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: Governance
At the crossroads of regulation
I respectfully suggest that we stop using the following lines from Henry VI Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2 in conversations about the modern legal profession: DICK: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. CADE: Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of [...]
Posted in Governance 1 Comment
The future of lawyer associations
Thomas Wolfe says you can’t go home again; nevertheless, I’m returning to my alma mater Queen’s Law School tomorrow to give a presentation on the future of the legal marketplace. While preparing slides for my section on networking, I noticed that examples of old-line bar associations (the volunteer kind, not mandatory or regulatory bodies like [...]
Also posted in 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 Clients, Competition, Outsourcing 3 Comments
Resolving the legal education disconnect
In conversation last week with a law school professor, the subject of law firms’ tunnel vision when recruiting law graduates came up. Firms focus relentlessly on the students with the highest grades, the professor lamented, even though these students can be one-dimensional performers with an affinity for the academic environment and no competing pressures outside [...]
Also posted in Law School 1 Comment
The UK crucible
North American lawyers have been fretting lately about the effects of this recession and what it means for their future. But the recession is only an amplifier or accelerator of change, not its source, and it doesn’t tell us much about the shape of things to come. If you really want to know what the [...]
Also posted in Competition, Innovation 2 Comments
The evolution of lawyer regulation
The thing about change is that once it gets rolling, it’s almost impossible to control and can go in directions you neither anticipated nor like very much. That thought occurred to me while reading a report issued last week by the Legal Services Policy Institute, the think-tank division of UK legal training company The College [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, Talent 5 Comments
Podcast on conflicts of interest
Law21 was quiet for a week while I worked the Canadian Bar Association’s Canadian Legal Conference in Quebec City. Among the highlights for me was moderating a podcast on the CBA’s just-released Final Report of its Task Force on Conflicts of Interest. You can access the podcast by clicking the third link in the right-hand [...]
Also posted in Clients Leave a comment
Here come the orderlies
This Law Times article, about changes made in 2006 to Ontario’s Law Society Act that have suddenly galvanized lawyers in the province, makes for an interesting read. Those amendments brought paralegals (non-lawyers providing limited legal services) under the regulatory authority of the law society, which now refers to both lawyers and paralegals as its “licensees” [...]
Posted in Governance 1 Comment
Micro law schools
Two interesting articles by Alex Dimson at Law Is Cool today have me thinking about a possible next step in the evolution of law schools. Two Ontario universities have applied to set up law schools: Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. Alex reports that Lakehead’s application, although on shakier ground [...]
Also posted in Law School Leave a comment
Fixing the failings of new lawyer training