I’m coming to think that many corporate clients get the outside counsel fees and service they deserve. After reading this LegalWeek article about in-house lawyers’ predictions for 2009, I had to note the ongoing disconnect between what corporate law departments say is important to them and what they actually do. The article speaks with some… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Innovation
Book Review: The End of Lawyers?
The End of Lawyers? by Richard Susskind (London: Oxford University Press, 2008) This is an enormously important book, and if you have any interest or stake in how the legal marketplace will operate in future, you have to read it. The End of Lawyers? provides a sweeping assessment (and in places, an indictment) of today’s… Read more »
Renovating or tearing down?
I grew up in a small city of about 80,000 and went to law school in a similarly sized town, so my first experience of a major metropolitan center was when I began working in downtown Toronto. I remember being a little overwhelmed by the massive bank towers in the financial district — not a… Read more »
Regeneration
Thacher Proffitt & Wood, a 160-year-old US law firm established the same year The Communist Manifesto was published, the Second French Republic was founded and Wyatt Earp was born, will close its doors tomorrow. Following failed merger talks with Spalding & King, Thacher Proffitt arranged for 100 of its lawyers, including its managing partner, to… Read more »
Information, innovation and a top 10 list
This is kind of a roundup post — a few things I thought might interest you on the theme of innovative information for lawyers. First, if you haven’t checked out JD Supra lately, you might have missed this handy new feature: a Facebook application for streaming your legal documents. JD Supra Docs allows legal professionals… Read more »
The market doesn’t care
Two of the smartest people writing on the web these days are Seth Godin and Scott Karp. They have an important message that everybody in the legal services marketplace, especially lawyers, needs to hear. First, this is what Seth had to say in the course of a short but eye-opening interview about the book publishing… Read more »
The power of positive blogging
It’s not often I can derive a blog post from a tweet, but Debbie Weil‘s recent Twitter entry sent me to this thought-provoking post at CopyBlogger, and got me thinking about the purpose of the legal blogosphere. Brian Clark’s entry talks about the phenomenon of “social proof” — people’s tendency to judge the quality of… Read more »
These are the days of miracle and wonder
I’m not American, I didn’t cast a vote in the Nov. 4 election, and I’m not especially partisan (nor is this blog remotely political). I just wanted to make a very brief entry here about the courage to innovate. All of us have said, at one time or another, that there’s no point in trying… Read more »
Dispelling the myths of lawyer education
There’s an old story about a supposed experiment in which five apes are placed in a cage containing a stepladder. A banana is hanging from the roof of the cage, and a sprinkler with ice-cold water is positioned above it. Whenever an ape tries to climb the ladder to get the banana, the sprinkler comes… Read more »
The law firm as middleman
This past week brought word that Axiom Legal is working on opening its fourth office, this one in Chicago. The company is now at 230 lawyers and growing, not bad for an operation that hasn’t yet celebrated its tenth anniversary. Axiom is a firm that provides highly credentialed lawyers on a contract or project basis… Read more »