Dispatches from a legal profession on the brink
Filed under: Competition, Innovation, Solo & Small Firm
Like Thomas Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell before him, Chris Anderson is becoming known for books that identify and name an evolving trend that connects business and society. You’ve probably read or head about his newest book Free: the Future of a Radical Price. It’s generating a tremendous amount of heat around the idea that the… Read more »
Filed under: Innovation
After serving two stints on the judging panel for the College of Law Practice Management’s InnovAction Awards, I spent this past year as Chair of the Awards. One of the great parts of that job is that I get to contact the winners, which I had the pleasure of doing last week. Now that the… Read more »
Filed under: Innovation
One of my favourite expressions about innovation is that few revolutions have ever started inside the castle. (I changed it from “no revolutions” after someone pointed out that Mikhail Gorbachev was a pretty clear exception.) The idea behind the expression is that the people who benefit most from the status quo are also the ones… Read more »
One of the reasons — maybe the main reason — why lawyers are so risk-averse is that averting risk is kind of the whole point of having lawyers. People hire us for two reasons: (a) to fix a problem that’s already occurred, or (b) to arrange things so as to minimize or eliminate the risk… Read more »
Filed under: Law21
If you have an hour or so to spare next Thursday and would like to hear what I actually sound like, tune into my appearance on this month’s Legal Research & Writing Pro Tele-Webinar. On July 16 at 3:00 pm EDT, I’ll be sitting down with the LRWP ‘s host, the incredibly bright and engaging… Read more »
Filed under: Demographics, Generations
“This,” says The Economist in a recent special report, “is a slow-moving but relentless development that in time will have vast economic, social and political consequences.” Peak oil? The fiscal crisis? Climate change? None of these — it’s the fact that the world is aging. Specifically, people are having far fewer children and living much… Read more »
Filed under: Innovation
As you might know, I’m a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and attend its annual meeting every fall (not least for the bestowing of InnovAction Awards, the winners of which will be announced soon — see the College’s blog for an ongoing roll call of this year’s nominees). The College’s annual meeting… Read more »
Filed under: Management
Recently, Carolyn Elefant at Legal Blog Watch summarized an interesting debate over a question that many lawyers will soon be asking themselves. Let’s say your law practice succumbs to the logical and inevitable, stops routinely billing by the hour, and institutes other system(s) of pricing and selling your work. Query: do you still need to… Read more »
Filed under: Billing, Innovation, New Lawyers, Outsourcing
Momentum is one of those things everyone talks about but nobody can ever precisely define or quantify. It’s that sense that things are turning around or gathering speed in a certain direction, usually for the better — with a corollary borrowed from physics that the larger the object and the greater its velocity, the more… Read more »
Filed under: Competition, Governance, Innovation
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… Read more »
