The Artificial Lawyer is reporting on a costly disconnect between U.S. law firms and their clients’ legal departments: The 2019 Annual Law Firm Leader Survey on Outside Counsel Guidelines shows that in the majority of cases, attorneys pay little to no attention to billing guidelines that have been established by their clients until it is
Flexibility a Key to Employee Satisfaction – Even in Law Firms
Writing in Inc., leadership specialist Marcel Schwantes predicts that traditional companies that want to hire and retain “the best” will need to adopt a principle set out by Microsoft founder Bill Gates several years ago: they will need to get more flexible.
As we discussed in a previous post, many valuable employees are
EY Expands Its Reach Even Further into the Legal Services Arena
In early April, Ernst & Young (EY) announced that it had acquired the legal outsourcing service provider Pangea3 from Thomson Reuters, increasing the intensity of the accounting giant’s assault on the legal services industry. Robert Ambrogi at Above the Law
Changes to State Bar Rules Could Mean Trouble For Big Law
Writing in Bloomberg Law, Sam Skolnik and Amanda Iacone report that recent initiatives to lower the costs of legal services in at least three western states may inadvertently make it easier for Big Four accounting firms to enter the U.S. legal marketplace. This could, in turn, present a major threat to Big Law.
The proposed
Big Four Continues Advance into Legal Space with World-Wide AI Legal Doc Review System
The Artificial Lawyer reports on another significant move by a Big Four accounting firm into legal territory with EY Law‘s installation of an AI document review system at its offices around the world.
A February 9, 2019 post in The Artificial Lawyer states that “EY Law, which has over 2,000 lawyers across 81 jurisdictions,
QNBT: Extracting Real Value from Non-Billable Time
“Your billable time is your income; your non-billable time is your future.” – David Maister
Non-billable time gets little respect*
Many perceive non-billable time as something that can be conjured at will. Taking someone to dinner who may or may not be a qualified client prospect can be recorded as business development. Furthermore, that two-hour
The Big Four and The Legal Industry: Who Should Be Afraid?
A recent instalment of the podcast series LegalSpeak addresses the question of whether or not recent forays into the legal arena by the accounting industry’s Big Four actually comprise a significant threat to U.S. law firms.
Nicholas Bruch, principal analyst at ALM Legal Intelligence, who has been looking into this issue deeply for at least
Do or Die: Outside Law-Firm Rosters Shrink as Client Spending Grows
Lest any of us get too comfortable in our swivel chairs, a new report from Michael B. Rynowecer, president of the BTI Consulting Group, indicates that in 2018 – despite spending more on outside legal counsel than ever before – clients are using fewer outside firms than ever.
In a September issue of The
Competition Likely Cause of Unprecedented Merger Frenzy
U.S. law-firm mergers to the end of the third quarter of 2018 reached levels unseen in the first three quarters of any year for more than a decade, according to an article published last week at law.com. The number of mergers recorded by Fairfax Associates between January 1 and the end of September of
U.S. Law Firms Mark Best First-Half Revenue Growth in Ten Years
Citi Private Bank reports in The American Lawyer that the first half of 2018 was better financially, in particular for small- and large-sized law firms, than was the first half of 2017. In fact, overall revenue growth across the industry in the U.S. contributed to the strongest first half since 2007.
Citi Private Bank’s Law