Category Archives: Clients

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 | 1 Comment

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

Search the Archives