thought leadership

Growing Chorus on the Deregulation of the Practice of Law?

By Toby Brown on September 25, 2011

Since the post on “Is Practice of Law Already Deregulated?” I have seen numerous other books, articles and posts on this topic. Also since this post, I have challenged colleagues from a variety of roles, on whether I was off-base in my analysis. I wanted people to challenge my assertion that the practice

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Using River Logic to Build AFAs

By Toby Brown on September 19, 2011

A recent post on Slaw highlighted an interesting tool called eGanges which employs the Ishikawa Fishbone approach to solving legal problems. This approach uses river logic in contrast to a decision tree approach. Beyond the wonderful ‘Ishikawa Fishbone’ name, I see some potential applications in the AFA world for a tool like this and river

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The next big thing?

By Scott Preston on September 14, 2011

The next big thing needs to be a proactive approach to knowing where data lives and what it means. It needs to include tools to keep data organized and secured regardless of location.

One of the most exciting areas in legal tech over the past several years has been the growth of intelligent software. When

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Rewarding Sales Efforts by Lawyers: A Response

By Toby Brown on September 13, 2011

Recently Ron Friedmann posted an intriguing idea on his blog about having some partner (or lawyer) comp being tied to sales efforts (a.k.a closing on new business). I had the incredible fortune of attending the dinner he referenced and was able to participate in this dialogue.

One might argue all partner comp is tied to

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It takes a village to deliver (place your goal here), it takes a leader to make a difference.

By Scott Preston on September 2, 2011

As we heard at the ILTA 2011 conference, in order to deliver your goals effectively you must include most (if not all) of the support functions within the firm. Now more than ever, integration between different administrative groups is essential for a firm to be agile, cost effective and client focused. How do you achieve

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Guess What?

By Toby Brown on August 31, 2011

Over a dinner with a very smart bunch of people at the ILTA Conference in Nashville an excellent question came up: What will the AmLaw 100 look like in 2020? Everyone there gave very thoughtful and reasonable predictions. We discussed ideas like more out-sourcing of work, better use of cloud-based apps, using analysis KM tools,

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Formats, Mash-Ups, Delivery, ROI, Thinking, & Winning

By Greg Lambert on August 23, 2011

Image [cc] ivyfield

When I was at AALL last month, someone asked me who I though would “win” the e-book format challenge. I think they were giving me a multiple-choice answer between Kindle, iBooks, HTML5, etc. However, my answer was “D — None of the Above.” In my mind, the “winner” doesn’t even exist yet.…

Legal Markets Fall in Classic Pincer Movement?

By Toby Brown on August 22, 2011

The news of Google investing in Rocket Lawyer got me thinking about the dynamics of the broader market for legal services. On one end of the market we have the discussion about how BigLaw is broken. There is a long and growing list of broken pieces of BigLaw, including: how fees are billed, how marketing

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Law Firms as General Contractors? Or the Other GC

By Toby Brown on July 15, 2011

Ron Friedmann and I ran a point-counter point post a while back on Bet-the-Farm versus Law Factory models for law firms. The dialogue was intended to generate some thoughts and ideas on the future shape of law firms.

In this post I take a tangent on that topic and explore whether firms should or could

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Disruptive Forces in Patent Litigation On the Rise?

By Toby Brown on June 10, 2011

Eventually I will blog on my Case Study on The Evolution of Pricing in the Patent Litigation Market. One reason I keep putting this off is that this topic continues to evolve – quickly.

Over the past few weeks a number of news items on this topic caught my attention. Adding them together highlights how

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