The key to cutting your company’s legal spending is not finding a lawyer who’ll work on-the-cheap. To cut legal spending (intelligently), pay – and don’t be afraid to pay well – for the legal help that you need.
Then ruthlessly avoid paying for what you don’t need.
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The legal profession’s prevailing business model designs its service offerings to defeat this strategy. Most law firms work this way. And the inefficiencies are compounded by the fact that most in-house counsel put up with it.
As a result, and as I described it in my most recent post, attorneys’ conventional service delivery loads up a lot of what you don’t need, to go with what you do need:
- Hourly quotas for attorneys encourage more lawyer time per task;
- This motivates a proliferation of lawyers on any given task — each lawyer with their own hourly quota; and
- This proliferation leads to insertion of recent law graduates alongside fully qualified attorneys to do the routine & repetitive work for which law clerks or paralegals are suited — but billed to clients at several hundred dollars per hour.
And these three waste-embedding traits discourage adoption of any technology that can materially increase the quality or efficiency of the legal tasks being performed. (See my December 13, 2019 post for elaboration on why I qualify this statement with “materially”: Law firms’ bread-and-butter work — what makes them most of their money — tends not to get automated. But there are some pain-in-the-neck legal tasks for which those firms can’t charge much — and, in a growing number of cases, law firms are using AI or other tech innovations to automate these tasks.)
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Axiom Law is a legal service provider whose offering strips away these wasteful add-on’s. And leaves the client company with what it needs: An accomplished, prestigiously pedigreed lawyer, who practices at the highest level of their particular niche.
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Managing Legal
