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An Evening With Some Really Smart People Working In Law+Tech

August 20, 2014 2:45 pm / Leave a comment

As many interested in Law 2050 topics will know, Nashville has the pleasure of hosting this year’s International Legal Technology Conference. I have not been able to attend much of it given the ironic detail that I have been teaching Law 2050 classes the same days as the conference. So it was a real treat to be invited to a dinner gathering to discuss the law+tech landscape along with several current and former Law 2050 students, other Vanderbilt Law students, and local legal community members. .

Our hosts were Michael Dunn and Aria Safar of e-Stet, the California based litigation technology company. Also present, and presenting tomorrow at the conference, was Noah Waisberg, founder of Diligence Engine, which has developed transaction due diligence review software. E-Stet treated us to an excellent Nashville hot chicken spread and opened an informal forum on the state of play and future of law+tech and its impact on the legal services industry.  Although I can’t speak for anyone but myself, here’s my take home from the discussion:

  • Legal technology developments like those represented by e-Stet and Diligence Engine (and a fast-expanding universe of other developers) will make lawyers better and more efficient. Law is one of those professions in which making a mistake can be very, very costly, so why not reduce the risk of missing an important document or detail? The downside may be that efficiency cuts into hours billed, but the offsetting upside is that better lawyering results attract more work.
  • These advances in law+tech are going to flatten the legal services industry in two ways. First, it will make it more possible for lawyers to service the mid-tier market of consumers and small businesses. Firms that might in the past (and present) have seen their market as large corporations and wealthy individuals might very well be in a position to provide reasonable-cost services to those markets. Whether they will deign to do so is a different question. But one thing is for sure–if they don’t, someone will.
  • The other flattening effect of law+tech is that it levels the playing field between the AmLaw 50, concentrated as they are in New York, L.A., and other mega markets, and the major regional/city law firms. If you have a significant deal or piece of litigation in Nashville or Denver, why fly in lawyers from New York or L.A. when law+tech has made everyone better? The experiential advantage of spending 10 years working deals in New York etc. will erode as everyone, everywhere, has access to aggregated databases of deal documents and the computational analytics to crunch through them. Bespoke lawyering may still be more concentrated in a few major cities, but over time this trend could revolutionize the legal services industry, giving law grads and young lawyers even greater flexibility to combine a sophisticated legal practice with quality of life preferences.
  • I think I can speak for all present in concluding that law+tech is not headed in the direction of robot lawyers any time soon (speaking of which, here’s the program for a conference session on that tomorrow). Perhaps a substantial chunk of lawyering can be mechanized, commoditized, and computerized, but the bottom line is that life is complicated and as soon as a client’s preferences or needs depart a smidgen from the default context built into the “robot,” you need a human. But the human will use law+tech to provide a faster, better, more efficient outcome. Maybe the better way to think of it is lawyer+robot.

The most gratifying aspect of this fascinating evening (besides the ridiculously spicy hot chicken!) was seeing my students engage in the discussion at what I considered to be a high level of knowledge and insight. Most if not all of them are members of our Journal of Entertainment Law & Technology, and it was clear that their experience on the journal has paid off in terms of enhanced awareness of the trends in law+tech. Go Vandy!

Law 2050 Rides Again!

August 18, 2014 3:07 pm / Leave a comment

Summer is over and classes start today here at Vanderbilt Law School, which means Law 2050 is back in action! Later today I will ramp up the second year of the Law 2050 class and begin posting about it and topics of interest to legal futurists.

The first order of business is to thank the many wonderful people who have agreed to be guest speakers in the class. Like last year’s lineup, it’s an exceptional set of presenters. Their perspectives bring life to the class and enhance the student experience in so many ways. Today’s post is devoted to them–many thanks to you all!

