15 Search results for: the smart money

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The Smart Money is not Following Traditional Law Firms

Blog Post
Back in the late ‘70’s, there was a popular commercial where a young professional commented above the din of a dinner party conversation that his broker was E.F. Hutton. The room fell silent and the punch line was: “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.” Above the din of legal pundits (myself included) opining about shifts in the global legal market comes Deloitte’s June, 2016 research study on “Future Trends for Legal Services.” (more…)

Big Money Is Betting On Legal Industry Transformation

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If “Money makes the world go ‘round,” then the legal world is spinning as never before. Law has been big business for decades, but only recently has significant venture capital, private equity, and entrepreneur money been pumped into the legal sector. Last year saw an eye-popping 718% increase in legal industry investment, and this year’s capital infusion through the third-quarter has already surpassed last year’s $1 billion total and could well double it. Capital is turbocharging customer-centric providers that are leveraging technology, process, new skillsets, and data to transform the legal function and the delivery of legal services. Why the sudden legal investment boom;... read more →

The Golden Age of The Legal Entrepreneur; Why Now and Why It Matters

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Law is seldom associated with entrepreneurs. Lawyers are a cautious bunch focused on precedent, risk containment, and tend to be reactive–not innovative. Entrepreneurs are a different breed. They create new business models in response to market voids, deploying risk capital to achieve customer satisfaction and scale. Entrepreneurs require passion, knowledge, vision, process, resources, expertise, execution, results, performance metrics, constant improvement, collaboration, transparency, scalability, and access to capital. A raft of entrepreneurs is entering the legal space. They are tapping into latent demand for access to legal services as well as expertise-differentiated, efficient, cost-effective, predictive, digitized, and scalable legal products and... read more →

Legal Buyers Taking Charge: The GC Thought Leaders Experiment and Beyond

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The corporate segment of the legal marketplace is a buyer’s market, and they are driving change. Legal consumers were once content to proscribe cost-controls including discounts, staffing limitations, “most favored nation” rates, and travel. That was followed by more aggressive steps including variations on fixed-fee arrangements, requests for proposals (RFP’s), firm compression, and other competitive processes. Since the financial crisis of 2007, disaggregation of ‘legal’ tasks–peeling functions away from law firms and sourcing them elsewhere–has increased dramatically in volume and complexity. ALM’s recently released Intelligence Report revealed that 73% of corporate legal work is now performed in-house with another 2%--and... read more →

Cab Companies And Law Firms Are Taking The Same Route

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Miles van der Rohe, the noted architect, remarked: “Architecture depends on its time.” The same can be said about business structure--it depends on its time. A paradigm shift is occurring. Technology has enabled the creation of new business structures. It has facilitated a decentralized delivery structure, creating communities that connect sellers with buyers. This is sometimes called the collaborative or sharing economy, where individuals deploy underutilized assets–everything from cars and apartments to lawyers–to “share” with buyers. This eliminates centralized institutions that control supply and stifle competition by protectionist self-regulation. It has produced“ faster, cheaper, better” delivery of goods and services... read more →

How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform The Delivery Of Legal Services

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Michio Kaku, a noted theoretical physicist and futurist, predicts, “The job market of the future will consist of those jobs that robots cannot perform.” Robots have recently entered the legal workplace, performing several tasks once assigned to newly minted law grads. What does this mean for current and future lawyers? Simple answer: robots will not replace lawyers but they will work with them. (more…)

The Emergence of Litigation Finance: What It Tells Us

Blog Post
The emergence of litigation finance is another telltale sign of a maturing, rapidly changing legal marketplace. Buyers and sellers of legal services have so much more to consider these days than legal expertise. They must assess, among other things: technology, process management, areas of expertise/specialization, insourcing/outsourcing/right-sourcing, legal supply chain, cyber-security, collaboration, pricing, markets, social media, regulatory and compliance issues, etc. Budget predictability, risk mitigation, and “more for less” have morphed from goal to mandate. (more…)

The New Threat to Law Firms From Across the Pond

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It’s no longer a secret that the UK’s Legal Services Act of 2007 (LSA) is a game changer.  It was intended to provide retail and corporate legal consumers more and better options of legal services delivery.  Among other things, it enabled licensure of “Alternative Business Structures” that could accept non-lawyer investment, engage in interdisciplinary practice, share profits with non-lawyers- and even go public. Clients were intended to benefit. And by all accounts they have. A recent article by Neil Rose in Legal Futures, a UK-based online journal, caught my eye. Mr. Rose, an astute legal commentator, discussed an annual review... read more →

Learning from Each Other: Fostering Intergenerational Collaboration

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People try to put us d-down (talkin' 'bout my generation) Just because we get around (talkin' 'bout my generation) Things they do look awful c-c-cold (talkin' 'bout my generation) I hope I die before I get old (talkin' 'bout my generation) This is my generation This is my generation, baby --The Who, “My Generation” Generational divides are common intra-familiarly as well as in the workplace. That is nothing new, but never in modern history has the workforce comprised five generations as it does now. Longer life expectancies, the high cost of living, and technological advances that have morphed offices into... read more →

Covid-19 Is Transforming The Legal Industry: Macro And Micro Evidence

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There is widespread consensus among CEO’s that business changes underway before Covid-19 have accelerated dramatically. For example, online delivery’s volume increased by the same amount in eight weeks as it had during the previous decade. Telemedicine experienced a ten-fold growth in subscribers in just 15 days. MicrosoftMSFT CEO Satya Nadella crystallized the nexus between Covid-19 and digital transformation during a recent quarterly earnings call: “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” Digital transformation has been a C-Suite priority for some time. The warp-speed of change unleashed by the pandemic has established digital adoption and maturation as... read more →