I’m delighted to be delivering a keynote address on the future of legal education and the legal services marketplace at the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System‘s annual awards ceremony on cOtober 11, 2012, in Denver, Colorado.
Posts By:
Oregon State Bar House of Delegates Annual Meeting, Portland, OR
I’m very pleased to be delivering the keynote address to the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Oregon State Bar House of Delegates on November 2, 2012, in Portland.
Law school revolution
One of my favourite bumper stickers, back when such things were popular, read as follows: “Where are we going? And what’s with this handbasket?” If you’re involved in any aspect of legal education these days, or if you have even a passing interest in how law schools are doing their job, you might feel that… Read more »
The future of legal employment
The American legal profession is on the verge of a full-blown jobs crisis. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that over the course of this decade, 440,000 new law graduates will be competing for 212,000 jobs, a 48% employment level. The BLS’s projection does assume law school graduation rates will remain steady during that time,… Read more »
Losing the confidence game
Here are six observations about the legal marketplace for you to consider, each supported by a news report filed just in the last few days. 1. Fewer people want to be lawyers. Number of law school applicants continues to slide: “[US law school] applications submitted are down 13.6%…. That translates to about 66,696 applicants and… Read more »
Writing on the road
It’s been a few months since I last posted one of these roundups, so I thought I’d pull one together today. Here’s a series of articles I’ve written elsewhere or interviews I’ve given to various print and online periodicals. As usual, I’ve been busiest at Stem Legal‘s “Law Firm Web Strategy” blog, but I’ve also… Read more »
The limited-profit law firm
What if your law firm were legally prohibited from making too much money? What if there were a fixed profit ceiling for equity partners, and any profit exceeding that amount had to be distributed to others? What if your firm explicitly placed social goals ahead of revenue goals — what would change about your firm’s… Read more »
Pricing to the client experience
Many lawyers, gnawed by doubt, regularly ask themselves, “What should I charge?” It’s the question with a million right answers — which is to say, with no right answer at all. Whatever number you finally settle on, however, is less important than the process by which you arrived at it. As far as I can… Read more »
Rebundling the law firm
Perhaps most importantly, unbundling has the immensely positive effect of removing from lawyers our self-imposed burden of omnipotence. Our intense dislike of risk and our fervent striving for control has left us vulnerable to taking on more responsibility for our clients’ outcomes than we often should. The modern view of clients — one they share… Read more »
Who should have the right to own a law firm?
And so the floodgates have opened, and here come the “non-lawyers” surging into the law firm ownership stream. The Legal Services Act‘s long-awaited authorization of Alternative Business Structures in the UK took effect in January. Within the first two weeks of February, here’s what followed (all transactions unofficial until approved by the Solicitors Regulation Authority,… Read more »