Aug. 25: Guest Speaker Panel – Law firm leaders discuss the state of the practice

Aug. 26: Guest Speaker Panel – Corporate in-house counsel discuss the drivers of change

Sept 9: Guest Speaker Panel – The globalization and consolidation of law firms

Sept. 29: Guest speaker – Larry Bridgesmith of ERM Legal Solutions: Introduction to legal process management

Sept. 30: Guest speaker – Marc Jenkins of Cicayda: Introduction to e-discovery and information technology

Oct. 6: Panel Discussion: Alternatives to BigLaw – What is their “new normal”?

Oct. 14: Demonstration of Lex Machina Legal Analytics

Oct 20: Guest speaker – Zygmunt Plater of Boston College Law School: The future of environmental law

Oct. 27: Guest speaker – Michael Mills of Neota Logic: Introduction to Neota Logic compliance software

Nov. 17: Guest Speaker Panel – Law firm economics and advancement, big and small

ABA Symposium Panelists Offer Some Sound Advice for Law Students and Young Lawers

May 5, 2014 8:21 pm / 1 Comment on ABA Symposium Panelists Offer Some Sound Advice for Law Students and Young Lawers

I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at the American Bar Association Section on Environment, Energy, and Resources (SEER) Annual Spring Symposium, held this year at Vanderbilt Law School last Friday, May 2nd. SEER Chair Bill Penny had the vision to build the symposium around the themes of the state and future of the practice, so it was a natural to host the event at Vanderbilt and I was glad to be a part of it.

My three panelists made for a powerhouse of energy, environmental, and resources practitioners: David Hill, Executive VP and GC of NRG Energy and former GC of the US Department of Energy; Ann Klee, VP of Environment, Health, and Safety at General Electric and former GC of the US EPA; and Janice Schneider, partner at Latham & Watkins in DC and just confirmed by the Senate the day before the symposium as Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior for Land and Minerals. Needless to say, I saw my job as moderator to be staying out of the way so my panelists could offer insight and advice, which they did immeasurably. Here I’ll distill what they said of most importance to law students and young lawyers about navigating the turbulence of today’s legal practice world and building a practice:

Don’t Skip the Basics: While it is enticing to think of riding a new trend like 3D printing to capture its practice opportunities, all the panelists agreed they do not hire young lawyers to be trend-spotters—they hire young lawyers who are good lawyers. That means lawyers with relevant domain knowledge, the ability to write crisply and clearly, strong communication skills, the capacity to work well in groups, the ability to manage relationships with clients, regulators, competitors, and the public, and the rest of what goes into the foundation of good lawyering. And don’t be a jerk.

Follow Emerging Technologies: Once you have the basics down, what’s the best way to spot and capitalize on emerging trends? The panelists agreed that, at least for the energy, environmental, and resources practice areas, emerging technologies drive legal change. Three emerging technologies that got the most attention were nanomaterials, distributed energy, and 3D printing. Distributed energy technology, for example, will change the level of control energy consumers have over their energy profile, thus leading to profound changes in the energy utility and distribution industries that will demand new legal regimes.

Learn Something About How Businesses Operate: Whether your practice is in a firm, government, NGO, or in-house, business actions and decisions drive an enormous slug of legal practice in the US. So it can’t hurt a law student or young lawyer to learn a bit about how businesses operate. Take basic law courses in corporate law, mergers and acquisitions, finance, etc., and even take some classes in a business school while in law school.

The Rise of Private Governance: One theme that spun through my panel and a panel later in the day was the increasing importance of private regulation as a legal practice field. The example my panel gave was supply chain regulation, in which a company demands upstream suppliers meet specified performance or product standards, embodied in contract terms, for environmental quality which often go above and beyond minimum standards established in public regulation. Not all regulatory practice, in other words, is about public regulation—your client’s customer might be its most aggressive regulator. (For more on this theme, see the work of my Vanderbilt colleague Mike Vandenbergh.)

