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Legal Commentary

In Search of Perfect Client Service

Why Lawyers Seem To Stumble. Blawg from attorney Patrick Lamb

Post Frequency: 1.8/day

Last Entry: March 17, 2011 at 16:14:07

Wall Street Journal Article Is Further Evidence Of Move Away From Billable Hour

Posted on August 24, 2009
The front page of today Wall Street Journal contains an article, 'Billable Hour' Under Attack,that poses more questions than it answers. Amongst the useful insights: corporate spending on flat fees is up 50% over the same period last year corporations using flat fees are experiencing 15% average savings over those not using flat fees But the article contains some stunning quotes that merit some commentary...

Legal Community Veterans Continue Attack on Billable Hour

Posted on August 24, 2009
In two separate articles, long-time law firm consultant Joel Henning and former GE GC Ben Heineman, Jr. and William Lee, co-managing partner of WilmerHale, have highlighted the plight of the profession borne of the billable hour and the model that creates a ponzie-scheme-like need for ever increasing revenue in law firms...

Mediation on the rise?

Posted on August 24, 2009
Last week, I wrote about corporate America instructing its counsel to make litigation go away rather than spending money defending lawsuits. Perhaps one way it is doing this is by increasing the use of mediation. Mediation is a good investment of time and money, especially if you get a good mediator...

War and Litigation Budgets

Posted on August 17, 2009
My friend Dan Hull at What About Clients? has an interesting post on litigation budgets. Here is Dan's key point: War is the last of all things to go according to schedule. -- Thucydides (460 BC - 395 BC) in The History of the Peloponnesian War...

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"What happens if ....?"

Posted on August 17, 2009
I met Gini Dietrich on Twitter. Gini is the CEO of Arment Dietrich, a public relations firm in Chicago. Gini also is the primary author of the blog The Fight Against Destructive Spin. In a recent post, Gini, an avid cyclist, recounted how she had been riding along with fellow cyclists talking about the Bears...

"Make this go away": Corporate America's New Take On Litigation

Posted on August 17, 2009
The online version of National Law Journal contains an interesting analysis of the impact the recession is having on how corporate America looks at litigation. In For Litigators, A Different Kind Of Recession,author Karen Sloan analyzes various data and surveys and reaches some interesting conclusions...

BigLaw Still Facing Problems?

Posted on August 17, 2009
Anecdotes first: A short while ago, I had lunch with a friend, a BigLaw partner. This partner's firm had gone through two rounds of associate and staff layoffs, a round of partner reduction and some de-equitizations. According to this partner, more of each are on the near horizon, as in 2009 sometime...

Some Reflections On Client Service

Posted on August 10, 2009
Over the weekend, I was cleaning out some old files on my computer and I ran across a slide show I had put together for a presentation on client service. I thought I would post them here. There were two over-arching points to the presentation that are worth reminding yourself of everyday: 1...

Hourly Billing And The PEP Conundrum

Posted on August 07, 2009
Let's say you're the managing partner of an AmLaw 200 firm. You've terminated associates and staff (using, of course, the kinder and gentler term "lay offs"), you've eliminated free coffee, taken tissues away from associates and staff (presumably you had the good grace to do this after all the layoffs), raised the amount people have to pay for vending machine soda, closed unprofitable offices, cut the salaries of summer associates, forced non-rainmaker partners out, had a second round of staff and associate terminations, and basically done everything one can do to cut costs and preserve you firm's profits per equity partner...

Rain Today Publishes Lamb-Auerbach Article On Client Loyalty As By-Product Of Great Leadership

Posted on August 06, 2009
Nicole Auerbach and I were honored to be asked to author a chapter in a RainToday.com special report, The One Piece of Advice You Need to Earn Your Clients' Loyalty. Our submission, Client Loyalty As A By-Product Of Firm Leadership, has received several positive comments on Twitter since the RainToday...

Jim Hassett releases 3rd Edition of Guide To Alternative Fees

Posted on August 03, 2009
Jim Hassett of Legal Business Development has just released the 3rd edition of his acclaimed work, LegalBizDev Guide To Alternative Fees. Jim has spent more time thinking about alternative fees than almost anyone I know, and his accumulated knowledge, analysis and insights are available in his Guide...

Virtual Firms And The Future Of Law Practice

Posted on August 03, 2009
Very interesting article in the Legal Technology section of law.com today, Does The Future Belong To Virtual Law Firms? The articles discusses how Virtual Law Partners secured a client that is incorporated in Delaware and based in St. Petersburg, Russia, and is represented by a VLP partner living in Cali, Columbia...

BigLaw and Fixed Fees: The Two Don't Mix

Posted on August 02, 2009
You cannot flip a switch and start pricing lawsuits on a fixed fee basis. Like anything else, it takes experience to become any good at it. Is it any wonder, then, that firms that have historically charged by the hour quote inflated flat fees? I've written about the tendency of BigLaw to multiply rates (which, of course, include a healthy profit) times the number of hours they expect to spend on a matter, and then add in a fudge-factor of 10 to 15% or more...

