Category: Uncategorized

Law and technology 1

The first of two interesting facts in the July copy of Wired.

From John Bringardner, Winning the lawsuit, in which he notes that ‘in the US a pretrial discovery request today can generate nearly 10,000 times more paper than 10 years ago’,

So how has this evidentiary deluge changed the practice of law? Consider that five years ago, newly minted corporate litigators spent much of their time digging through warehouses full of paper documents. Today they’re back at their desks, sorting through PDFs, emails, and memos on their double monitors – aided by semantic search technologies that scan for key-words and phrases. In another five years, don’t be surprised to find juries chuckling over a plaintiff’s incriminating IMs, voice messages, video conferences, and Twitters.

I see it coming sooner.

What does revamp mean?

Lucy Kellaway’s Monday column in the FT always brightens up the start of the week. This week she ended with Words to the wise, ‘the sinister things that people say to each other in offices – the little phrases that look perfectly innocent but are actually toxic’.

I liked in particular

“We haven’t made any final decision about this.” This means we have made a final decision and you aren’t going to like it. An alternative, even more sinister variation is “We want to consult you about some possible changes . . . “

Given the reports about the travails of Bevan Brittan in both Thelawyer.com and Legalweek.com, one wonders which of the two phrases was used when the men in grey suits walked in to Stuart Whitfield’s office last week?

BlackBerry as fig leaf?

A quote from a Links partner, reported in Linklaters says: take a BlackBerry break in Thelawyer.com,

I have to admit, though, I do feel a little naked without my BlackBerry. It’s like when you leave the house without your watch on.

Not sure how worried I should be. I don’t have a BlackBerry (as those of you who read this blog will know), but I am now going to have to own up to the fact that I don’t wear a watch either. I only feel naked when I leave the house without my trousers on.

Delivering value

If Nick Jarrett-Kerr is right that the current downturn in work has removed the last excuse for partners avoiding to engage in valuable non-chargeable work (see his article in Kerma Partners Quarterly 2/08 and my earlier post Spending time wisely), then high on our list of things to look at is how to resolve the problem of a business model based primarily on selling time.

Although his post The new brand landscape for law firms in Law 21 is primarily aimed at law firm rebranding rights and wrongs, and is very well worth reading for that, Jordan Furlong also touches on billing and branding,

Today, brand opportunities are opening up everywhere — not primarily in new industries or practice areas, although there are a few of those, but in how a firm delivers value to its clients. Service delivery, billing parameters, value definition, client communications, risk sharing — these and many other key elements of customer relationships, which have lain dormant and ignored for years, are coming to sudden life.

Take the oldest complaint in the book — the billable hour system — as an example. Clients have moaned for decades about how the billable hour removes the burdens of accountability and risk from the lawyer (though clients share some of the blame for not pushing harder), and conventional wisdom called the billable hour unkillable.

But now there are firms that have successfully staked out this ground and branded themselves as having abandoned the billable hour altogether.