Law schools join the talent war

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Posted in: Innovation, Law School, Talent

Northwestern University School of Law garnered a lot of attention last week by announcing a series of curriculum changes, most prominently the creation of an accelerated JD program that would allow students to graduate with a law degree in 24 months, rather than the traditional 36. While Dayton and Southwestern law schools have gone this route before, NU is the first “elite” faculty (ninth in the irrationally important US News & World Report rankings) to go this route.

Most of the reaction to Northwestern’s announcement centered on the new two-year law degree, which some observers (including many commenters at the Wall Street Journal Law Blog) misread as a decision to “drop the third year” of law school. NU Law isn’t reducing its courseload by a third; it’s squeezing the traditional three-year degree into two calendar years, by means of a summer semester, extra courses each semester, and mini-courses between semesters. It’s a far more intense and challenging experience, not the easier one that eliminating the final year of school would suggest.

Predictably, the traditional three-year degree has staunch defenders, including those at NU’s crosstown rivals, who call the new plan an irresponsible compression that will produce inferior lawyers. Others worry that the law school experience is already sufficiently intense, and that cramming it into two years will damage students. But Dayton Law’s Dean of Students Lori Shaw sees no evidence that her program’s two-year enrolees missed out on the full law school experience: “It’s fascinating to see how much they can do.”

Now, in reality, accelerating a law degree by administering it in two years isn’t that big a deal — it’s certainly nothing like the major innovations undertaken at Washington & Lee Law School, which made its third year entirely experiential as part of a massive program overhaul. What really caught my attention — and that of Douglas Berman at Law School Innovation — were other aspects of Northwestern’s announcement that generated much less fanfare. From the Inside HigherEd article:

Northwestern is adding three new required courses (to the nine currently required, largely following a traditional law curriculum), starting with the two-year program and eventually being required of everyone. The new requirements are:

  • Quantitative analysis (accounting, finance and statistics).
  • Dynamics of legal behavior (teamwork, leadership and project management).
  • Strategic decision making.

These topic areas were grouped by faculty members based on the focus groups of what legal employers need….

These are all key elements of any law practice that intends to succeed in the 21st century. Particularly interesting are the mentions of project management, a skill I’m seeing repeatedly referenced by in-house counsel as a must-have ability that most lawyers simply don’t, and teamwork, an essential ability in the new collaborative lawyer-client relationship. Then there’s Northwestern Law’s renewed emphasis on teaching communications skills: Continue Reading

Victims of their own success

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Posted in: Big Firms, Innovation

After two weeks away from the blogosphere, my RSS feeder has 756 unread posts for me to look at, not including my daily updates from Dilbert, Slumbering Lungfish, and the Astronomy Picture of the Day. One of those 756 posts appeared at LegalWeek’s Editors’ Blog and concerned UK managing partners’ cluelessness and complacency about the impact of the Legal Services Act, particularly regarding the coming ability of UK law firms to go public.

This theme was picked up by Paul Lippe in a (members-only) post at Legal OnRamp, where he acknowledged that successful law firms don’t have much incentive to explore innovative private equity options. But he argued that other kinds of firms will, such as old run-down name firms needing to overhaul, solid midsize firms looking to break out, and stable firms with contentious partnerships. Paul’s money quote:

Whether any of these firms will ever truly “Go Public” I would question; but certainly they can access the capital markets in ways that create liquidity and competitive advantage. The point is (and some lawyers seem almost congenitally incapable of understanding this) that disruptive innovation never comes from the super-elite, and doesn’t have to. The disruption will come from an outsider, but will quickly impact the elite – think Honda and General Motors over the last 40 years, think JetBlue and United Airlines. If these scenarios sound fanciful, remember they are exactly was has happened in a dozen other industries that have been impacted by a combination of global competition and private equity.

Here, with some amendments and additions, is the response I posted:

True enough; as the saying goes, revolutions don’t normally start inside the castle. But I think this is kind of the problem, because in the legal services marketplace, the castle is huge — it encompasses much of the kingdom, in fact. Most law firms consider themselves to be “successful,” which greatly reduces the number of “unsuccessful” firms that would be naturally motivated to try something innovative. Continue Reading

Innovation requires clients to step up

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Posted in: Clients, Innovation

Bruce MacEwen at Adam Smith Esq. reports on a presentation he attended at Allen & Overy’s New York office titled “Innovation in Legal Service Delivery,” featuring high-profile law firm lawyers, in-house counsel and consultants. The gist of the event and his article is that innovation of this type is still very much wanted and isn’t nearly the hopeless cause many like to believe. As a certified aficionado of legal marketplace innovation, I agree on both counts.

Bruce ends his post by asking a central question: “How shall we continue these discussions? Are they best conducted in law firm-sponsored colloquies such as this? Under the auspices of a legal publication such as The American Lawyer? At dispassionate fora and conferences put together by and hosted at a law school?” I have a couple of thoughts to offer here.

