Category Archives: Innovation

How to kill a law firm

There’s a story told about Jack Welch, former GE president — it might be from one of his books, or it might be apocryphal; quite possibly it’s both. The story goes that soon after he took over the company, he called in his vice-presidents and other senior people and advised them that countless [...]
Also posted in Competition | 9 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 Clients, Outsourcing | 5 Comments

One week left to enter the InnovAction Awards!

If your law firm or legal organization has successfully introduced a powerful innovation in the last few years, then you have one week left to enter the College of Law Practice Management’s InnovAction Awards, as detailed in this previous post here at Law21, and reap the rewards. At a time when innovation is valued by [...]
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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 Clients, Purpose | 3 Comments

Why the 2010 InnovAction Awards matter

When the College of Law Practice Management launched the InnovAction Awards in 2004, Western economies had just climbed out of a tough recession (and were busily laying the foundations for a much uglier one) and law firms were starting a run of several years of unprecedented growth and profit. It was a time when the [...]
Posted in Innovation | 1 Comment

The blind side

My newest column has been posted at Canada’s best legal website, which regular readers will know is Slaw.ca. Even though the article is also posted here for posterity, take the opportunity to absorb all of Slaw’s great information by going to read it there.
Also posted in Big Firms, Competition | 3 Comments

The platform is changing

Seth Godin calls it the WordPerfect Axiom, and he’s exactly right: When the platform changes, the leaders change. WordPerfect had a virtual monopoly on word processing in big firms that used DOS. Then Windows arrived and the folks at WordPerfect didn’t feel the need to hurry in porting themselves to the new platform. [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, Competition | 4 Comments

The obsolescence audit

My newest column at Slaw, the best of Canada’s increasingly impressive law blog collection, has been posted. Go read it there and check out the rest of the news and remarkable insights Slaw makes available every day.
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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 Billing, Talent | 5 Comments

Hands across the water

I don’t normally focus on very large law firms and mergers thereof, but I’ll make an exception for this one. As you might have heard, US-based Hogan & Hartson and UK-based Lovells have apparently reached an agreement to merge their respective firms by May 2010. The combined entity (Hogan Lovells, provisionally) would crack the top [...]
Also posted in Big Firms | Leave a comment

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