Monthly Archives: June 2009

Measuring lawyer productivity

By Jordan Furlong | Published: June 30, 2009
Recently, Carolyn Elefant at Legal Blog Watch summarized an interesting debate over a question that many lawyers will soon be asking themselves. Let’s say your law practice succumbs to the logical and inevitable, stops routinely billing by the hour, and institutes other system(s) of pricing and selling your work. Query: do you still need to [...]
Posted in Management | 6 Comments

Momentum

By Jordan Furlong | Published: June 24, 2009
Momentum is one of those things everyone talks about but nobody can ever precisely define or quantify. It’s that sense that things are turning around or gathering speed in a certain direction, usually for the better — with a corollary borrowed from physics that the larger the object and the greater its velocity, the more [...]
Posted in Billing, Innovation, New Lawyers, Outsourcing | 9 Comments

The UK crucible

By Jordan Furlong | Published: June 19, 2009
North American lawyers have been fretting lately about the effects of this recession and what it means for their future. But the recession is only an amplifier or accelerator of change, not its source, and it doesn’t tell us much about the shape of things to come. If you  really want to know what the [...]
Posted in Competition, Governance, Innovation | 2 Comments

The best and the brightest?

By Jordan Furlong | Published: June 12, 2009
It’s a small thing, but it’s been bothering me disproportionately, so I want to say a few words about one of my least favourite current phrases in the law:  “the best and the brightest.” It’s normally used in a talent recruitment or institutional marketing capacity to describe the very small group of the very best [...]
Posted in Big Firms, Law School, Talent | 15 Comments

The canary in our coal mine

By Jordan Furlong | Published: June 8, 2009
My newest column has been posted at Slaw, winner of the Canadian Association of Law Librarians’ 2009 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing. It’s the latest honour for Canada’s best legal website, and yet another reason to read this post there and take in the rest of the terrific content.
Posted in Compensation, Law School, New Lawyers | 1 Comment

The legacy of work-life balance

By Jordan Furlong | Published: June 4, 2009
I think we’ll soon be closing the book on one of the legal profession’s most-used and least-understood phrases of the last decade: “work-life balance.” It was still all the rage just a couple of years ago — new lawyers invoked it as a mantra, talent recruiters bandied it about, and many legal publications (including those [...]
Posted in Big Firms, Billing, New Lawyers, Purpose, Satisfaction, Talent | 12 Comments

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