Law21 Twitter Updates- Absolutely delighted to welcome Pam Woldow (@pwoldow) to Edge International! http://bit.ly/bUHvP1
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- @idealawg Thanks very much for the reference to my article in your blog post!
Category Archives: Clients
The evolution of outsourcing
Still in its relative infancy, legal process outsourcing has already had a huge impact on the legal services marketplace: scoring major deals with the likes of Microsoft and Rio Tinto, garnering the attention of private-equity investors, and helping to expose the degree to which law firms have overcharged for the simplest legal work, among other [...]
Also posted in Innovation, Outsourcing 5 Comments
The end of inevitability
If you want an example of how the legal profession likely will respond to new competitors and a future marketplace very different than today’s, take a look at how Canada’s real estate agents are coping with change in their market. (Short answer: not well). The Globe & Mail reports on a rising wave of sell-it-yourself [...]
Also posted in Competition 8 Comments
Frugal innovation and the law
Lawyers need to learn a very important lesson from a salad spinner. Specifically, we need to understand the implications of the Sally Centrifuge, developed by students at Rice University in Texas:
The necessary parts: one salad spinner, some hair combs, a yogurt container, plastic lids, and a glue gun. The finished product: a manual, [...]
Also posted in Innovation, Purpose 3 Comments
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 Billing 2 Comments
Ready or not, here come the clients
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 [...]
Posted in Clients 2 Comments
The hyperlocal lawyer
You’ve seen plenty of references to the decline of traditional news media here, usually in the context of similar struggles in the legal marketplace. Instead of dwelling on that industry’s problems, however, here’s what looks like one of its future successes, and how it might have potentially profound applications to the law. It’s the rise [...]
Also posted in Solo & Small Firm 3 Comments
Law firms on demand
What if you could take a law firm, carve away all the parts of it you don’t like, and keep all the parts you did? What if, from the client perspective, you could get rid of high and rising prices, time-based bills, gratuitous overhead costs and unfamiliarity with your business? What if, from the lawyer [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, Talent 5 Comments
The rise of the responsible client
At its recent annual meeting in Boston, the Association of Corporate Counsel dropped a minor bombshell by announcing it had created a law firm rating system. In-house lawyers can now rate their outside law firms on six criteria: understanding of objectives/expectations, legal expertise, efficiency/process management, responsiveness/communication, predictable cost/budgeting skills, and results delivered/execution. Even if these [...]
Posted in Clients 7 Comments
The solution or the problem?
Last week brought news of three innovations that, each in their own way, aim to increase access to justice. It’s noteworthy that none of them came from lawyers.
First is a report that for the first time in Canada, a third-party litigation funding company, BridgePoint Financial Services Inc., persuaded an Alberta trial judge to allow it [...]
Also posted in Innovation 1 Comment
Will-writing and the redefinition of “legal services”