June 2013

Image [cc] paojus

One of Adam Smith’s great contributions to economics was his commentary on the ‘division of labor’ – explained in his pin factory example. For those of you who may have fell asleep during this part of the Econ 101 lecture, Adam Smith demonstrated how productive capacity increases with specialization.

He evaluated an

Image [cc] – Tomozaurus

Jane: The billable hour is dead, Dan. It is the sad and lonely remnant of an era when clients were to stupid to realize they were being fleeced by outside counsel. I for one can no longer, in good conscience, blatantly steal my client’s money. I officially declare the billable hour

Image [cc] doni19
Everyone seems to agree that BigLaw is f’d up. The business model is completely screwed up and not in alignment with reality. This allows great sport for those of us who enjoy picking at the various aspects of exactly how BigLaw is headed for disaster.

But what does this disaster look like?

Image [cc] Ed Callow
I used to joke with Geek #1 about how we could pluck a lawyer from 1985, teach her email and Word, send her to a few CLEs to update her legal knowledge and she would be “good-to-go” to practice law. The point being – the practice of law hasn’t changed much



Dan:  Recently a number of firms have announced reductions in their secretarial ranks as a means of improving their secretary ratios – which is to say 5:1 is the new 4:1. For those not familiar with this stat – it means that the new goal is 5 timekeepers for every 1 secretary. This approach makes