Legal technology is slowly becoming core to the legal business. It’s time to commit to a cross-functional team approach.

In the legal profession, attorneys with specialized subject matter expertise (e.g., discovery, trial work, corporate transactions, appellate, regulatory, and many others) provide tremendous value to their clients.  Similarly, technologists supporting the legal profession typically include accomplished programmers, skilled engineers, application experts, integration specialists, security ninjas, and the like. In both disciplines, specialized expertise is incredibly valuable.   

The premise of this post is that individual capabilities and excellence (either legal or technical) standing alone are not enough to ensure long-term, sustainable success.  No superstar technologist or lawyer is equipped to do it all, as there are too many specialties and functional roles which need to be filled.  Rather, a better approach is to construct team-based, cross-functional units that offer greater operational efficiency while building in layers of redundancy that reduce the potential for surprises, errors, or disruption.  Cf Post 323 (Patrick McKenna’s “rules of engagement” for high-performing legal teams).
Continue Reading The expanding role of technology in the law firm business model (338)

A. By embracing Adaptive Leadership principles.

[Editor’s note: Scott Westfahl and Anusia Gillespie worked together at HLS Executive Education and have been collaborating ever since.  Drawing upon Scott’s expertise in Adaptive Leadership and Lawyers Driving Change and Anusia’s perspective across organizations, their most recent effort was an online panel titled “The Resilient GC: Rolling with Disruption.”  Today’s NewLaw Fundamentals column summarizes the top five takeaways from this session, which strongly reinforce the message that NewLaw methodologies and frameworks are becoming core to legal department strategy. wdh]

Shannon Thyme Klinger, Terry Theologides, and Dev Stahlkopf

In The Economist’s recent General Counsel US Insight Hour, “The Resilient GC: Rolling with Disruption,” we heard from Shannon Thyme Klinger, Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel of Moderna, a biotechnology company that went from $800 million US in sales in 2020 to more than $18 billion US in sales in 2021; Terry Theologides, General Counsel of Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored mortgage financing enterprise with $22 billion US in annual revenue; and Dev Stahlkopf, Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel of Cisco, a digital communications technology conglomerate corporation with $52 billion US in annual revenue.

What did these three leading General Counsels from three disparate industries have to say about thriving as the clock speed of change accelerates around them and their companies?
Continue Reading Q. How do GCs thrive amid disruption? (337)

Smart lawyers face hard questions.

After reading the recently published Servants to the Damned (2022) by investigative reporter David Enrich, which chronicles the role of large law firms in today’s political polarization and wealth disparities, I revisited some earlier psychology materials to consider whether a lawyer could find meaning while pursuing a career in Big Law.

Servants offered two questions in the context of trying to understand a Big Law team’s sanctions-worthy, abusive discovery maneuvers on behalf of its Big Pharma client in a product liability case filed by the parents of a brain-damaged child: “Am I proud of the work I’m doing?” and “Am I the person I want to be?”
Continue Reading Is it possible to find meaning in BigLaw? (336)

“Firms outside the Premier and Championship leagues are playing a different sport.” Thus, the winning strategies are different.

Jae Um, in her bracketing exercise for The American Lawyer magazine, arrays the 2022 AmLaw 100 based on the structure of the English football league system. At the top are 22 firms in the Premier League. Next is the Championship League, with 23 firms focused intently on getting promoted to Premier.  The third group is “Everybody Else,” which includes all the corporate law firms playing in lower-tier leagues.

Yet, as Jae Um pointed out during her visit to my Law Firms class, “it’s a mistake to extend the soccer metaphor to all 300 US/UK law firms that are doing significant amounts of corporate legal work.”  Jae explains that Premier and Championship League firms have some combination of practice areas (type, quality, depth), sector focus, and geographic footprint that enable them to attract price-insensitive work from the world’s largest and wealthiest clients. See Part II (332) (discussing market power of these firms).

Jae continues, “The 250+ firms outside the Premier and Championship leagues are playing a different sport.”
Continue Reading Learning about law firms, Part III: Innovation at “Everybody Else” firms (335)

The jobs of being a leader within any law firm should come labeled with a clear warning: This job could seriously change you and how you behave within your firm!

Over the past two decades, I have had the privilege, through my research, interviews, and hands-on consulting to peek behind the veil surrounding the challenges of becoming a NEW Firm Chair (or whatever title best signifies your firm’s leader).

From candid discussions about the stress involved in looking like you know what you are doing and the huge time demands imposed by your partner’s requests to feeling disorientated by the scale and scope of the mandate, many professionals quietly struggle with the various pressures that accompany their term in office.  In fact, I’ve discovered that the great majority of leaders, in any position of responsibility, are at their most vulnerable early in their tenure.
Continue Reading Agile leadership: navigating the double bind (334)

Source: “Legal Innovation After Reform: Evidence from Regulatory Change,” Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession (Sept 2022) at 18, Figure 1.

In the long run, however, it’s all about the data.  Initial findings from Utah and Arizona reform efforts.