First, the conversation should continue wherever and whenever it can take root and flourish, especially in the blawgosphere, as part of a continuing effort to draw in as many decision-makers, and generate as great a sense of urgency around this subject, as we can. Legal services delivery innovation captures the imagination of lawyers at the grassroots level — at what event speaker Paul Lippe called the “immensely strong pockets of innovation” in law firms. Tapping into those pockets, through online and other vehicles, will multiply and magnify the volume and impact of that conversation.

But secondly, and more importantly, the effort to lionize innovation in the law needs more than law firm colloquia, legal periodical articles or law school efforts, helpful as all these would be. It requires more than the excellent College of Law Practice Management’s Innovaction Awards or the Financial Times’ legal innovation series. Innovation in legal services delivery will not succeed unless clients get seriously and deeply involved in the process. Continue Reading

Enter the Innovaction Awards

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Posted in: Innovation

I’ve been remiss in not mentioning this before now: the June 2 deadline for the College of Law Practice Management‘s annual Innovaction Awards is approaching fast. These awards recognize valuable and innovative projects undertaken by law firms in marketing, client service, recruitment, retention and other areas of law practice management. Previous winners of this prestigious competition, from firms of all sizes in the US, the UK and Australia, can show clients their dedication to innovative and efficient service and get bragging rights over their rivals to boot.

The application process is straightforward, and the potential benefits, including a chance to address the entire College at the award ceremony to demonstrate your winning initiative, are tremendous. I was honoured to serve as a judge last year, and I’m delighted to have been asked to do so again. Take a moment to tour the site, view the criteria, and then think about an innovative project within your own firm that could qualify. Innovation is going to be a cornerstone to successful law firms from now on — these awards can help you lay the foundation.

Burn your newsletters

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Posted in: Clients, Innovation, Marketing, Publishing

Ah, the law firm newsletter. The simplest and humblest of law firm communication vehicles – a collection of lawyer-written articles on new statutory or case law developments, bundled together into a stiff, saddle-stitched document that’s mailed out to clients on a regular basis (or more recently, placed online and e-mailed). What could be a safer and more broadly acceptable marketing tool? Well, there’s the problem, really.

The necessity and effectiveness of law firm newsletters have been long overrated. Partly this is because the content is written by lawyers, and is therefore a reliably tortuous read. Partly it’s because a general legal update is of limited interest and use to clients, who don’t really have time for FYI documents that don’t deal directly with an immediately relevant matter.

But mostly, I think, it’s because law firms have never given newsletters the attention, support and priority to be anything other than pretty mediocre and indistinguishable from one another (if I took the banner off two random law firm newsletters and switched them around, could you tell the difference?) That’s because firms don’t take newsletters seriously as publications in their own right.

Law firms sometimes seem to think their newsletters, print or e-mail, are competing only against other law firm newsletters for clients’ attention. They’re not. They’re competing against every business and industry publication their clients read, usually produced by large publishing companies with decades of experience. Unlike law firms, these companies don’t regard their periodicals as a sideline, a nice marketing tool – they treat them the same way law firms treat their work product, as the lifeline of their businesses. So it’s not surprising that in this competition, law firms are outgunned from the start.

Have you read any of the top publications in your clients’ industry sector? Gerry Riskin used to ask this question at managing partners’ conferences, and would get only a few hands raised in affirmation. If you did read them, and you compared them to the newsletters law firms produce for the same client audience, you’d feel embarrassed for the firms. The leading industry publications receive focused editorial direction and excellent quality control, are written by experienced staffers or freelancers, and are professionally designed and produced with high-quality magazine stock (or web architecture), art design and imagery. Law firm newsletters, it can safely be said, don’t and aren’t. Continue Reading

The legal talent matrix

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Posted in: Innovation

Ron Friedmann at the Strategic Legal Technology blog has a terrific new post that should shift a few paradigms about how in-house counsel deploy legal talent to tackle various tasks. Ron crossed an x-axis that plotted the complexity of work with a y-axis that plotted the volume of work, and ended up with what he calls “a classic management consultant’s 2-by-2” — a graph that charts the most appropriate type of talent solution for different types of legal challenges.

The result is eye-opening and provocative. The majority of space in the chart is given over to legal providers other than in-house lawyers or outside counsel. Low-volume, low-complexity tasks are best solved by checklists; high-volume, low-complexity tasks can be addressed through automated systems. In-house and outside counsel are reserved only for high-complexity tasks, but half of that sector is occupied by temps, paraprofessionals and offshore legal talent. The dominant takeaway from the diagram is that there are a whole lot of ways to solve your legal problem, and (expensive) traditional lawyers constitute a minority of them.

Ron notes that “[e]ach person likely would draw the circles/ellipses elsewhere,” and indeed, I’d be inclined to enlarge the “temp” oval and shrink the “offshored” circle, among other adjustments. But those differences of opinion don’t detract from the fact that this is a groundbreaking way to look at the assignment of legal tasks to the appropriate level of talent. Legal departments might be already doing this on a de facto basis, but they should take steps to formalize it in this fashion; I fully expect they would be rewarded with cost and efficiency savings.

