyers abandoning big firms to set up smaller boutique practices, taking clients with them, and thriving in the result. It’s a four-step process: client tells lawyer it can’t afford her rates anymore. Lawyer tells client she doesn’t control her rates and doesn’t want to lose the client. Light bulbs appear simultaneously over their heads. And a few months later, a new small firm is born, with at least one A-list client on its roster. Read More »

Posted in Big Firms, Solo & Small Firm | 3 Comments

The iFuture

By Jordan Furlong | Published: February 4, 2010

My newest column is up at Slaw, winner for two consecutive years of Dennis Kennedy’s Best Law Blog Award. Follow the link to Canada’s best legal website. Read More »

Posted in Publishing, Research, Technology | 8 Comments

Law21 2.1

By Jordan Furlong | Published: January 29, 2010

It’s not quite the iPad launch, but for me, it’s still a momentous occasion. If you’re reading this post via an RSS feed, then you might want to click on the originating link, because Law21 has a new look today.

With the indispensable help of Jesse Collins of Moxy Webworks and Tony Delitala of Delitala Design, I’m very proud to show off Law21’s new design. You’ll see that while many features remain the same or similar, you’ll find many more are new and, I hope, interesting. In addition to a cleaner, more open feel to the site, we’ve added these elements:

  • The tabs across the top of the page – which will always stay on top of the page; try scrolling down and see – will bring you to information about the consulting services I’m offering through Edge International and Stem Legal. You can also access this information by clicking the Stem and Edge icons at the top of the right sidebar column.
  • My five most recent Twitter updates are now featured continuously just below those icons, and they’ll constantly refresh whenever I make a new Twitter post. If you want to join the 1,300+ people already following the micro-blogging and micro-publishing service I’m operating on Twitter, a simple click of the Twitter icon will do the job.
  • I’m making a lot more speaking appearances these days, so we’ve installed a feature that tells you where, when, and to whom I’m giving a presentation in the upcoming months. If you’re interested in having me come speak to your firm or organization as well, click on the “Consulting Services” tab at the top of the page for more information.
  • I also thought it was time to provide some links to articles I’ve written and podcasts or teleseminars I’ve recorded. So again, down the right-hand column, you’ll find lists of both types of publications and links to where they can be found online.

As is the case with every blog and website redesign, the form is only a point of entry into the content. So I’ll continue to strive to provide you with the very best articles I can at Law21, to justify and provide real return on the investment of your time and attention here. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Posted in Law21 | 3 Comments

The lamp and the laser

By Jordan Furlong | Published: January 20, 2010

When you set up a home office, as I’ve recently been doing, you begin to notice lighting in a way you hadn’t before. It quickly becomes apparent that fixed overhead lights and large floor lamps, no matter how bright they might be, don’t illuminate desks and laptops very well. For close-range work, helping you navigate the nooks and crannies of keyboards and file folders, you need more focused lighting — portable, flexible, easily angled, with small super-bright halogen rather than rounded regular bulbs. These light sources are smaller and carry less wattage than the big lights and lamps — but they serve a specific need much better, and many of our illumination needs these days are pretty specific.

I used this analogy — high-wattage lamps that cast vast amounts of light in a wide circle, contrasted with smaller, sharper, focused sources that put only the light you need exactly where you need it — in a recent discussion about the future size of law firms. My theory is that most things being equal, the future belongs to smaller firms and solos, because the large-firm model ultimately suffers from an over-reliance on volume and an inability to finely focus resources. Read More »

Posted in Big Firms, Marketing, Solo & Small Firm | 5 Comments

Solo Practice University guest lecture

By Jordan Furlong | Published: January 8, 2010

After all these years, I’m going back to law school. I’m happy to announce I’m making my first appearance as a Guest Lecturer at Solo Practice University on Tuesday, January 12 at noon ET. After having numerous great conversations with SPU founder Susan Cartier Liebel by phone and email over the years, it’ll be tremendous fun to exchange our ideas with the whole Solo Practice community. Here’s the agenda we’ve prepared — we might not get to all of these topics, but we’ll cover as many as we can:

  1. Why the billable hour’s not dead — just irrelevant.
  2. Why process and systematization will change how legal work is done.
  3. Why “access to justice” no longer has to mean “access to a lawyer’” Will we see the demise of “Unauthorized Practice of Law” restrictions?
  4. How and why client collaboration will affect your practice.
  5. Are we finally ready for preventive lawyering, becoming full-time holistic legal health professionals?
  6. How will the introduction of Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia and China (BRIIC) into the global legal marketplace affect you and your practice?
  7. Why solos and small firms are the long-term future of the practice of law.
  8. Why law schools won’t change, but legal education will.

