In the news: "With technology, a legal department can speak with a single voice, think with a single mind, and act like a partnership even with lawyers dispersed around the world. Consultant Rees W. Morrison discusses 20 techniques that increase coherence and effectiveness in a spread-out department."
Source: Law.Com's Daily Legal Newswire. 10 March 2010. Copyright 2009. ALM Properties, Inc. All rights reserved. Subscribe <http://store.law.com/registration/register.asp?subscribeto=nw>.
Posted by Allison Shields: "Arent Fox has confirmed that some offers made to 'deferred' associates have now been fully withdrawn. This comes as no big surprise, particularly as the old BigLaw model becomes increasingly less viable.
The economic downturn and added client scrutiny into law firm staffing and billing issues makes it less and less likely that lawyers whose offers have been deferred will ever actually work for the firms that made the offers. Next year, there will be a new crop of lawyers graduating from law school - will these new lawyers be more or less attractive to firms than the 'deferred' lawyers, whose experience over the past year may or may not be beneficial to the firms that made them offers?
Arent Fox Chairman Marc Fleischaker was quoted in a post by Jeff Jeffreys of the National Law Journal on The Blog of Legal Times as saying that the firm was concerned, in part, about a 'logjam' when this year's graduates are ready to receive offers. But it's difficult to believe that the firms that deferred offers didn't consider this issue when they made a decision to 'defer' some of the offers made to 2009 graduates. After all, these firms continued with their summer associate programs and were well aware that these summer associates would be graduating in 2010, just when their deferred lawyers were ready to return to the firms for full time work...
Full text and the active link are available at the source site listed below.
Source: Legal Ease Blog, 25 September 2009
In the news: "The concept of law firms talking to clients isn't a new one. But most general counsel and consultants say firms that employ client interviewers and use other client relationship management tools are still in the minority. However, the paradigm shift in the business of law is starting to generate some much-needed lip service. "If you don't have communication and they can't tell you what they like and dislike, then you're leaving them one choice and that's to leave," says Flaster Greenberg managing partner Peter Spirgel"
It turns out that this goes beyond corporate law and extends to cornflakes. The Economist
($$) drills into this issue and quotes Eric Anderson, associate professor of marketing at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University:
The study will alarm packaged goods groups, as the most loyal customers - those choosing one brand for more than 70 per cent of their purchases in a category - should also be their most lucrative.
"Defection is top of mind for brand managers now because they're the most profitable customers..."
You could link that excerpt to convergence and ponder it for awhile. The good professor continues:
"Price and promotion have become so salient at retail, that what we thought was the loyal customer can be moved with discounts..."
"Past recessions have seen similar defections from top-tier national brands to stores' private-label goods, Mr Anderson said. Academic research showed that customers could be quickly persuaded to switch by a cheaper price but took far longer to switch back."
Let's assume for a moment that some of this retail phenomenon applies to professional services. My question is: will the flight work return to the largest law firms once the economy turns around?
My hunch: some maybe, most no. (The efforts of certain firms to hold on by giving discounts in consideration for future work is noted, but it will get a separate post.)
Certainly these so-called "branded" firms may have to try something different, marketing-wise, to make that happen.
One idea: how about this splashed across the firm home page?"
[See the source link below for the graphic]
22 June 2009
Links mentioned in the show: Planning for Legal Technology in a Recession, TREC Legal Trac, Twitter Search, ABA TECHSHOW BUZZ.
Podcast: Play on page | Play in new window | Download
The active links are available at the source site listed below.
Source: Legal Talk Network, 31 March 2009
One of the biggest advantages solos and small firms have is their ability to be more flexible, to innovate quickly and to offer alternatives that big firms traditionally haven't offered or couldn't offer. Many large firm lawyers don't have the ability to alter fee structures or provide alternative services without navigating a large firm bureaucracy and their entrenched way of doing business. Solos and smaller firms, by virtue of their size and their decision-making have traditionally been able to experiment more and to work more closely with clients to provide individualized solutions. But large and small firms alike have been slow to adopt billable hour alternatives, particularly in a litigation setting.
If BigLaw is willing to embrace non-hourly billing alternatives for litigation, solos and small firms will have to move quickly and think even more seriously about changing their fee structures to stay ahead of the curve.
Melody Kramer, writing for the National Association of Freelance Legal Professionals (Quality vs. Quantity - the billable hour mousetrap) reiterates the refrain of many alternative billing proponents when she says, "The amount of time spent on a project is not an accurate reflection of the end product's value. Lawyers have forgotten that basic truth." But she also points out the complicity of clients in the fee trap, noting that the 'best' law firms are often considered to be those firms with the highest profit per partner, rather than those that have demonstrated efficiency, creative thinking or legal insight.
Even the New York Times ran a piece last week about the billable hour system and the potential changes on the horizon...
Full text and active links are available at the source site listed below.
Source: Legal Ease Blog, 2 February 2009
Law practice management expert, Rees Morrison, emphasizing the value of LinkedIn for law firms in a post this morning thought my statement about every major law firm having a profile a touch of an exaggeration. I'm not sure it's an exaggeration.
Is there a law firm in the AmLaw 200, widely accepted as the 200 largest law firms in the country, which does not have a detailed law firm profile in the company profile section of LinkedIn? I am not aware of any. Let me now if you know of any AmLaw 200 firms without a LinkedIn profile.
