It seems that the post Use My Invoice As a Project Update struck a chord with some people. Therefore, I must tell you about its even more troubling sibling. It still exists because law firms refuse to learn this.
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Strange, right? Yet totally accepted common practice in law. Here are three reasons this is dumb.
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If I had a dime for every time a law firm partner told me that they had to cancel their participation in an internal meeting at their firm because of a client conflict, I … well, I would probably have enough money to buy us a budget bottle of wine. Yet, considering how often I have heard it, I estimate that the excuse is being pulled on average every 3 seconds - around the clock, around the world. It seems standard practice for many lawyers. But is it the right practice?
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UK is proof nonlawyer ownership threatens legal profession - this headline in Law360 caught my eye over the weekend. Was there new research? I decided to find out.
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Shy Alter, legal industry veteran of ii3 origin, started the LawFirmWeekly channel with (initially promised and later withdrawn) backing from ILTA. I was happy to serve as his first interview guest and see several friends and mentors appear on Shy’s show later. We recorded this in June 2020.
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Helena Hallgarn and Ann Björk of VQ - Virtual Intelligence in Sweden have organized the VQ Forum for the 10th time in 2019. It was going to be the last time as they practically employed Schumpeter’s imperative of creative destruction and declared that VQ needed to innovate rather than doing the same conference year after year. Kudos to them for the courage to abandon such a successful event.
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Do you feel a bit lost in the “value of legal services” discussion? Welcome to the club. But it should not be. It should be fairly simple. Let’s take a look at its core, shall we?
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While I’m not a friend of the hourly rate, I am realist enough to acknowledge that it is the standard approximation to “value” in law-law-land. Here’s what I don’t get: why are there no partners listing their hourly rate as $5k? Some are worth it.
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How true in legal services:
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
- Buckminster Fuller
Where are the new models in law? Those that make old models obsolete?
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Do you work in a firm that has hundreds of partners? And does your firm have committees for “management issues” that are populated by “a cross-section” of those partners? I don’t mean a board or an executive committee. I mean those countless other committees, such as for recruiting, for technology, and most recently for innovation.
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Unless you lived under the proverbial rock for the past 7 years, you will have heard of Daniel Kahneman’s book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” In it, he proposes that we have two modes of thinking: "System 1" is fast, automatic or instinctive, and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, effortful, and logical.
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A couple of charts, published by ALM Legal Intelligence this week, caught my eye and agitated the cynic in me. So much “data” is published on the web and by legal “media” companies, yet so little is properly explained or scrutinized.
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So many lawyers who are leaders in their firms run from conference panel to conference panel claiming that their firm has changed profoundly in the last 10 years. That's nonsense. Firms have merely progressed as they have done every other decade before that. The practice of law has not changed.
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It‘s Groundhog Day again! And this year is also the 25th anniversary of the Bill Murray comedy with the same title. In it, Bill finds himself trapped in a time warp and is doomed to relive the same day over and over again. If you’re a partner in a law firm, this could serve as a reminder to ask yourself: am I stuck in the same rut? Why am I doing what I’m doing? And what am I going to do to get out of it?
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