Dispatches from a legal profession on the brink
Filed under: Clients, Innovation, 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… Read more »
Filed under: Competition, Marketing
One of the oldest pieces of marketing advice in the legal profession is: “Don’t compete on price.” Wiser heads than mine constantly warn lawyers not to cut their prices to match what other sellers are providing, that engaging in a price war for legal services is as potentially ruinous as getting involved in a land… Read more »
Filed under: Innovation
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… Read more »
Filed under: Clients, Competition
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… Read more »
Filed under: Globalization
I’ve written fairly extensively about India and its continuing and future impact on the legal services marketplace. I’ve not paid as much attention to China, but that country’s effect on the legal industry in the 21st century will be profound and could happen sooner than is widely expected. This is a brief note to acknowledge… Read more »
Filed under: Clients, Innovation, Purpose
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, push-pump… Read more »
Filed under: Innovation
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… Read more »
The LegalBizDev Survey of Alternative Fees, by Jim Hassett, Ph.D. (Boston: LegalBizDev, 2009) Okay, strictly speaking, it’s a report rather than a book. But I’m so interested in talking about this publication and its importance to the developing field of alternative fee arrangements (AFAs, a topic we’re focused on these days at Edge) that I’m… Read more »
Filed under: Law21
There’s now textual and videographic evidence that I’ve been kind of busy the last few weeks. If you’re interested, here are some links to assorted content I’ve been producing or helping produce elsewhere than Law21: 1. Two blog posts in the last month at Stem Legal’s Law Firm Web Strategy blog have focused on social… Read more »
Filed under: Process
Project management is about as close to a silver bullet as the legal profession could ask for these days. Consider: It’s easy to understand. It’s inexpensive to implement. It lowers costs. It improves quality. It enhances communication. It facilitates lawyer training. It makes fixed fees profitable. It makes clients happy. If it could cure cancer… Read more »