But really, it’s law firms that should seriously think about revising their own workflow processes in light of this matrix. A similar diagram reflecting current work assignments at most law firms would be an ungainly, unsightly mess of partners and associates doing work that’s beneath their level of talent and experience, but that generates revenue because it’s time-intensive. Apply this kind of workflow discipline to your average law firm, and all hell would break loose. Maybe it’s about time it did.

One more thing: Ron’s matrix as pictured necessarily suggests that the quantity of work in each quadrant is equal, although I’m sure he would agree that that’s not the case. In-house and especially law firm lawyers would be unpleasantly surprised, I think, to know just how small (albeit potentially lucrative) the high-volume, high-complexity quadrant really is. If clients start reformatting their legal tasks according to templates like this, the paucity of work that will flow to highly paid lawyers is going to come as a rude awakening to a lot of people in this profession.

Lawsuit investment and the limits of innovation

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Posted in: Clients, Ethics, Innovation

As you probably know by now, I’m a big fan of innovation in the law. But there’s good innovation and there’s bad innovation, and what’s emerging in the litigation field in the US and the UK looks to me like it belongs in the latter category.

LegalWeek reports that UK hedge funds are lining up to provide funding for lawsuits. This idea in itself isn’t breaking news: several US companies, often backed by massive hedge funds, already provide financing for plaintiffs in personal injury suits — and arguably, contingency fee arrangements in class actions accomplish the same end, providing funding in return for a piece of the expected damages award. Hedge fund investments in plaintiffs’ lawsuits has recently spread to the UK. But this newest British development contains a twist: the investors are looking to finance the defendant.

Here’s how LegalWeek‘s Editor’s Blog explains it:

The investor is likely to be a hedge fund or special situations fund looking to make high-risk investments. The investor gets a fee or premium and effectively offers to fund a substantial chunk of the defendants’ liability. The attraction for defendants is hedging and managing their exposure, despite higher upfront costs. And by introducing an outside investor that will look at a legal opinion to gauge the merits and risks of the claim, a company can effectively put a ‘market price’ on their litigation risk.

The concept of a market in plaintiffs’ lawsuits has its supporters, who contend that the benefits include creating a more level playing field between plaintiffs and defendants and bringing market-driven risk assessments to evaluate lawsuits’ chance of success. Opponents cite concerns about champerty and maintenance, though it seems to me these prohibitions have not been pursued enthusiastically by governing bodies and have lost some of their force over time (lawsuit investors argue that they’re not instigating lawsuits, which is forbidden, but financing suits already underway, which seems a distinction bordering on the specious).

There are access-to-justice arguments in favour of allowing plaintiffs to seek financial backing to bring a claim and sharing the rewards with those who do so, and reasonable people can differ on this. But when defendants start looking for investors as well, I start getting worried. Continue Reading

NALP: the future of law firms

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Posted in: Big Firms, Clients, Innovation, Talent

Back from a lengthy trip, I have a lot of catch-up blogging to do. Just to get the ball rolling, here are my speaking notes from last Friday’s plenary session at the NALP Annual Education Conference in Toronto, in case they’re of interest.

I was honoured to be part of a distinguished panel of speakers, moderated by Ida Abbott and including Ron Friedmann, Rick Matasar, Tim McManus and Vernā Myers, on the future of law firms. I’ll pick up on a few of the points raised during the wide-ranging 90-minute plenary later on, but for now, here’s what I prepared in advance: Continue Reading

Late-night marketing

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Posted in: Innovation, Marketing

Sometimes, the best innovations are the simplest — just a matter of looking at a familiar situation differently.

A dominant topic of discussion in legal practice has been the late hours many lawyers are forced to put in and the damage it does to personal life, “work-life balance,” etc. So along comes Boston lawyer James Perullo, who looks at this situation and turns it on its head: he only works late. His law practice operates from 6:00 to 10:00 pm Mondays to Fridays, and employs lawyers who, like him, have other jobs during the day (he does contract IT work).

The key to the practice, of course, is that clients have day jobs too, and they don’t like having to duck out of work to attend to a personal legal situation. So “After Hours Law,” as James has branded the firm, is immediately attractive to them.

What’s interesting, though, is that working late or unusual hours is not rare at all for lawyers, as the comments at Carolyn Elefant’s blog post on this topic make clear: Susan and Stephanie both provide examples. But the simple genius of what James has done, as he suggests in his own comment to Carolyn’s post, is to make it the focal point of his firm’s branding and marketing. The fact that the lawyers work late is the hook.

See, the rich irony is that while lawyers complain about being stuck at work past 5:00, clients picture lawyers as only working until 5:00 and being unavailable otherwise. After Hours Law glimpsed this disconnect and is exploiting it (to great effect — articles in Law News Now and Small Firm Business, posts by Carolyn and now me). It’s one of the neatest examples of innovation in legal marketing I’ve seen in a while.

What’s the next evolution of after-hours practice? Well, legal work is already being offshored to India, the Philippines, Finland and Israel, to name just four countries scattered around the global time zone map. Can the first 24-hour law firm be far away?