I recently attended a conference that included both law firms and clients. One of the clients had a slide showing his company’s savings by bringing work in-house. It was the classic approach of comparing billing rates for law firm lawyers to hourly compensation rates of equivalent level in-house lawyers. Even though this lawyer was not
Listening to Clients
Last week I was able to attend the Bridgeway Customer Connective Conference in Nashville. Unlike many of the conferences I attend, this one is directed at clients, not law firms.
One of the sessions I attended really got my attention. Pratik Patel and Peter Eilhauer of Elevate presented on a Practical Data-Driven Roadmap for
Sounds of the Echo Chamber
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| Image [cc] Grand Canyon NPS |
My posts have subsided a bit lately as I felt an echo chamber growing and started questioning a lot of stuff I was reading as either echoes or reiterations of prior statements. Some of these echoes are new angles on old subjects, but they merely restate the basic premise: BigLaw
Not So Fast …
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In the 19th century one of the big business revolutions was the adoption of a new technology called “Railroads.” Of course when railroads were first proposed, two things happened. The first was a general uprising from the establishment about why this was a bad idea. This push-back came from those you would
What Law Firms Sell
Not too long ago, Jordan Furlong wrote a good post on what law firms sell. Normally I would go all “Dan Aykroyd” on him, but not this time. His post got me thinking about the broader question of what law firms sell in terms of product offerings. And here’s the catch: They don’t know
Price Elasticity in the Legal Market
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| Image [cc] Marc Samsom |
My recent post on the Price Point Law Firm generated a few interesting discussions. One included Kingsley Martin. Kingsley asked whether law firm work volume would go up if a firm lowered their rates (a.k.a. prices).
Poor Kingsley. This engaged my Economist Engine at Warp 10.
The “real” question is
Why Clients Are Mad
Geek #1 had the opportunity of asking Casey Flaherty a question during a presentation recently. One of his takeaways is that clients still do not trust their outside law firms. After posting my recent piece on SOLP 2013, a thought clicked in my head. Consumers of any product will grow angry if they
Introducing the Price Point Law Firm
What is your reaction to that title?
Most lawyers will probably turn their noses up at this. Since law is a reputation-based business, who in their right mind would want their reputation associated with being cheap?
Many clients will likely be quite interested in this concept. Not that all of their work will ever go
To Thomson Reuters, Time is Money… And Money Will Buy You Time
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Back in January, Tom Wolfe wrote a Newsweek article called Eunuchs of the Universe where he articulated the new style of Wall Street versus the Wall Street that most of us knew. Instead of a raucous gathering of traders in a pit, scrawling information on sheets of paper and signaling wildly to buy
Adam Smith’s Pin Factory and the Law Firm
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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