As law firms look for opportunities to grow revenue, there really is only once place to look: Down. By down I mean further down the food-chain of legal services. Most lawyers and firms like to hold themselves out as a unique brand: a brand worthy of only the highest levels of legal work.
Even
With great interest, I have been following Bruce’s series on Growth is Dead. Bruce brings a refreshing economist’s perspective to a bear on an important set of issues.
Apart from agreeing with him, I offer yet another economist’s perspective, taking on another dimension of this analysis. Back in the Spring, I dubbed 2012
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After I wrote the post last week on de facto embedded librarians, I started getting comments in from my friend Colleen Cable arguing that we shouldn’t settle for de facto librarians in law firm practice groups, but instead we should be pushing for real live librarians in every practice group. Initially,
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Recently Greenberg made a Capital Call to its partners. Of course, the market reacted with an expected “Is this the next Dewey?”
My thinking – that is unlikely. Looking beyond the Dewey angle, I think there is a much bigger issue looming here. The issue: The extreme limitations on the
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I welcomed a new neighbor this week who is moving in across the drive from me. I struck up a “Welcome to the Neighborhood” conversation and learned he is a relatively new lawyer working in a small defense firm. Of course the subject turned to the current market for legal services and
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[Editor’s Note: My wife might disagree – but I relish it when people disagree with me (think on that one for a moment). My recent post on the Rise of Compliance at the Expense of Legal prompted Susan Hackett to provide an alternative point of view. Susan has a wealth of experience in working with in-house counsel, especially in her former role
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A couple of weeks ago, I sat in on a webinar with a number of Alternative Fee Arrangement folks, including consultants and General Counsels from a few major companies. The talk was the typical discussion of change in the industry, need to adjust the billing structure, AFAs… yada yada yada… the
For those of a certain age, the phrase “I read it for the articles” will resonate. Well … I was reading Above The Law this week and stumbled on a substantive article (since I read it for the substantive articles) on law schools. It was actually a thoughtful piece on how ABA accrediting standards have
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In the past I have talked about how law firms have become profit-margin businesses versus their old cost-plus model. And I have alluded to the fact that associates and other non-partners are the source of margins and therefore profit. So I thought I would take a crack at modeling a single associate