Beware of Buzzwords: If you dream of being a “sustainability lawyer” or a “climate change lawyer,” the panelists had some sobering advice for you: they don’t hire “sustainability lawyers” or “climate change lawyers.” They hire lawyers with expertise in fields that are relevant to how their clients decide they need to respond to sustainability and climate change, in fields like air pollution, water pollution, endangered species, etc. Their advice was to build your expertise around relevant statutory regimes (Clean Air Act, Endangered Specie Act, Federal Power Act, etc.) to best position yourself to assist a client that is developing or implementing its sustainability and climate change policies.

Embrace Serendipity: Resonating with one of my Law 2050 class themes, the panelists all agreed that, now more than ever, young lawyers need to jump on opportunities to deepen and diversify their expertise, including taking chances to try new practice fields and settings.

Designing a Law 2050 Law School Curriculum

March 7, 2014 10:10 pm / Leave a comment

One of the final assignment prompts for my Law 2050 class asked the students to write a memo to the Law School Curriculum Committee recommending “how to innovate the curriculum to respond to the ‘new normal’ in the legal industry and best position students to enter and succeed in legal practice over first 10 years of their careers.” I received 45 very thoughtful and comprehensive responses. Recall that Law 2050 could best be described as a boot camp on the “new normal,” exploring everything from outsourcing to legal tech to how to make a practice out of Google Glass, so these students were primed to go on the topic of what to include in the curriculum beyond a survey course like Law 2050.  Here’s my synthesis of what they would like to tell the Curriculum Committee.

First, four proposed new course cluster themes dominated the student proposals, with well over 80 percent of the papers proposing courses in two or more of these clusters:

  • Legal Process/Project/Program Management: Students want to know more about efficient management of legal processes (e.g., due diligence), discrete projects (e.g., drafting a contract), and broad programs (e.g., managing origination of hundreds of similar contracts). This theme also includes suggestions for courses on E-discovery and Legal Risk Management, which draw on routinized and efficient process techniques.
  • Legal Technologies and Technologists: Michael Mills’ presentation of Neota Logic’s flowcharting technology platform was one of the smash hits of the class, and a good number of students presented law-tech and big data companies for their case studies, such as Lex Machina and Tymetrix. Students want to understand what these emerging technologies do, how they work, and even how to design them. This theme also includes suggestions for courses on Legal Software and Coding and Legal Computation and Analytics, as well as a number of suggestions that the law-tech theme be designed around some type of clinical delivery model.
  • Legal Entrepreneurism and Startup: Although much of the discussion of the “new normal” dwells on Big Law, plenty of class time focused on innovative legal startups such as Ravel Law and Casetext, as well as on how legal innovations can better support other industry entrepreneurs and startups. This theme also included many suggestions for a clinical setting, such as teaming up with business incubators.
  • Legal Business Management and Innovation:  With all the emphasis on “more for less” and “disruption,” students expressed a strong demand for courses they described as Law Firm Management and Finance, the Future of Legal Practice, Alternative Legal Services Business Models, Solo and Small Firm Practice, and similar themes.

Beyond these four dominant themes, which I am happy to say are being integrated into the offerings at Vanderbilt, quite a number of other innovations popped out of the papers, including:

  • As courses like the above are integrated into the curriculum, design a Legal Technology and Management Certificate
  • Push some of the content of Law 2050 themes into the 1L year
  • Offer a course focusing on nontraditional legal jobs, such as legal process management, legal risk management, and regulatory compliance systems
  • Offer a course on Comparative Legal Services Regulation
  • Offer a course on Legal Leadership
  • Include regulatory compliance flowcharting exercises in more classes
  • Integrate the law-tech issues into the Professional Responsibility course
  • Develop a year-long speaker series picking up on many of the Law 2050 themes

Finally, many students included proposals which, while not fitting within the Law 2050 scope directly, are consistent with the theme, heard over and over again, that they need to hit the ground running (or at least walking a lot faster than my peers and I were when we graduated!). The dominant topics in this category were:

