Law21 Twitter Updates- Slater & Gordon/Russell Jones & Walker aims to "dominate" consumer legal services market in UK: http://t.co/6Na2ZNbR
- RT @grbeaton Slater & Gordon, Russell Jones Walker - not just another acquisition http://t.co/6Wotgv7l
- Crazy Like A Fox: Why Non-Equity Partners are More Valuable Than Associates: http://t.co/NYZAHfvQ
- It's not "lateral hiring" anymore; it's poaching: http://t.co/M43yyhOz Firms poached often enough will be in real danger.
Category Archives: Clients
Losing the quality wars
There are days when I feel optimistic that lawyers can rise to the challenges before us and take the lead in the new legal marketplace now emerging worldwide. And then there are days like today. Three data points for you. The first from a friend who sent along this item from the 2010 ACC/Serengeti Managing [...]
Posted in Clients 2 Comments
The stratified legal market and its implications
An extraordinary conversation has emerged among multiple authors in the blawgosphere over the past few days. It revolves around a pressing question: in light of the huge changes in the marketplace, what will become of law firms? More specifically, given the increasing segmentation and stratification of the universe of legal work, how can law firms [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, Innovation 14 Comments
The new price wars
Their World Series victory last fall wasn’t the only surprise the San Francisco Giants sprang on the baseball establishment. Throughout the 2010 season, the team engaged in “dynamic pricing,” changing the price of single-game tickets according to demand. The same seat for a Monday night yawnfest in May against the Washington Nationals, for example, would [...]
Also posted in Billing, Innovation 2 Comments
The new battlefield: convenience
Whatever happened to Napster? Depending on your age, you might remember it either as a piracy-enabling nuisance, a groundbreaking music-swapping service, or the dusty antecedent of iTunes. Time magazine caught up with Napster’s founder, Shawn Fanning, and three other pioneering hackers in a recent article that describes them as “The Men Who Changed The World.” [...]
Also posted in Competition, Innovation 4 Comments
Will-writing and the redefinition of “legal services”
Last month, a BBC investigative program called Panorama exposed a wide range of illegal and unethical practices by “will-writers,” advisors who help people prepare wills and who are not lawyers. One result of that broadcast could be a significant clawback of lawyer regulatory power over the legal services marketplace in the UK, with implications for [...]
Also posted in Competition, Governance, Outsourcing 3 Comments
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 7 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, push-pump [...]
Also posted in Innovation, Purpose 4 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
Goodbye to all that