CLOC

Subscribe to CLOC via RSS

Good question.  I have a few thoughts.

In recent travels, I came across a group of women who appeared Amish in dress, talking and laughing with one another, and I experienced a surprising emotion—I was jealous.

For someone who runs towards the new, always testing the capability, seeing if it improves life for myself and others, and sharing it broadly if the answer is yes, the experience of jealousy when met with a conservative crew steeped in tradition (whether fair or not, some would say “frozen in time”) was puzzling.

After some self-investigation and reflection, I realized that I was envious of their sense of community. There is safety in numbers, there is also comfort in numbers. Comfort in community.
Continue Reading Q: NewLaw is hard. Why should I stay? (344)

“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)

Photo by Jeremy AAsum on Unsplash

If blazing a new path is your only option, it’s also your best option. Make the most of it.

[Editor’s note:  If readers pick up a copy of Richard Susskind’s Tomorrow’s Lawyers (2nd ed. 2017) and flip to page 135, they’ll see a table captioned “New jobs for lawyers.” This table is reproduced below.  Richard writes, “these are the jobs that flow quite clearly from the arguments and claims of this book.” 
Continue Reading One student’s career journey into legal tech (196)

Congrats to the KO law firm, an IFLP employer, for winning 2020 CLOC Legal Innovations in Operations Award.

When you’re a small growth company focused on product development, sales, and customer service, you don’t have a lot of time or interest in talking to expensive lawyers. That said, you likely do have a strong interest…

Lessons from the dot com implosion and the financial meltdown.

Henry Kissinger once observed that while history does not repeat itself it often offers useful lessons regarding the future.  With this in mind, I thought might be useful to see what lessons the last two periods of economic adversity – the dot com implosion and…

Big corporations are growing faster than the rest of the economy. It is not hard to figure out where this is going. Lawyer acceptance is different story.

Many lawyers and law firms claim to serve the middle market, often describing how they deal directly with owners and executives rather than in-house counsel. Although these clients…