“It’s like déjà vu all over again…The future ain’t what it used to be.” Yogi Berra
2021. A year that started with such hope. Vaccines had arrived. Hope and joy as it looked like we might come out of Covid darkness and resume life as we knew it. In-person conferences and meetings slowly returning. There were serious conversations about returning to work and the benefits.
Surveys, surveys, surveys. We seem to be awash these days in surveys. It’s hard to keep track of them all, much less vouch for their validation.
But the results from a recent one from Law360 Pulse caught my eye. Law360 is generally pretty reliable because of the number of subscribers and customers to which it has access and the methodology it typically uses.
Continue Reading Want to Measure a Law Firm’s Reputation? Law360 Gives It a Shot
As commentators, we often focus on those who can’t afford lawyers and are thus deprived in a tangible way to access to justice. We often focus on the very sophisticated purchasers of legal services. Large companies, for example, with full in-house legal departments. We often don’t talk about those in the middle: individuals and small businesses who, from time to time, need and must purchase legal services.
These individuals and businesses can afford some level of legal assistance. But they lack the sophistication, knowledge, and financial resources of more significant purchasers. I call this group the Middle. It should come as no surprise that the perceptions of those in the Middle of lawyers and the legal service they get and pay for are pretty poor.
You’re gonna have to serve somebody.
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Bob Dylan: Gotta Serve Somebody
State Bar Associations need to decide who they serve and then develop regulations that actually serve that group. Too frequently, Bar Association try to serve their lawyer members and give lip service to the public interest in access to justice.
I learned a new term this week courtesy of Leo LaPorte, aka the TechGuy. LaPorte hosts weekly radio shows on Saturdays and Sundays and then pushes the shows out to his podcasts. I like to listen to his shows since they are full of tech news and developments unfiltered through the lens of legal tech.
Continue Reading State Bar Associations and Regulatory Capture: Who Do You Serve?
It’s Thanksgiving again. A time to stuff ourselves, watch some serious football (well, some football anyway), and be thankful. It got me thinking: what do I, as a blogger on legal technology and innovation, have to be thankful for this year (beyond, of course, my tech toys lol).
So, here are my top 10 things I’m thankful for this year:
Continue Reading 10 Things This Legal Tech Blogger Is Thankful For
Despite a lot of talk, law firms continue to make little progress down on the diversity path. Law firms set billing rates of ethnically and gender diverse lawyers, particularly at more experienced levels, lower than white males.
Director of Strategic Counseling of LexisNexis’ CounselLink had a problem. She was tasked with giving a webinar on benchmarks for diversity and equality in law firms and was looking for a new way to go at the issue.
Satkunas had an idea. She reasoned that while pundits often talk people numbers: how many women, how many diverse lawyers, how many this, how many that. No one looked hard at the money. Remember the adage: “follow the money”? Satkunas had the bright idea to follow the money: analyze the billing rates lawyer charge their clients. She reasoned that billing rates are the critical factor in driving lawyer compensation (and power in law firms). As she puts it, billing rates are “a proxy for a lawyer’s value to the firm.” And she had a pool of data to look at how the rates of diverse lawyers and women compare to those of white males.
Exterro, a provider of Legal GRC software for in-house legal teams, recently named legal discovery expert and technologist Jenny Hamilton as General Counsel. It’s an interesting hire since Hamilton was the former head of the e-discovery team at John Deere (“nothing runs like a Deere”), a Fortune 100 company. John Deere is a longtime customer of Exterro.
It’s interesting since Hamilton spent a lot of time evaluating competing e-discovery products in her role at John Deere. She ultimately became familiar with and selected Exterro’s technology suite as its chief e-discovery tool. So she brings a unique familiarity and perspective as a customer of Exterro and is an e-discovery process expert. I was able to chat recently with Hamilton about her new position, the discovery market, and market trends in general.
Continue Reading Exterro Names New General Counsel With Customer Focus
I used to have a partner who was fond of saying a lawyer spends half their life worrying about having too much to do. And the other half worrying about not having enough.
If true, then most lawyers are in the first half right now: more and more demand for legal work and fewer and fewer people around to help get it done. (For a good summary of the situation and the links some firms will go to to retain lawyers to do the work, see this excellent article by Lizzie McLellan.)
One possible result of this mismatch is a technology revolution among lawyers. It’s no secret that for years, lawyers have largely resisted technology. Particularly technology that would reduce the time spent on billable matters. Less time spent on billable matters, less revenue.
While we may not yet know the long-term viability of remote work in legal, a new MyCase Survey confirms that remote work has accelerated legal’s use of the cloud. And remote work tools and the use of the cloud have led legal professionals to the greater use of technology and an appreciation for what it can do.
At its first-ever customer conference yesterday, the practice management company MyCase announced the results of its inaugural Survey. The Survey is entitled MyCase 2021 Legal Industry Report: Lessons Learned from the Pandemic. The goal of the Survey was to look at how the pandemic has affected law firms and their operations. More importantly, the Survey shows how the pandemic and remote work has affected their use of and comfort with technology and change.
Continue Reading Remote Work & Cloud Computing: Driving Lawyers to Like Tech
Law 360 on Monday of this week announced the results of its inaugural Social Impact Study of law firms. The study was designed to rank firms based on socially responsible business practices. In particular, the study attempted to evaluate firms across four pillars: racial and ethnic diversity, gender equality, employee engagement, and pro bono service. Law 360 only released the scores of those firms which scored in the top 100.
Continue Reading Law360 Announces Results of First Social Impact Law Firm Study
Kris Satkunas,