One of the biggest stories over the summer of 2017 was an open letter from 25 general counsel announcing that they are working together to test industry assumptions about the legal market. Although the composition of this group is very impressive, it is also not random. Each company is a member of AdvanceLaw, a
Among the many impressive finalists for this year’s ILTA Innovation Awards, the submission for the Telstra legal department stood out as a compelling change management story. By enabling the right kind of collaboration among its lawyers, the Telstra change initiative reduced the internal workload on the 220-lawyer department by 40,000 hours. Further, by returning
As a law professor, I worry about my students’ job prospects. One way to manage this worry is to study clients and to work backwards from their needs. Opportunities tend to find lawyers who follow this discipline.
Yet, making generalizations on law clients in the year 2017 is surprisingly difficult. This point was recently driven
As the legal market remains flat for law firms, the focus naturally turns to clients. How they think. What they care about. How they spend their budgets. Etc. Yet, to the extent that clients vary in significant ways, the generalizations aren’t particularly helpful.
There are many ways to categorize clients, but by my lights the most useful is size and organizational structure of the in-house legal department. As shown in diagram above, this metric varies from zero for individuals (Type 1) and business owners (Type 2), to the equivalent of a specialized law firm embedded inside a large corporation (Types 5 and 6).
Continue Reading Six Types of Law Firm Clients (005)
A lot. The trend is large and longstanding. Over the last two decades, the number of lawyers working in corporations has more than tripled, growing from 34,750 in 1997 to 105,310 in 2016. The chart above shows the trendlines.
Most people working in the legal industry know that in-house legal departments have been growing, but