Corporate legal departments are all about cost control and efficient processes, yet when hit with a new investigation or lawsuit, legal teams often reflexively fall back on the "collect everything" mentality. The emergence of targeted and remote collection technologies now makes it possible for corporations to collect in a legally defensible way that reduces cost and minimizes business disruption.
This is the second installment of a series examining the shift in law firm business models and the issues law firms must address to remain competitive in a new age of providing legal services. The third installment will appear later this year.
For the past several years, I have been tasked with providing an update on proxy advisory firms, most notably ISS and Glass Lewis, and the evolving policy updates they issue on an annual basis.
In-house counsel are facing a dramatic increase in discovery costs, the associated expenses related to compliance and a growing emphasis on initiatives such as diversity programs within an increasingly challenging economic landscape.
With competition growing, clients terminating long-term relationships and the inability of firms to keep up with technology and marketplace changes, business development training and coaching have become mainly a palliative measure, ignoring the primary problem.
Despite our firm's technological savvy, the burden of growing discovery volumes was challenging to manage. We were experiencing performance and workflow issues on all cases with over 150,000 documents, forcing us to send the larger cases to outside vendors, adding time and cost to every case. Our goal was to find a new in-house solution that could process and search vast amounts of data quickly and provide our attorneys with powerful analytic tools to use in early case assessment (ECA) and strategy development.
Whether you are an in-house communications manager or a PR consultant, every day presents new challenges. With experience, how you respond may become automatic, while others require more in-depth thinking for solutions.
Going paperless" is something that many law firms claim they desire. There is exceptional value to be gained from a totally paperless environment and storing documents electronically, both in terms of cost savings and efficiency. Risk is reduced as well. However, going completely paperless is a frustrating task that is akin to slamming your head in a door over and over again: It only feels better when you stop.
The incessant mud-slinging between in-house counsel and law firm lawyers about abysmal communication reveals a continuing and unresolved component in the law firm-client relationship, a serious and costly barrier to effective collaboration. As a partner, can you allow this to continue?
Law firms are ever-so-slowly starting to incorporate "key account planning," a critical element in any successful strategic go-to-market strategy and/or best-in-class business development program is "business intelligence."
