Legal Evolution PBC

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Legal Evolution

Lawyers and teamwork, Part II: Training (190)

By Bill Henderson

August 9, 2020

“A lot of companies think their employees are so smart they require no training.” — Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things (2014) at 105. This two-part series is focused on a persistent feature of the legal services market: Clients are underwhelmed with lawyers’ ability to work together as a team. See Post 188 (quoting publisher of Legal 500). In Part I (188), which was focused on lawyer motivation, I argued that…

Legal Evolution

How to navigate “parochial and self-interested concerns” (189)

By Bill Henderson

August 6, 2020

The Jim Sandman approach shows the most promise. “The profession has a responsibility to assure that its regulations are conceived in the public interest and not in furtherance of parochial or self-interested concerns of the bar.” This above sentence comes from ¶12 of the Preamble of the Rules of Professional Conduct. As states increasingly take up regulatory reform, state Supreme Court justices and administrators inevitably encounter significant resistance from members of the bar. What’s…

Legal Evolution

Lawyers and teamwork, Part I: Motivation (188)

By Bill Henderson

August 2, 2020

“There are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training.” — Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things (2014) at 110. Several years ago, I had the good fortune of having dinner with David Burgess, the Publishing Director of The Legal 500, a global research company that compiles detailed rankings of law firms based on jurisdiction and practice area.…

Legal Evolution

Overview of states considering regulatory changes (187)

By Bill Henderson

July 30, 2020

Professionalism is plotting a major comeback. With each passing week, it’s becoming clearer that many state bars and supreme courts are getting serious about regulatory reform. One of the many fruits in this effort is the above presentation, which I encourage readers to review and download. The presentation was prepared by Alice Mine and Brian Oten, senior staffers of the North Carolina State Bar, as part of their foundational work with the NCSB…

Legal Evolution

2019 IFLP Alum Trezell Ragas (186)

By Mary Henderson

July 29, 2020

[Editor’s note: The IFLP archives include several student profiles that document the impact of the program on students’ lives. With the students’ permission, the IFLP leadership team wanted to share these with a broader audience. Regarding Trezell Ragas, after three weeks at the IFLP Boot Camp at Colorado Law in the spring of 2019, she went on to a 7-month field placement in the Cummins legal department followed by a summer split between PNC legal…

Legal Evolution

Hourly billing and the “chit chat” factor (185)

By Tom Sharbaugh

July 28, 2020

A timely reminder on the value of time, from my carpenter. Large firm lawyers spend a lot of time debating the pros and cons of so-called “alternative fee arrangements,” but hourly billing is still their sweet spot. It is much nicer to focus on the legal work than to worry about being efficient or pursuing only the most likely winning arguments. Although I have long been an advocate for fixed fees, I recently had a…

Legal Evolution

We’ve got a bad case of Baumol’s cost disease (184)

By Jordan Couch

July 26, 2020

Fortunately, there are treatments. If you work in the legal industry, the above graph from Thomson Reuters’ 2020 Report on the State of the Legal Market should terrify you. What it shows is an industry steadily sliding towards obsolescence, not because the need for legal services is declining but because hiring a lawyer is becoming more expensive, thus making it less affordable to those paying the bill. This affliction, which we also see in the…

Legal Evolution

2018 IFLP Alum Elmer Thoreson (183)

By Mary Henderson

July 23, 2020

[Editor’s note: The IFLP archives include several student profiles that document the impact of the program on students’ lives. With the students’ permission, the IFLP leadership team wanted to share these with a broader audience. Regarding Elmer Thoreson, after three weeks at the IFLP Boot Camp at Northwestern Law in the spring of 2018, he went on to a 7-month field placement at Chapman and Cutler as part of their Practice Innovations team. The cutting-edge…

Legal Evolution

Rocks on the back of first-generation college grads attending law school (182)

By Bill Henderson

July 21, 2020

It’s also compounding racial inequality. The story in ten charts. My fundraising work for the Institute for the Future of Law Practice has required me to delve into the equities of modern legal education, particularly around the debt loads and employment prospects of historically underrepresented groups. This is because virtually all potential benefactors want diversity and inclusion baked into anything they fund. What I’ve discovered has truly shocked my conscience. The failure is both large…

Legal Evolution

What can we learn from medical field’s experience with competency-based education? (181)

By Neil Hamilton

July 19, 2020

Plenty. It’s our opportunity to make a quantum leap forward. Legal Evolution readers are likely familiar with law firm competency models that define the skills and capacities of their lawyers, including the stages of development. In response to changes in the accreditation requirements, law schools have been slowly moving toward what is called Competency-Based Legal Education (CBLE). See, e.g., Michele R. Pistone, “Competency-based legal education,” Christiansen Institute, Mar. 29, 2016. CBLE is an…

Legal Evolution PBC

Legal Evolution PBC Blogs

Blog Authors

Lawyers and teamwork, Part II: Training (190)

How to navigate “parochial and self-interested concerns” (189)

Lawyers and teamwork, Part I: Motivation (188)

Overview of states considering regulatory changes (187)

2019 IFLP Alum Trezell Ragas (186)

Hourly billing and the “chit chat” factor (185)

We’ve got a bad case of Baumol’s cost disease (184)

2018 IFLP Alum Elmer Thoreson (183)

Rocks on the back of first-generation college grads attending law school (182)

What can we learn from medical field’s experience with competency-based education? (181)

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