Ron Friedmann

Connect: https://www.lexblog.com/author/ron-friedmann/feed/
Firm/Organization: Beaton Research & Consulting, Intapp, Prism Legal, Ron Friedmann
Blogs: Dialogue, Horizons, Prism Legal, Strategic Legal Technology Blog

Latest Articles

I recently tried a new approach to managing email better. It did not work for me. I share my experience, however, to make the point the everyone should periodically try to improve their personal productivity. And accept that not all tries work. (I periodically blog about my experiences doing this.) At the recommendation of my friend Patrick DiDomenico, I decided to try email client Superhuman, whose tagline is “The Fastest Email Experience Ever…
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Many discussions of legal market evolution or revolution (AKA disruption) miss a key element: our perception of change. This hit home last week in a fabulous Twitter dialog that I had with Jason Barnwell, Assistant General Counsel, Legal Business, Operations, and Strategy at Microsoft. In response to one of my Tweets, Jason hand-drew a diagram that uses simple math and a graph to explain how our perception of change can differ. (Our Twitter dialogue…
Thomson Reuters today released its annual law firm report, 2020 Report on the State of the Legal Market, prepared with Georgetown University Law Center, suggesting law firms disrupted. I agree in part with its conclusions but disagree that large law firms are at a unique turning point or face disruption. I summarize key points from the report, then explain my views. Report Highlights re Law Firms Disrupted In the past year or so,…
Clickbait titles don’t appeal to me but my original idea for a title here – “Incremental Change in 2020” – just sounded too lame. Unlike many other commentators, I shy away from bold predictions of big changes coming soon. I’ve worked for three decades in the corporate legal market and have witnessed many incremental changes but few dramatic ones. Yet Big Law today does look rather different than it did when I started in the…
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The large law firm service delivery model continues to evolve according to the just released Citi 2020 Client Advisory, prepared with Hildebrandt Consulting (PDF). I summarize key findings here on the service delivery model and comment on them. Citi writes “we expect that firms will continue to develop more innovative service delivery models… With the growing competition from Big Four accounting firms and alternative lower cost service providers, we expect that law firms…
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I highlight here findings from the 2019 Altman Weil CLO Survey on ALSP (alternative legal service providers), legal operations professionals, and knowledge management. See also my post on the 2018 survey, where I focused on these topics as well. The Chief Legal Officer Survey is one of the better legal market surveys. Altman Weil has run it since 2010, asking many of the same questions year to year, which provides better than usual longitudinal…
Law firms can win more cases and gain new business with proper use of data analytics. We now live in the age of data analytics so expect to keep hearing about this topic. I explain here what data analytics is, how its age arrived, and what that means for the legal market. [A version of this post originally appeared at Intapp’s blog, titled Drive better business decisions through data analytics. What is data analytics?…
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We’d like to welcome Ron Friedmann, Chief Knowledge & Information Officer at LAC Group. Ron lends his perspective here on the ripe opportunity that data analytics presents for law firms that are looking to grow their business and drive profitability. We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Ron to talk about the impact data is having on the legal sector, which you can explore in this video. His commentary below…
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A couple of months ago I posted Visual Intelligence (Part 1). I explained that in my new job as of January 2019 at LAC Group, I spend more time thinking about how to present visually the results of our competitive intelligence and business research services. And that I have focused on visual displays since my first job after college.  To get ideas for different approaches, I turned to limited crowdsourcing. I moderated a…
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My Tweet (featured below) gave rise to multiple related and robust conversations, especially about the legal talent that BigLaw (large law firms) hire versus the talent that the Big 4 hire. And I suspect that alternative legal service providers align with the Big 4 for purposes of this talent conversation. The conversations highlighted for me the question of whether the Big 4 can achieve substantially different results, costs, or outcomes by hiring the same legal…