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- New blog post at Stem Legal: Creating a Facebook fan club: http://bit.ly/bK7qkL
- Compete with alternative legal service providers through the marketplace, not UPL claims: http://bit.ly/94kFq9 (Carolyn Elefant)
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- Don't hide your lamp under a bushel: lawyer advertising in church bulletins: http://bit.ly/cKPld8
Category Archives: Innovation
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 4 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
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 [...]
The electric law firm
“Electric” as an adjective has kind of a dated feel, harking back to the 1970s when it modified Horseman, Company, Mayhem and Light Orchestra. But electric cars still retain a 21st-century buzz, keeping the momentum they developed during the recent oil shock as a serious alternative to gasoline-powered vehicles. The Economist recently devoted a special [...]
Posted in Innovation 4 Comments
The apprenticeship marketplace
Critical mass, like the famous definition of obscenity, is one of those things you can’t necessarily define but that you know when you see. We’re approaching a critical mass of discourse on the necessity of change within the American law school system, and when we reach that point, the focus will switch overnight from necessity [...]
Also posted in Law School, New Lawyers 5 Comments
Why change is so hard
Last week’s New Yorker column by James Surowiecki talked about health care reform in the United States, but it has something important to say about change in the legal profession too. Surowiecki noted the sudden remarkable rise in the number of Americans who say they’re satisfied with their current health coverage. Among other factors, he [...]
Posted in Innovation 4 Comments
The real impact of private equity
It’s coming to the attention of many North American lawyers that our overseas colleagues are or soon will be selling equity interests in their law firms. Earlier this summer, American Lawyer profiled the progress of pioneering publicly traded law firm Slater & Gordon in Australia. More recently, Bloomberg News announced that at least three [...]
Also posted in Finance 3 Comments
Just in case
“Stuff expands to fill the space available.” If you’ve ever owned a closet, basement or garage at some point in your life, you know how true that is. The corollary, of course, is that the less space you have, the less stuff you find you really need. I once moved six times in the space [...]
Also posted in Outsourcing Leave a comment
The firms of the future
“Does the future belong to virtual law firms?” That question was posed by an American Lawyer article earlier this week that focused on Virtual Law Partners, a growing firm nominally based in Silicon Valley but in fact operating, well, wherever its lawyers are. Virtual firms — two others, FSB Legal Counsel and Rimon Law Group, [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, Solo & Small Firm 2 Comments
The obsolescence audit