Recently, I was asked to repost a prior post in which I shared my insights as a career-long litigation.  Here it is, with a couple of changes. Spend a minute and ask yourself why you don’t outsource problem solving for your own problems.  Have you ever thought about going up to a random stranger and asking her to solve a dispute you are having with another person?  Would you feel better about crowd-sourcing the solution, asking, say, 12 people to come to a consensus about how to solve your personal dispute? Think about these questions from the standpoint of a General Counsel.&nb ..read more

I recently read about a General Counsel breathing a sigh of relief regarding his ability to navigate the new economic reality by securing 25% discounts on hourly rates from his outside counsel. That sounds good, but there are two things that should temper that sigh of relief.  First, it is not sustainable.  At some point, the discounts will revert back, not just to what the rates where, but what they have been raised to during the discount period. But more importantly, a 25% discount on hourly rates does not translate into a 25% reduction in fees.  The data supporting this are b ..read more

This is personal. It is has nothing to do with law, and nothing to do with customer experience. It has to do with my heart.  But mostly, it has to do with my soul. I write to assemble thoughts, to test the coherence of my thinking–an internal check–and to invite others to comment, dispute, debate, laugh at me, or teach me something I need to learn.  With that as backdrop, let me get to the point. The death of George Floyd is tragedy. I hope no one disagrees.  His death, and how it was so callously caused, reveals what I believe is a systemic problem in police practices, not just ..read more

We have to change the way we think about change. To get to the Next Normal and succeed in that new era, we are going to have to change. A lot. As a profession, we are, to be honest, not very good at change. We have to become better. How we do so is the question I want to address. But first, it is important to create some context. Change is everywhere, every day, all around us. It happens, sometimes despite our best intentions. Yet despite its prevalence, our thinking about change is rather unnuanced. We present it as binary, yes-no, black-white. We tend to see it as only a matter of choice.&nb ..read more

Guest post by Philip Harris Perhaps by Memorial Day, college presidents and their leadership teams will face what will likely be the most important decision of their collective tenures: when to open the dormitories and classrooms on their campuses following the COVID-19 crisis.  Even though we are bombarded with new information each day, it is safe to predict that these decisions will be made with at best imperfect information.  And even with massive testing and an effective treatment, COVID-19 will continue to present a thr ..read more

Guest post, by Philip Harris The current environment is spawning conversations about reducing costs as a means of responding to the loss of revenue that many businesses are experiencing. Many businesses already have laid off and furloughed employees and cut their compensation. No one seems to know how long this will last. The pressure to reduce costs now and in the near term will affect all businesses and institutions in this country, whether they are for profit or non profit. And that includes higher education. Already, experts in higher education are predicting that there will be significant ..read more

Law departments are not immune from the exceptionalism that pervades much of the legal industry. Lawyers, generally, think they are special. See here and here. And the problem is worse as lawyers get both older and more successful. I was fortunate to early on have an experience that vividly proved to me that despite being a lawyer, I was not special.  I had prepared really hard for a deposition. It was a complicated chemical exposure case, and the medicine was daunting, but I had mastered it.  Because I was a lawyer and that’s what I did, right?  Well, I got to the deposition and another lawye ..read more

I was born in Detroit and grew up in the heyday of the auto industry. So, when I first heard Ron Baker speak about Lee Iacocca, I listened with great interest. Iacocca was a Detroit icon, first for his trailblazing work for Ford and later for saving Chrysler. Ron set the stage: Chevrolet had created the Corvette. It was very expensive, relatively, but it was the first real sports car.  Ford needed to challenge it. Iacocca came up with the idea of the Ford Mustang. Baker picks up the story in The Firm of The Future:  When Lee Iacocca developed the Ford Mustang, he reversed the order of the usua ..read more

Every day, businesses prioritize. They invest in one thing, not another. They fix one problem, but defer fixing another. The build one facility, but not another. They pursue one strategy to the exclusion of others. These decisions are almost always made based on some form of return-on-investment or cost-benefit analysis.  ROI is coin-of-the-realm for operating a business. Except in law.  At least until now. Most law departments now operate in a world where they must budget. But the sophistication of the budgeting process varies considerably.  But even the most sophisticated tend to look at cas ..read more

From 2010 until 2016, I was a columnist for the online ABA Journal’s The New Normal column.  I was invited to start the column as a result of the creation of Valorem Law Group in 2008.  We started a law firm just before the Great Recession and because of the novel model and approach, we thrived because of the Recession.  We pioneered and shaped the significant changes that were to become an eventuality as the New Normal. The term stuck. The New Normal is now over. I write this post from my home office, joining workers from across the country, from many industries, who are sheltering in place ..read more