Dispatches from a legal profession on the brink
Filed under: New Lawyers
The American legal profession is on the verge of a full-blown jobs crisis. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that over the course of this decade, 440,000 new law graduates will be competing for 212,000 jobs, a 48% employment level. The BLS’s projection does assume law school graduation rates will remain steady during that time,… Read more »
Filed under: Clients, Competition
Here are six observations about the legal marketplace for you to consider, each supported by a news report filed just in the last few days. 1. Fewer people want to be lawyers. Number of law school applicants continues to slide: “[US law school] applications submitted are down 13.6%…. That translates to about 66,696 applicants and… Read more »
Filed under: Law21
It’s been a few months since I last posted one of these roundups, so I thought I’d pull one together today. Here’s a series of articles I’ve written elsewhere or interviews I’ve given to various print and online periodicals. As usual, I’ve been busiest at Stem Legal‘s “Law Firm Web Strategy” blog, but I’ve also… Read more »
Filed under: Innovation, Purpose, Uncategorized
What if your law firm were legally prohibited from making too much money? What if there were a fixed profit ceiling for equity partners, and any profit exceeding that amount had to be distributed to others? What if your firm explicitly placed social goals ahead of revenue goals — what would change about your firm’s… Read more »
Many lawyers, gnawed by doubt, regularly ask themselves, “What should I charge?” It’s the question with a million right answers — which is to say, with no right answer at all. Whatever number you finally settle on, however, is less important than the process by which you arrived at it. As far as I can… Read more »
Filed under: Big Firms, Solo & Small Firm
Perhaps most importantly, unbundling has the immensely positive effect of removing from lawyers our self-imposed burden of omnipotence. Our intense dislike of risk and our fervent striving for control has left us vulnerable to taking on more responsibility for our clients’ outcomes than we often should. The modern view of clients — one they share… Read more »
Filed under: Governance
And so the floodgates have opened, and here come the “non-lawyers” surging into the law firm ownership stream. The Legal Services Act‘s long-awaited authorization of Alternative Business Structures in the UK took effect in January. Within the first two weeks of February, here’s what followed (all transactions unofficial until approved by the Solicitors Regulation Authority,… Read more »
Filed under: Clients
The joke goes like this: “The optimist says the glass is half-full. The pessimist says it’s half-empty. The engineer says it’s twice the required capacity.” So what does the lawyer say when looking at the glass? In many cases, it’s: “Why hasn’t anyone refilled my drink yet?” I speak to more lawyers and legal professionals… Read more »
Filed under: Big Firms, Innovation, Outsourcing
Back in my university days, I remember walking past the Graduate Students Office and seeing a photocopied diagram taped to the door. It was called “The Doctoral Candidate Flowchart,” and it provided a series of turns and directions for graduates struggling to get their thesis finally completed. My favourite entry on the flowchart was in… Read more »
Filed under: Big Firms, Competition, Globalization, Innovation
So there goes 2011, and from a legal marketplace perspective, you could probably call it the year of hanging on. Large law firms hung on in the face of flat-lined or diminishing revenues, in no small part through the wonders of de-equitization. Small law firms hung on despite an expanding sea of legal service providers… Read more »