[Editor’s note:  For today’s feature post, we are pleased to welcome Lucy Ricca and Graham Ambrose, two of the authors of the recently published Stanford Law report on the legal regulatory changes taking place in Utah and Arizona. Prior to becoming Director of Policy and Programs at the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, Lucy Ricca was the founding Executive Director of the Office of Legal Services Innovation (the regulatory office overseeing the Utah sandbox). In addition, she remains a member of the Office’s Executive Committee.  Graham Ambrose is currently a 2L at Stanford Law and a 2022-23 Civil Justice Fellow at the Rhode Center. wdh]

The year 2020, known to most for global pandemic shutdowns, also heralded leaps and bounds in legal regulatory reforms.  Utah and Arizona approved extraordinary changes to the regulation of legal practice. Both states loosened the bans on nonlawyer ownership of legal practices and the practice of law by nonlawyers.  Further, the Conference of Chief Justices issued a resolution urging states to consider regulatory innovations regarding the delivery of legal services, and the ABA approved a limited resolution encouraging consideration of regulatory innovation.  Even Justice Neil Gorsuch weighed in with his support for regulatory innovation.

This year, on the other hand, has been more challenging. 
Continue Reading The high highs and low lows of legal regulatory reform (333)

Stable, transparent, not very complicated, reasonably profitable, and often quite collegial. It also has flaws.

As noted in Part I (330) of this “learning about law firms” series, it’s taken nearly two decades in the trenches, including many years doing applied work with law firms, for a very confusing and counterintuitive insight to come into focus:  Most large firms are not “firms” in the sense of conventional business theory.  Instead, they are a confederation of individual partners building and running leveraged practices in various complementary and adjacent legal specialties.

In today’s essay (Part II), I’ll add a second counterintuitive insight:  For the most part, lawyers pay little or no financial price for organizing themselves as a confederation rather than a firm.  Even in the event of spectacular collapse, as was the case with Dewey, Brobeck, Heller, Howrey, Thelen, and many other large firms, see ALM Staff, “30 Years of Law Firm Collapses: An Annotated Timeline,” Law.com, Oct 29, 2019, there’s always a large cadre of competitor firms looking to give the partners (and their fee-generating practices) a new home.  In most cases, what provides financial security and certainty to an equity partner is seldom the quality of firm-level strategy, or the ability of firm leadership to execute, but instead the health and vitality of their own practice.

This is what distinguishes law firms from conventional businesses. Like Legos blocks, individual law practices can be removed from one law firm and snapped onto another. 
Continue Reading Learning about law firms, Part II: Why confederation is our default model (332)

Lawyers are coming around to the “why” for transformation, but struggle with the “how.” That’s change we can work with.

[Editor’s note:  To keep things fresh, Anusia is periodically handing her NewLaw Fundamentals baton to other provocative change agents in her network.  This month, we are pleased to welcome Anna Lozynski, who, as General Counsel of L’Oréal in Melbourne, Australia, led a large and successful transformation of the company’s legal function.  See “2019 In-House Leaders,” Australasian Lawyer.  Since January 2021, Anna has been in demand as a legal Innovation consultant, tech advisor, influencer & freelance GC. As evidenced by today’s essay, Anna is one of the legal industry’s most persuasive voices for change. wdh]

In 2015, when I pioneered the implementation of legal technology as a General Counsel and self-taught Legal Operations aficionado at the world’s leading cosmetics company, the prevailing questions in the legal industry being posed by skeptical legal lips were “Is Innovation hype?” and “Is it a lawyer’s role to innovate?”

Swipe forward the better part of a decade, in this post-pandemic world, we are observing a plethora of socioeconomic shifts. Many businesses face unprecedented change and guiding the organization and the legal department through this period of transformational change can feel like an oversized ask.
Continue Reading Out with the old, in with the … bold? (331)

“Some things are clearer from a distance.”

20 years ago, I didn’t know very much about law firms, though I was curious and knew law firms were important, at least to students attending law school.  Thus, why not dig into the primary vehicle for a successful and rewarding legal career?

That was my reasoning back in the fall of 2004 when I first taught a course called “The Law Firm as a Business Organization (B573).”  As a junior professor, it was an early win for my career. Foremost, the students gave it strong reviews, which enabled me to teach it again in 2006.  Second, it put me in direct contact with practicing lawyers, as I invited them to class to bring color to the assigned readings. Third, it launched some novel and original research that earned me tenure and opened doors to do challenging applied work in the legal innovation space, including Lawyer Metrics, the Institute for the Future of Law Practice (IFLP), and Legal Evolution.

Now, for the first time in 16 years, I am teaching the Law Firms course, prompting much reflection.  See 2022 Syllabus.  What’s changed more—the law firm market or my perspective?  It’s a close call.
Continue Reading Learning about law firms, 20 years in (330)

A checklist that, if done in order, actually works.

How do you ensure task completion when important projects need to get implemented, when partners seem to have agreed to participate and do their bit, but when you are not really certain that you are going to get committed follow through?

It’s been an old joke within law firms that if a partner has a deadline for producing some task by this coming Friday, when are they most likely to start on it?  And you know the punchline.

Whether it’s in a practice or industry group setting, around the table with the members of your Strategic Planning Committee, or wherever you happened to be working with your fellow colleagues, this seems to be one of the most common challenges and greatest frustrations that I hear about from leaders at every level within firms.  And perhaps worse, the most common excuse seems to be, “I had a client emergency arise.”  And of course, a client excuse trumps everything!
Continue Reading Ensuring follow-through on partner promises (329)