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Warren Buffett, the quintessential capitalist, was recently quoted:

“[t]he single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by

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In chatting with my boss / colleague / mentor about the economic state of the legal industry, we stumbled on an interesting analogy. We were discussing the recent CT TyMetrix Real Rate report and the fact that the number one driver of differences in billing rates is a lawyer’s location. We concluded that law firms

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It seems reality continues to encroach on the practice of law. Announced this week in the UK is “a bid to create the first solicitors franchise.” The idea is to create a standard platform of back-office systems and services and then franchise that out as a law firm platform to different locations and markets. The

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In this recent ABA Journal article, the co-CEO of Pangea3 is quoted as saying, “No law firm should be doing commoditized work.” The assumed intent of this statement is to ease concerns that Thomson Reuters (TR) / Pangea3 is competing with law firms (a.k.a. customers). On its face, this statement may provide some reassurance.

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As a corollary to the profitability series, this post tackles the need for KM to be tied to profitability in a law firm. Otherwise it becomes KM for the sake of KM. Ron Friedmann’s recent post on KM Reincarnated combined with some recent evaluations of Legal Project Management (LPM) software got me thinking

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In the series on law firm profitability, the clients weren’t directly addressed. As law firms struggle to adapt to a profit margin business model, what will the impact be on how much clients pay and on the quality of services they receive?

We explored two basic methods for lowering the cost of delivery of legal

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In the last post in this series on law firm profitability, we examined the implications of shifting from a cost-plus business model to a margin model for law firms. The bottom-line is that firms need to reduce the number of hours it takes to provide a service, and/or reduce the average cost per hour for

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Revenue – Cost = Profit: The basic equation that governs business. Yet this remains an elusive, not-yet-understood equation for most law firms. This fourth post in a series on law firm profitability will examine what this equation could and should mean to law firms.
As various legal markets shift from rates to fee pricing,

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