Recommendations for corporate legal buyers and providers in the digital age

In making recommendations for corporate legal buyers and providers in the digital age, Mark starts with the proposition that the law is struggling to keep pace with the speed of business as well as to satisfy clients. One key reason is that there are too many lawyers involved in legal delivery and too few logistics, supply chain, and management experts, technologists, project managers, data analysts, and other professionals/paraprofessionals. Another is that law conflates acquiescence to client demand with client-centricity. That’s changing but it will take time, cultural evolution, and activism by legal buyers.
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Posted by on Oct 11, 2018 in Clients | 1 comment

Relationships 3.0: The “Idea Relationship” era

In Relationships 3.0: The “Idea Relationship” Era Mike O’Horo argues the “sales funnel” has been replaced by the “buyer journey,” a conversation that is increasingly on the buyer’s terms.

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Posted by on Sep 12, 2018 in Clients, Innovation | 0 comments

What’s on clients’ minds

After a break, Aric Press is back in Dialogue with What’s on clients’ minds. My partners and I have spent the last three years talking to hundreds of law firm clients. And we have good news and bad news to report.

Most clients like and appreciate the work they get from their outside firms, but only a minority told us that they were “very satisfied” by their outside lawyers. We heard heartwarming praise—“They were in the foxhole with me”—and the familiar “too” complaints: too expensive, too inefficient, too slow to change.

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Posted by on Jun 20, 2018 in Clients, Legal services ecosystem | 2 comments

Do clients prefer lawyers who are hedgehogs or foxes?

Ken Grady leads today with his intriguingly titled post: Do clients prefer lawyers who are hedgehogs or foxes? Refresh your memory about Archilochus, the Greek lyric poet (c. 680-c. 645 BC), famous for his poetry fragment: “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing” – Πόλλ᾽ οἶδ᾽ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἕν μέγα – and immerse yourself in addressing this profound question.

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Posted by on May 29, 2018 in Clients, Law departments | 2 comments

Insights from the latest buying legal services survey

Written by Dr. Silvia Hodges Silverstein – Executive Director of the Buying Legal Council – today’s post is based on key insights from the latest buying legal services survey [1]. In the spirit of Jeff Carr’s recent letter reproduced on Dialogue to outside counsel on delivering value with integrity, Silvia uses two emails, one from a CFO to the Legal Department, and the other from the CMO of a major law firm on the panel to the Head of the Corporate Practice.

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Posted by on May 10, 2018 in Clients, Law departments | 0 comments

Small firms: Take your size and own it

At the end of March, George Beaton posted an article in his Remaking Law Firms blog entitled ‘Mid-market law firm brouhaha’ in which he challenges the automatic attribution of law firm woes outside the BigLaw firmament. George references my previous article on ‘The Strength of Small Law Firms’ and advocates for a move away from the “small equals struggling” narrative. “To my knowledge”, he says, “there isn’t a skerrick of systematic evidence that all/most clients of these mid-market firms are saying “It’s desirable that your services are delivered by you in a firm with a bigger/international footprint/greater scale/wider range of services”.

Beaton argues that the “small-equals-struggling” narrative attributes certain challenges to the mid-market, which are, in fact, challenges faced by all law firms. In this scenario, he argues, it’s not the size of the firm that matters but the way it delivers its services.

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Posted by on May 8, 2018 in Clients, Small law firms | 1 comment