There are many within the legal community who scoff at Twitter saying that “it’s as a useless piece of fluff”. However for those interested in learning about legal innovation and connecting with legal innovators around the globe, Twitter is indispensible. Everything that is happening globally in terms of legal transformation is shared on Twitter. Today I connected with another innovative law firm from the UK – gunnercooke.

Former general counsel Sarah Goulbourne got together over coffee with corporate lawyer Darryl Cooke in mid-2010 to chat about how a different legal model would have huge competitive advantage over existing . . . [more]

With today’s release of The Future of Legal Services in Canada: Trends and Issues, the consultation phase of the CBA’s Legal Futures Initiative begins.

Trends and Issues puts data and insight from original research commissioned by the CBA into a single document meant to provide an overview of major challenges facing the profession. The report – and the questions it raises – form a starting point for discussions and further consultations with stakeholders in the legal services industry.

We’ve been showing you bits of those papers here, and on the interim Futures website, for the last seven weeks. If . . . [more]

Save the cheerleader, save the world. That was the tagline for the popular first season of the TV show Heroes several years ago – the cheerleader was the key to the mystery.

In terms of the legal industry, expert Richard Susskind suggests that kind of causal relationship might be stated as “change the incentives, change the behaviour” – incentives are the key to creating a profession that can flourish into the next decade and beyond.

In a paper prepared for the CBA’s Legal Futures Initiative, Susskind notes six key issues facing the legal industry, many of them also noted by . . . [more]

Is it the future if it’s already here?

The Canadian Bar Association launched its Futures initiative with a view to helping legal practitioners best position themselves to face the challenges ahead, but it also took a look at the legal service providers who have already taken the plunge.

The Futures research has shown that there is no lack of ideas about how to face the future of the legal system, but none of them present a clear, obvious option. Any of them, or any combination of them, could work. Or maybe there’s another silver bullet out there, one creative solution . . . [more]

They say it takes a community to raise a child – to watch out for it, to teach and shape him or her, and to give wise counsel.

Could it be that a community is also what it takes to put the legal profession in a position to flourish?

Slaw.ca founder Simon Fodden, in a background paper prepared for the CBA Legal Futures Initiative, suggests that the lack of a communal sensibility could be one of the reasons the profession is such a slow-turning ship.

That lack is both top-down and bottom-up. Inertia is found at the top in the . . . [more]

Western Union. IBM. Kodak. All are examples of well-established, successful businesses that failed to seize perfect opportunities to evolve to meet changing market conditions and paid the price. How much bigger would Western Union have been if it had bought the patent for the telephone when Alexander Graham Bell offered it? IBM’s not a small fish, but think of where it might have gone if its business modelling hadn’t suggested that carbon paper was a better bet than xerography. As for Kodak, the firm focused on film instead of the digital camera – on which it held the first patent. . . . [more]

Globalization. Technology. Economy. Unbundling. Alternative billing. Offshoring.

A CBA-commissioned survey of the state of the research into the future of the legal profession suggests that while these words come up again and again in the thousands of pages of text devoted to the subject, that is where it ends. While there is a near-consensus on the forces driving change, and how law firms might adapt to the new normal this change will bring, there are few recipes showing how best to implement the ideas, and fewer cases still of them actually being implemented.

The American Bar Association held its first . . . [more]

We began our respective legal practices within a year after finishing our articles; we both wanted to be able to express our personal ethics and practice law our way. We had to develop new skills, ranging from file organization to client management, grapple with unforeseen stressors, and learn to congratulate ourselves for victories big and small. Our biggest surprise was that neither law school nor former employers had ever taught us the things we needed most to run our business. So to that end, and in honour of Law Student Week at slaw, here are ten facts you may also . . . [more]

We in Canada have little understanding of the legal services industry in Australia, whether this is due to geography or wilful blindness is unclear. But given our common legal heritage and commonwealth brotherhood (whenever I’m in Asia, Canadians seem to bond easiest with Aussies – in the pubs at least) we should pay much more attention to the land down under. Especially since it’s thinking on legal services delivery is years ahead of our own.

So I count myself fortunate to be able to grow my contacts in Australia.

Aussie management/legal consultant George Beaton has put me onto a post . . . [more]

In the large business arena, we are starting to see some interesting developments that impact the way law firms are selected for work – which in turn is starting to impact the role of rain-makers in firms.

In larger companies, procurement teams are becoming more active and influential in the legal field. General Counsel are being pushed harder to do more with less and C-suite executives are becoming less convinced that selecting law firms is different from selecting property managers or other suppliers.

Procurement brings a more disciplined and rigorous approach to selecting firms that focuses on costs, but also . . . [more]

Another Google product which may soon disappear is Google Alerts. Alerts are absolutely essential to keep track of a brand or an issue online, especially for crisis communication and reputation management. It’s important for lawyers dealing with these issues to identify web mentions as they occur and to respond proactively as needed.

Unfortunately I haven’t been pleased with the service for several years, noting the results were spotty and largely incomplete. Although I don’t have enormous “Google trust issues,” I have been looking for years for an effective alternative to Alerts without much success. Danny Sullivan at . . . [more]

When was the last time you tweaked or updated your LinkedIn profile? Unfortunately, “never” or “not recently” is the most probable answer for the majority of lawyers. In a day and age where almost every prospective or new client will check you out online, a solid LinkedIn profile is one of the key foundations to an online social brand. And if you are not otherwise active on the web or in social media, it is the one place you probably should be.
For those that would like to tweak their LinkedIn profile, a hat tip to Ernie Svenson for pointing . . . [more]