Category: General

At the International Legal Technology Association annual conference last month in Nashville, I was a panelist for Future Proofing Your Law Firm. I share here an overview of the themes we prepared in advance (click here for the published slides (PDF).  My co-panelists were Gerard...

At the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) annual conference last week, alternative fee arrangements (AFA) was a hot topic. One dinner discussion with a few forward-thinking friends got me thinking about how firms cost matters and how best to handle sales commissions.  What, you ask,...

Let’s face it, clients now exercise the buying power they’ve long held. So law firms must act. But how?  A session at the upcoming ILTA Conference called Making an Impossible Engagement Possible tackles the “how question.” And panelists John Alber, Rudy DeFelice and Ayelette Robinson...

Doctors share many traits with lawyers. Yet health care, prompted by public policy and challenging economics, has changed much more than law practice. Lawyers and law firms can learn from doctors, as a Wall Street Journal article last week illustrates.  ERs Move to Speed Care;...

Toby Brown of 3 Geeks and a Law Blog recently posted The Lawyers’ Fear of Accountability, which expands and comments on my recent post, Does Defining Good Service Scare Clients and Lawyers? A Thought Experiment. I’ll continue the discussion.  Toby writes that lawyers fear accountability...

I recently asked here how large law firms should define “good client service”. Subsequently, I posed this question at a meeting of several experienced BigLaw professionals.  All of us – lawyer, librarian, marketer, IT, KM professional, practice manager – struggled to define good client service....

Do large law firms provide quality service?  The answer depends on what we mean by quality and the metrics we choose. A threshold question is whether to consider the quality of substantive legal advice. Even if that were the only metric, the question remains difficult:...

Lawyers were once technology laggards. Moi, type? They resisted e-mail. They ridiculed websites. Thankfully, that era ended. In spite of the 30-year history of what the PC has spawned, it’s not obvious lawyers get technology for more than personal productivity. Let’s look at some evidence....