  • Expand extern and clinic offerings, and even make taking one mandatory
  • Require each student to take at least two “skills” designated courses
  • Include courses and training on non-trial pre-trial skills, such as taking depositions, interviewing clients, communicating with courts and other counsel, reading records, etc.
  • Offer a course on understanding how businesses operate, how they make the “legal buy” decision, and how they manage their legal operations
  • Offer a class on “behavioral practice skills” such as case evaluation, legal communications, and risk assessment and communication to clients
  • Offer more and broader transactional document drafting courses
  • Offer a three-year JD/MBA
  • Offer a course like Harvard’s Legal Problem Solving workshop
  • Offer a more practice-oriented advanced Legal Writing course covering short answer memos, white papers, client letters, letters to opposing counsel, drafting interrogatories and document requests, etc.

Overall, I found this set of papers impressive in terms of the attention my students gave to the exercise and their creative, thoughtful suggestions. I was also gratified to think that my class sparked such a depth of interest in learning more about the topics fitting under the Law 2050 roof. With this kind of student effort and input coming in the first offering of the class, I’m looking forward to the Fall 2014 class even more.

Law 2050 Is Back – Starting with a huge round of thanks to my guest speakers

January 14, 2014 9:13 pm / Leave a comment

My one-month unannounced break from posts is over–Law 2050 is back! I would say the break was voluntary, but grading 61 1L Property exams, hosting six relatives over the holidays, and reading an enormous stack of papers from my 45 Law 2050 students kind of got in the way of blogging, with good reason.

Before I dig into my backlog of possibly interesting posts about the future of the law, the legal profession, and legal education, I want to thank all of the guest speakers who made the Law 2050 class a success. Based on the probing reviews my students compiled, you all truly had an impact and deserve recognition for being willing to share your time with the students to better prepare them for entering the profession during these transformational times. On behalf of them, and from my heart as well, THANK YOU! The honor roll follows in order of appearance:

Law firm managing partners discuss the state of the practice

  • Ben Adams – Baker Donelson
  • Richard Hays – Alston & Bird
  • Stephen Mahon – Squire Sanders

Corporate in-house counsel discuss the drivers of change

  • Reuben Buck – Cisco
  • Jim Cuminale – Nielson
  • Cheryl Mason – Hospital Corporation of America

Scenario Building Case Study: Climate Change

  • Prof. David Hess – Vanderbilt Sociology Department
  • Prof. Jonathan Gilligan – Vanderbilt Environmental Sciences Department

Legal Project and Process Management

  • Larry Bridgesmith – ERM Legal Solutions
  • Marc Jenkins – Cicayda
  • Dan Willoughby – King & Spalding

Law firm associates discuss life in the modern law firm

  • Ashley Bassel – Bass Berry
  • Daniel Flournoy – Waller Lansden
  • Sarah Laird – Bradley Arant
  • Chris Lalonde – Nelson Mullins

Measuring Lawyer Performance

  • Paul Lippe – Legal OnRamp

Alternatives to the Big Law model

  • Walt Burton – Thompson Burton
  • Eric Schultenover – Counsel on Call

Legal Technology Case Study

  • Michael Mills – Neota Logic

Scenario Building Case Study: The Bioengineered Superhuman

  • Prof. Michael Bess – Vanderbilt History Department

Implementing LEAN Law

  • John Murdoch – Bradley Arant
  • Prof. Nancy Lea Hyer – Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management

Capstone Lecture: The Future of the Legal Industry

  • Prof. Bill Henderson – Indiana University-Bloomington Law School

More posts to follow soon…

Final assignment in my Law 2050 class – How would you answer these questions?

November 20, 2013 2:43 pm / 2 Comments on Final assignment in my Law 2050 class – How would you answer these questions?

