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Category Archives: Billing
The new rules of pricing
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 [...]
Also posted in Clients 2 Comments
Beyond billing
Even a dyed-in-the-wool optimist like me didn’t think there’d be so much progress so fast on what’s increasingly referred to as “alternative fee arrangements” (AFAs). Fulbright & Jaworski’s 6th Annual Litigation Trends Survey says 45% of clients are using AFAs like fixed and outcome-based fees. Hildebrandt’s survey of 231 companies showed about half are or [...]
Targeting the variable fee
For as long as most lawyers can remember, the billable hour has defined, powered, and shaped their law firms. It determines how lawyers work, how they sell their work, how much they earn, and how they assess and reward their employees. It breeds inefficient, overworked lawyers and frustrated, resentful clients; but it has also [...]
Also posted in Innovation, Talent 5 Comments
Breaking the big firm
My strongest, greatest fear by far, if it’s not too soon to look to the “other side” of this financial system meltdown and general economic interregnum, is not that things in law-land will look overly different when we emerge, but that they won’t look different enough.
That observation comes from Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, Diversity, Talent 3 Comments
Momentum
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 [...]
Also posted in Innovation, New Lawyers, Outsourcing 9 Comments
The legacy of work-life balance
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 [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, New Lawyers, Purpose, Satisfaction, Talent 12 Comments
Renovating or tearing down?
I grew up in a small city of about 80,000 and went to law school in a similarly sized town, so my first experience of a major metropolitan center was when I began working in downtown Toronto. I remember being a little overwhelmed by the massive bank towers in the financial district — not a [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, Innovation 3 Comments
The failure of billable-hour compensation
Two ugly stories from the mainstream legal media at least give us the opportunity to consider an under-publicized way in which the billable hour poisons the profession.
First is this National Law Journal article about how law firms are responding to the recession (short answer: myopically). Among other things, firms are laying off staff and paralegals [...]
Also posted in Compensation 3 Comments
Decoupling price from cost in legal services
Virtually all the talk these days in client circles is about the cost of legal services. It’s well established that institutional purchasers of these services are under great pressure to reduce costs by, for example, “taking bids, asking for discounts, shopping around for lower-cost options.” Patrick J. Lamb points out that many in-house lawyers don’t [...]
Also posted in Competition, Technology 5 Comments
Book Review: The LegalBizDev Survey of Alternative Fees