Jan
26
Legal Disruption at the Margins Last week's post discussed how the legal vertical is primed for interruption. So why hasn’t something big happened yet? If we follow Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation, we can identify change at the margins: the rise of legal service providers. They have wrested “high...
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Jan
19
Is Disruption Becoming Commonplace? The theory of “disruptive innovation” was coined by Clayton Christensen and popularized by his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. The theory tracks the process by which an industry dominated by high cost and complex products or services is transformed by innovation marked by certain key elements: simplicity,...
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Jan
12
Some friends who run a successful legal consulting boutique called me the other day to wish me a Happy New Year, to catch up, and to talk about their marketing plans for the coming year. “We have decided to concentrate on the AmLaw 200,” one of them said, “so where...
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Dec
22
It’s that time of year again when gifts are exchanged–and returned; resolutions are made–and quickly breached; and hopes for the future abound–so long as one does not watch the news or follow social media. So in the spirit of the season, and recognizing that what follows is decidedly aspirational, here...
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Dec
15
Law is not an Island Much has been written about the causes and effects–immediate and longer-term–of change in the legal marketplace. Such analysis is a busman’s holiday for lawyers who have a proclivity for identifying “issues” (read: “problems”) but are far less likely to advance solutions. Most everyone agrees by...
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Dec
09
The Climate that Propelled the Growth of Lower End Providers When the Association of Corporate Counsel (“ACC”) launched its Value Challenge in 2008, it sought to exact greater value from the AmLaw 200 (the 200 largest U.S. law firms measured by aggregate revenue and size). These law firms had a...
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Dec
02
The “Fat Middle" and the Segmentation of Corporate Legal Work “Fat Middle” is a term that has been applied by legal pundits to describe that broad range of legal tasks between “bespoke” work (“bet the company” cases, mega-mergers, major Governmental investigations, etc.) and high-volume, low value tasks (e-discovery, document review,...
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Nov
18
It’s easy to be critical of Plaintiff class action lawyers: They are the Oakland Raiders of the legal profession They are more successful than the Raiders, though They are “the one percent” of law (or a good part of it) Detractors call them “ambulance chasers on steroids.” They are aggressive...
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Nov
10
With so much being written about the changes afoot in the legal ecosystem, it is a good time to revisit the practical definition of some key terms. Here is a sampling: Chinese Wall: a term applied to a conflict that involves lots of money and the construct by which it...
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Nov
03
Life imitates baseball; that much we can stipulate. So too does law parallel baseball. And what better time to explore that parallel than after a thrilling seven game World Series Let’s Start with Farm Teams Long-time baseball fans–those who predate the designated hitter, multiple teams making the playoffs, and a...
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