These profiles were not created proactively by the law firms, as they would be with Martindale-Hubbell. The LinkedIn firm profiles are automatically generated from the demographic information in LinkedIn profile's completed by lawyers and other professionals employed by law firms.
Let's pull randomly number 100 on the AmLaw 200, Kilpatrick Stockton, a full-service, international law firm in nine offices across the eastern United States and in Europe. You do this by clicking on the company link on the home page of LinkedIn. Key in the firm name or browse to law firms. Here's a the screenshot.
[Screenshot is available at the source site listed below]
Look at Kilpatrick Stockton's law firm profile on LinkedIn. Included in the profile are links to the 418 employees with LinkedIn profiles, career paths to the firm, who the firm's employees are most connected to in LinkedIn, new hires, promotions, popular profiles, top schools, median age, gender breakdown, and much more. Here's a screenshot.
[Screenshot is available at the source site listed below]
Free detailed law firm profiles in a social networking site that has 30 million registered professionals users spanning 150 industries. Powerful stuff.
Expect every law firm, large or small, to have a LinkedIn profile in the coming years. That's something I don't believe any legal directory is going to match."
Posted by Jordan Furlong: "I'm currently taking part in an intriguing conversation at Legal OnRamp about the reasons why GCs hire prestigious, big-name law firms. A recurring theme in the discussion is that in-house lawyers often default to using big, well-known (and often highly inefficient) firms because of the protection these firms' prestige affords to corporate counsel. Just as no one was ever fired for buying IBM, as the old saying went, no one gets fired for sending important and potentially calamitous work to Famous & Expensive LLP: "I paid top dollar for Top Law Firm, so don't blame me for what happened."
My contribution thus far has been to ask (a) whether that protection actually materializes in practice, (b) how much outside counsel work is so important that it requires the F&E imprimatur, and (c) if any GC has yet been fired for failing to rein in outside counsel costs. The whole conversation might eventually form the basis of a separate post. But it does lead me to a related and I think pretty important subject: what "law firm prestige" itself actually represents.
"Prestige" is one of those words, like "professionalism" and "value," that we throw around a lot in the law without establishing exactly what we mean by it. Interestingly, trace its etymology back to Middle French and you'll find it originally referred to an illusion or a conjuror's trick, a sleight-of-hand; if you've ever wondered where the old magician's standby "Presto!" comes from, you have your answer. That's something to keep in mind when considering law firms' "prestige" -- that we're talking more about the appearance or suggestion of merit than we are about the actual presence of merit itself.
Let's say an in-house counsel purchases a law firm's services at least in part because he expects that firm's "prestige" will provide effective cover against adverse outcomes. The clear implication, I would think, is that that prestige reflects a higher quality of service and/or results, as compared with less well-known or less "prestigious" firms -- otherwise, why would it be relevant to the question of whether the corporate counsel made the right call? This implies that there's a rational, measurable connection between a prestigious, well-known name and better, more reliable results.
But is that actually the case? And it it's not, are clients who rely on "prestige" when making their legal purchasing decisions doing little more than buying smoke and mirrors?...
Full text and active links are available at the source site listed below.
Source: Law21, 20 January 2009
Here's a sampling:
Don't follow in the auto industry's footsteps...
Don't stick your head in the sand or follow the crowd like the Madoff investors did...
Get rid of the Ponzi business model...
Time for a new paradigm..."
Sheryl Katz has experience as a BigLaw associate and partner (WilmerHale, Bryan Cave, Perkins Coie, and Graham & James), general counsel, and business person. Here are her comments:
I read your blog post about the possibility of large companies getting sick of big firms and going to small firms. Having been a General Counsel I think this is highly unlikely as more than a minor trend.
If small firms that would do the same quality work for less were truly available, I would have farmed out more work to them. In some cases former law school classmates, or former attorneys at Wilmer or other firms that I knew, were available in smaller firms to help on matters. Sometimes this resulted in good quality work and lower bills. However, small firms often don't have the depth of staff, so some matters that are not even necessarily that big can really only be handled by a bigger firm. Also, on a lot of transactions you really need your tax lawyer, corporate lawyer and banking lawyer to be at the same firm.
Then there is the issue of outside parties on transactions. If you are working with a large bank or Venture Capitalists or Private Equity, you may find that they want to work with a "name brand." Often they are indifferent to the legal fees because they are not the ones paying the bills.
There are very good lawyers everywhere; there are great solo practitioners. Unfortunately, there is also a lot of mediocrity. If, as General Counsel, I had to put too much work into the project training outside counsel or fixing their work, then I didn't want to use them again. The firm I used the most was expensive but always did an excellent job, and its associates were efficient enough that the bill was often cheaper than less competent counsel from smaller firms.
On the other hand I regularly used a small IP firm that had split off from a large mega firm. The work was consistently great and it was a bargain. But I knew the lawyers really well and before I used them I tried several small IP firms and was very frustrated.
Going to a large firm in a lot of cases is sort of like going to a chain restaurant. You pretty much know that the minimum you are going to get is going to be acceptable. And if the firm messes up, as General Counsel, you are covered. After all, you can always say "It may be a mess but Blank, Blank and Blank is reputed to be a great firm so don't fault me for hiring them."
