The median number of equity partners in an Am Law 100 firm (ranked by PPP) is 170. The number is arbitrary, but it probably isn’t random.
W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex, is known for a “radically nonhierarchical management structure.” One aspect of the Gore approach that makes the company so
As Robert Ambrogi has been reporting, Avvo launched a new legal forms offering to compete with LegalZoom. Mr. Contract himself, Ken Adams, reviewed an Avvo form and concluded that Avvo was another of the “hack vendors” that was “foisting crap” and “dreck” on consumers. Avvo responded to Adams’s “silliness” in a way that suggests to
“Richard Susskind writes the same book every five years. He just updates the examples.“
The above would be offensive if it were not a joke frequently delivered in the first person by Susskind himself. What makes the self-deprecation so humorous is that, in part, it is true. Richard Susskind has been delivering a
I received multiple forwards of this article entitled “The Rise of the Tech-Savvy Lawyer.”
Apparently, I can’t just enjoy things anymore. I thought it was a good article. I found much in it that I liked. A properly balanced individual would simply recommend it and move on. I, however, am not properly balanced and the
“Nine women can’t make a baby in one month.”
That’s good because adding headcount is not nearly as productive as it appears at first glance. Last post, I wrote about Baumol’s cost disease and why labor in stagnant sectors (like law) gets more expensive over time. This post, I’m going to use Brooks’ law
Lawyers are not anti-technology. Lawyers are pro getting sh*t done. The caricature I drew of the nose-to-the-grindstone inside counsel in my last post was an attempt to illustrate how the need, predisposition, and incentives to focus on immediate, mission-critical work often dominate the competing demand to systematically integrate new process and technology to improve the
Last post, I challenged myself after seconding an observation from Toby about discounts. Toby wrote:
Discounts are the market (via specific clients) telling a firm their prices are too high for a piece of work. One might think firms should lower their prices in response to this information, however, that could be a
I’ve shared elsewhere the story of my first contact with law firms. I was not a lawyer. I was a sandwich jockey. I didn’t make the sandwiches, I sold them. I was an account rep for a historic Los Angeles deli. My biggest account was a law firm. They were my best and worst client.
Confirmation bias is a source of comfort. Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there’s no need to do so, most of us get busy on the proof. If you have an opinion whether the market for legal services is changing, or not, you can find plenty of ammunition from recent studies,
As mentioned in my last post, law students often respond to their poor scores on a basic Word assessment by explaining to me that they need not need worry about this tech stuff because “that is what secretaries are for.” I think this is wrong for a number of reasons, a few