Part 1 of this four-part post introduced a February 19, 2019 Forbes article, “Clients Need Legal Services But Not Necessarily Lawyers” — by Mark Cohen, both an accomplished business attorney and former chief executive of his own (non-law firm) business. Part 1 introduced Cohen’s observations about the process management and technological…
My client was an Amsterdam-based investor who wanted to build an aviation services business in the United States. As a corporate and commercial lawyer whose practice largely emphasized the transportation sector, I needed to get this client the best advice possible on positioning its new business from a U.S. federal…
Business people care about results. That was the biggest lesson I learned upon crossing to the client side of the lawyer / client table. After spending a decade as a practicing attorney. Kind of a “duh” factor for my friends who’d lived and died by the P&L all their careers.…
Part 1 of this three-part post described software engineer-turned-attorney Jason Barnwell’s introduction — two months into his first law job after graduating from USC Law School — to the legal profession’s idea of “productivity”. As the junior lawyer on a deal team, he offered to automate the process of creating…
This is a tale of two definitions. Two definitions of what “productivity” means in the delivery of legal services to a company. It’s about an MIT-trained software engineer named Jason Barnwell who worked in one of the country’s major corporate law firms right out of USC Law School. The tale…
The case of Cass v. 1410088 Ontario Inc. contains this one sentence written by an Ontario Superior Court judge in the course of disallowing from an attorney’s fee request the amount designated for “legal research”: “If artificial intelligence sources were employed, no doubt counsel’s preparation time would have been significantly…
Collaboration — on a consistent basis at least — calls for more than good intentions. Real teamwork is promoted — or it’s discouraged — by the way we pay people for their work. In her “What Makes Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic Different?”, financial journalist Maggie Mahar interviewed one of its…
In Part 1 I described how the Mayo Clinic simultaneously achieved both the highest clinical standards and robust new efficiencies in its heart surgery department. In looking to the Mayo Clinic for ideas on how to better manage the work that lawyers do for our businesses, I’d like to look…
Last year the Wall Street Journal recounted how — eight years earlier — the Mayo Clinic’s heart surgeons had asked for two more operating rooms to meet skyrocketing demand. “No” – replied the Mayo Clinic’s CEO — himself a physician. Not only did he say “No” — CEO Dr. John Noseworthy then…
This last of three posts about a 54-page opinion in which U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of Illinois Judge Mary Gorman explained her reduction of a nationally prominent law firm’s $1.8 million fee down to $670,000 offers a case study of the billable hour’s perverse incentives. Today I address a case-study-within-a-case-study…