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The Point

Yesterday, the American Bar Association (ABA), the Country’s leading organization of practicing attorneys, reinforced the legal profession’s longstanding opposition to anyone other than a licensed lawyer having an ownership interest in a law practice.

Future adherence to this policy would prevent the Big Four and tech-adopting / process-implementing alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) from including the advice of licensed attorneys among their offerings.

To date this policy has already successfully barred the Big Four and ALSPs from including services of licensed lawyers from among their offerings — until, that is, ALSPs Elevate and Axiom Law availed themselves earlier this year of Arizona’s reforms. Continue reading

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The Point

On July 27 I posted a blog piece entitled “Sometimes Only an Experienced Lawyer’s Judgment Can Make the Difference Between Business Catastrophe and Success”.

Here’s a corollary: It’s usually not the law firm in which that attorney practices that makes the difference in this selection. It’s usually the individual practitioner who specializes in the area of law your company needs.

Continue reading

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The Point

There’s a lot more to the corporate law function than what lawyers do.

But most of the legal profession doesn’t recognize that, and client companies suffer the resulting costs of Legal’s labor-intensive, technology-averse work methods. Continue reading

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The Point

Consistent with my firsthand experience on both sides of the client / lawyer table — recent survey data reflect how businesspeople and corporate Legal view each other:

1. A majority of businesspeople think that attorneys don’t understand their work, and are unsupportive of that work.

2. A majority of corporate employees respond to this reality by sometimes simply bypassing Legal on deals or policy issues.

3. Most attorneys in the corporate law function are oblivious to these realities. Continue reading

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The Point

For legal judgment on truly consequential business decisions, it’s imperative to get the very best (and often the most expensive) lawyer you can find.

Please note: in referring to the provider of such legal judgment, I use the singular. Continue reading

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In about 60% of legal matters, the law firm doing the work fails to estimate the amount of money needed to complete the task, according to a recent BigHand technology survey described in The Artificial Lawyer June 28, 2022 issue.

This has two harmful implications:

1. Lax cost control: there is no number against which to manage accumulation of ongoing charges while lawyers run up the bill. “Cost control” is left to the attorneys. Continue reading

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The Point

Last Friday, Bloomberg Law reported survey findings supporting the same conclusion I reached in a post two weeks ago:

“While these results indicate that most respondents are using ALSPs [“alternative legal services providers”, or “law companies”], it’s interesting that they’re being used for a relatively small proportion of an organization’s workflow, despite the specialized services and cost-saving potential ALSPs offer.” Continue reading

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The Point

“Law.com Radar” is a dry-sounding technology and services combination that could help your company dodge bullets in its litigation exposure.

It combines court data, algorithms, and human expertise to give attorneys a fact-based heads-up to management about how their client companies are likely to be treated in court. Continue reading

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The Point

Too often, in-house law departments and law firms use licensed lawyers (Category #1 below) to perform routine, recurring tasks that an alternative legal services provider (ALSP) or law company (Category #2 below) could do more cheaply, faster, and with higher accuracy.

CFOs and others in the C-suite should take a hard look at using ALSPs and law companies for routine, recurring legal tasks. Because in-house law departments and law firms, for the most part, are not doing so. Continue reading

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The Point

The last few years witnessed headlines announcing a legal technology investment boom (here, here, and here).

But — for all the publicity on the investor side — actual technology adoption among law firms remains slow.

This Matters to Your Business

A survey of 560 law firm attorneys taken in May 2022 for Dashboard Legal asked them: “Are you satisfied with the technology at your firm?”

Only 37% answered “yes”. Continue reading

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