LexisNexis Practice Management: Firmly Rooted In The Past

Posted on July 23, 2009
I received an email this morning that I found really shocking. It was from Law Firm, Inc., attaching "an offer" from one of its advertising partners, LexisNexis. The offer was contained in what was formatted as an article or blog post, with this title: "Stacking the bench with more associates wins partners more income...

Jack Welch Work Life Pronouncement Is NOT Newsworthy

Posted on July 18, 2009
The ABA Weekly reported today that Jack Welch, former General Electric CEO, told an audience at Society for Human Resource Management's annual conference that 'there is no such thing as work-life balance' and women who take time off for family will have a tough time climbing the corporate ladder...

Work LIfe Balance and the Kobayashi Maru

Posted on July 17, 2009
I think the world of Dan Hull. Smart, opinionated, tough-as-nails, erudite. Great writer. Funny as hell. Plus we share an unwavering commitment to providing unsurpassed client service. We don't see eye to eye on everything, though. Dan still believes in the billable hour...

Does Skin In The Game Improve Case Assessments? Clients Say Yes.

Posted on July 16, 2009
Dave Bohrer of Confluence Law Partners recently published an article, Trolling For Efficiency, which discusses the impact of using alternative fees in patent defense litigation. [I should be able to post a link to the article in a few days. Email me for a copy in the interim...

BigLaw Partner Compensation Systems Hurt Clients

Posted on July 15, 2009
A July 14 post on Chicago Law announced that Joe Collins had resigned from Mayer Brown following his recent conviction in the Refco fraud debacle. That was hardly newsworthy: Collins had been on leave since 2007. Here's the quote that caught my attention: "The story also says few other lawyers at Mayer Brown knew much about Collins' practice because of the firm's eat-what-you-kill compensation system...

IsThe Insurance Industry Waking Up?

Posted on July 15, 2009
Someone emailed me the link to an article, in Claims (Covering the Business of Loss). The article, Fleecing The Golden Goose: Why Insurers Need A Defense To Overbilling Lawyers, addresses the phenomenon of overbilling in the world of insurance defense...

I Highly Recommend "An Open Letter to the General Counsel"

Posted on July 14, 2009
My friend Pam Woldow of Altman Weil just posted "An Open Letter to the General Counsel." It is must-read material if you are an inside lawyer. See if you identify with any of these comments made to Pam in an interview with a GC of a major transportation company: 1...

How High Is Too High?

Posted on July 14, 2009
ACC blog post notes that Jones Day is charging Chrysler hourly rates ranging from $400 per hour for the youngest lawyer to $950 per hour for the most experienced. Wow. Let's run the numbers. Assume that because work is slow, the $400 lawyers work only 2000 hours per year...

More BigLaw Pain

Posted on July 14, 2009
The pain just keeps getting more intense. Morgan Lewis just announced that it is: 1. canceling all on-campus interviewing this coming fall; 2. canceling the summer program for 2010; and 3. pushing back the start date for current summer associates to 2011...

What Can Be Outsourced Eventually Will Be

Posted on July 13, 2009
Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Then President of a think tank in Washington, D.C. Then, motorcycle mechanic. Not a normal career path, to be sure. This is the path taken by Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into The Value of Work...

The Just Don't Get It, Do They?

Posted on July 13, 2009
Andrew Kassner, managing partner of the 680-lawyer Drinker Biddle & Reath L.L.P. of Center City, said the new focus on flat fees, incentive payments and other alternative forms of compensation means law firms need to be very careful about how they deploy their lawyers...

Valorem Improvement Contest

Posted on July 11, 2009
No one has cornered the market on great ideas. Certainly not us, But we feed on great ideas, so we wanted to try something out. Here's the message: We want to get everyone's creative juices flowing. And everyone means everyone, except for Nicole, Mark, Hugh and Pat (i...

Economy Improving? Words Say Yes, Actions Say No.

Posted on July 10, 2009
You have marvel at the ability lawyers have with sleight of hand. Here on the left, we will tell you the economy is improving. Ignore the additional layoffs, deferred start dates, cancellation of on-campus interviewing, closing of offices and other actions taken with my right hand...

A Lesson From Our Forefathers

Posted on July 04, 2009
Happy Birthday America. Two hundred thirty three years ago, leaders decided that change not only was possible, but necessary. Were they certain what change would bring? Of course not. But they did it anyway.

If Not Now, ....(well, why waste a great quote)?

Posted on June 30, 2009
Altman Weil has released the results of its 2009 Chief Legal Officer Survey. To my mind, the most telling result is this: The survey asked Chief Legal Officers (CLOs) to rate how much pressure corporations are putting on law firms to change the value proposition in legal service delivery, as opposed to simply cutting costs...

Celebrate What You Have.

Posted on June 28, 2009
Yesterday, I took my soon to a church function that, frankly, neither of us was too thrilled about attending. But lessons are learned in the most unexpected places. We were in a group of about 50, and were treated to a performance by Tony Melendez...

NineSigma--Can The Model Be Adapted For Law?

Posted on June 25, 2009
Mavericks At Work: Why The Most Original Minds in Business Win is a terrific book, written by Fast Company co-founder William Taylor. The book has many attributes that make it a "must-read," but the one I want to focus on here is a company discussed in the book named NineSigma...

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