All the details of the Guest Lecture can be found at the SPU website. If you’re not currently enrolled at Solo Practice University but would like to access this event, log in to Facebook (or create an account) and become a fan. Hope you can make it next Tuesday!

Update: A recording of the teleseminar is now available by becoming a fan of SPU’s Facebook page here.

Posted in Law21, Solo & Small Firm | 1 Comment

The trusted advisor

By Jordan Furlong | Published: January 7, 2010

My collection of prized possessions is extremely small — the feature item is probably a ticket stub from Game 6 of the 1993 World Series (Joe Carter’s home run off Mitch Williams). Among that narrow collection, you’ll find a personally inscribed copy of David Maister’s last book, Strategy and the Fat Smoker, and if your passion is making the legal services marketplace better for both lawyers and clients (as mine is), you’ll understand why. A remarkable number of very successful lawyers and law firm leaders have a copy of one of David’s groundbreaking books, such as True Professionalism or Managing the Professional Services Firm or The Trusted Advisor (co-authored with Charles H. Green and Robert M. Galford), on their bookshelves. His status in law practice management circles can fairly be called institutional, and unfortunately for us, the new year has brought word of the institution’s closure: David is retiring from consulting, speaking and writing on professional service delivery.

My own interactions with David Maister have been only glancing — he contributed a fine article to a College of Law Practice Management e-zine on innovation that I edited in 2006, and he generously gave me a credit in his last book for some very slight suggestions I contributed. But his influence on me and his impact on a generation of legal professionals have been profound — not only through his practical guidance and his contributions to a rational law practice business model, but for the principles he constantly advanced as essential to excellent professional service. David exhorted lawyers and accountants to stay true to the highest standards of trustworthiness and ethics and to focus relentlessly on serving the client’s best interests. Read More »

Posted in Ethics, Purpose | 1 Comment

Ready or not, here come the clients

By Jordan Furlong | Published: December 22, 2009

What’s left to say about the 2000s? What the legal profession (and the marketplace in which it operates) have just gone through was, as Brad Hildebrandt points out, unprecedented in almost every way. I won’t recap the changes — as Law21’s second full year draws to a close, you can read about them in many of the 274 previous posts here. But at a glance, we’ve seen astounding technological advances (primarily online) that change how legal services are accomplished and delivered, the rapid development of service providers outside the confines of national borders and the legal profession, and two recessions, the latter serious enough to trigger a long-overdue shift in the balance of power between lawyers and their clients. By the decade’s end, we saw the first signs that fundamental change in the marketplace, talked about for so long, was finally, really happening.

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t be happier about what’s taking place in the law right now. That’s because virtually all the changes we’ve seen in the legal services marketplace over the past few years — and most of those to come in the next decade — operate to the benefit of clients and of the public generally. Legal services are gradually becoming more comprehensible, more accessible, and less expensive. Clients (both consumer and corporate) possess more knowledge of and more influence over legal services delivery than they’ve ever had, and both will grow. In sheer numbers, more people figure to have real access to justice in the 2010s than at any time in history. That’s an amazing development, well beyond what anyone could have anticipated as recently as 2005, and justifiable cause for celebration.

The question is, are lawyers attending this party? And if so, are they chatting away at the punch bowl or grumbling in the corner? These advances are coming largely at the expense of the traditional lawyer business model, one that was quite profitable for many years and seldom more so (especially at large firms) than in the early part of this decade. That model is now in its dying days, and whatever eventually replaces it will be more market-sensitive and client-intensive than the command-and-control model lawyers have enjoyed for so long. Not only that, but more sources for legal services, more automation of those services, and more sophisticated buyers all will cut into the profit margins that traditional legal practice generated. In the result, for the next several years at least (and maybe longer), law figures to become both a more challenging and a less remunerative career than it used to be. Read More »

Posted in Clients | 1 Comment

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