And now, your legal services marketplace update: “First six months of 2008 has weakest revenue growth in this decade. Expense growth is significantly higher than revenue growth. … [D]emand is falling, gross hours are falling. The old cliche that law firms are recession-proof has been debunked.” “Spending on outside counsel by corporations has dropped to… Read more »
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E-document ethics and the rise of regulation
It’s been a great week for conversations with Law21 readers, because I’ve also had a terrific correspondence with John Gillies, head of Practice Support at Cassels Brock in Toronto. John brought to my attention an opinion issued this past summer by the New York City Bar Association regarding lawyers’ ethical obligations to retain and provide… Read more »
Trading money for time in your legal career
One of the unexpected benefits of this blog for me is the correspondence I’ve received from people who’ve read something I’ve written and have struck up a conversation about it. Recently, I received an email from a reader in the western US, and I thought you might be interested in both his question and my… Read more »
The new legal publishing niche: clients
Hey there, legal professional — looking for a career change in these uncertain times? I have a legal publishing niche to recommend to you. But first, some background. This economic crisis has inspired some of the best legal blog writing I’ve seen in a while — urgent, direct, and relentlessly focused on communicating to readers… Read more »
Dispelling the myths of lawyer education
There’s an old story about a supposed experiment in which five apes are placed in a cage containing a stepladder. A banana is hanging from the roof of the cage, and a sprinkler with ice-cold water is positioned above it. Whenever an ape tries to climb the ladder to get the banana, the sprinkler comes… Read more »
New look, new features
If you’re reading this post on an RSS feed, you might want to click on the link and check out the original entry. And if you’re reading this directly on the site, you can see that I’ve made some pretty substantial changes to Law21. So, welcome to the new design! WordPress has been a great… Read more »
Credit crisis: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet
We’re already seeing some dominoes start to wobble in the legal community, as the short- and medium-term impact of the financial crisis becomes clearer. If you’re a law firm CFO or a law student nearing graduation, you probably won’t like what’s coming. But it looks to me like there are much bigger pieces likely to… Read more »
Branding, blogging and the attention economy
Every online community loves a meta-conversation, a discussion about the community itself, and the blawgosphere is no exception. But even by those standards, the explosion of posts ignited by a law.com article on women law bloggers was remarkable for its strength and immediacy. Published yesterday, the article posited a relative absence of women blawggers (rather… Read more »
Globalize your thinking
It’s with some reluctance that I link to The American Lawyer‘s Global 100 rankings (or at least, to the article about the rankings — the actual list is subscriber-only). I have an aversion to anything that roughly equates “law firm success” with “profit per equity partner,” which most of these rankings tend to do, because… Read more »
The future of law firm branding
My semi-monthly column is up and running at Slaw. As always, I recommend you go read it there, because I guarantee you’ll find other very cool stuff at Canada’s best legal blog. If you haven’t visited lately, you might not know that Slaw has added great new bloggers like Dave Bilinsky, David Canton, David Fraser,… Read more »