The final class session in Law 2050 was yesterday. It has been a blast, and now that I can reflect on it I plan several wrap-up posts. For now, though, how would you answer the three prompts I assigned for the final paper:

1. Congratulations—I have hired you as my speech writer! The Dean has asked me to deliver a talk to the incoming 1L class next year at the beginning of the academic year. He has asked me to summarize the most important themes covered in the Law Practice 2050 class, offer advice to the new law students about how to approach their legal education with those themes in mind, and inspire them to begin thinking about what they can do to best position themselves to enter and succeed in the “new normal” of legal practice in three years. Please draft the speech for me. (suggested length: 1500 – 2000 words)

2. Congratulations again—the Dean has appointed you to be the new student representative to the Law School Curriculum Committee! The Law School is considering how to innovate its curriculum to respond to the “new normal” in the legal industry and best position students to enter and succeed in legal practice over first 10 years of their careers. Please prepare a memo for the Committee with your ideas. Be specific: What courses and other curricular components do you propose? What would be their content and format? How would they be delivered? Who would teach them? What would be the work product and other expectations? How would they be graded or otherwise evaluated? How would students benefit from them? What are the goals? (suggested length: 1000 – 1500 words)

3. Write a letter to yourself to be opened in five years. Tell yourself the steps you plan to take to best position yourself to be where you aspire to be in your legal career five years from now. I will mail this to you in five years. (suggested length: whatever you decide)

Learning from My Students in Law 2050

October 16, 2013 8:36 pm / Leave a comment

My Law 2050 class has moved into group presentations (format explained here), the first round being their assessments of new companies and business models emerging in the “new normal.” In two days of presentations, so far we’ve heard about a wide variety of fascinating developments: Axiom, QuisLex, Neota, MetricStream, Yusin & Irvine, Pangea, CEB, Clerky, Onit, MyCase, and Legal Outsourcing Partners. Also, one of my students, Christine Carletta, wrote an insightful description and assessment of Lex Machina as a post on the JETLaw blog for Vanderbilt’s Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law. I couldn’t be more pleased with how the students are engaging with their projects and the class in general!

What You Get When 45 Law Students Brainstorm About Legal Futures

September 26, 2013 12:50 pm / Leave a comment

Last week my Law 2050 class moved into a group project phase. I’ve divided the 45 students into six groups. Each group is exploring a pair of legal future topics grouped under two themes: (1) emerging legal technologies and practice models, and (2) future legal practice scenarios. The six paired topics are:

Group

Tech/Industry Theme

Practice Scenario Theme

1

 Outsourcing

Environment and energy

2

 Legal process management

Social and demographic

3

 Legal risk management

Economic and financial

4

 Routinized and expert systems

Health and medicine

5

 Legal prediction

Data and privacy

6

 New legal markets Other technologies

Each group member prepared a proposed set of specific research projects fitting the group’s topics, and last week they pitched them to their groups. Each group selected 3-4 projects for each topic. They are exploring the viability of their tech/practice model selections and of their practice development selections. Later in the semester the groups will present their findings to the class as a whole.

Last week, the groups selected their final set of research projects and gave a quick summary to the class. I was quite impressed with the breadth and depth of their selections:

Future Practice Development Topics: synthetic organs, bitcoins, robotic surgery, student loan debt relief, Cloud computing, Google glass, 3-D printing, Dodd-Frank aftermath, crowdfunding,  sea level rise, cybersecurity standards, carbon sequestration, space law & asteroid mining, virtual real estate, ocean-based power sources, biometric identification, water rights issues, genetically pre-fabricated children, natural disaster law, AI decision making, majority-minority America, same sex marriage, LGBTQIA rights, mass human migration, the sharing economy.

Legal Tech and Practice Models: QuisLex, Yuson & Irvine, LPO security breach issues, rebundling of LPO functions, My Case, Onit, Clerky, Axiom, Lex Machina, Casetext, Clearspire, Lawyer Up, Jury Verdict Analyzer, Kiiac, Neota Logic, healthcare compliance software.

I’m looking forward to what they have to say about each of these!

Law’s “New Normal” as Seen Through the Eyes of Law Students

September 18, 2013 2:06 pm / Leave a comment

As I mentioned in my last post, my Law 2050 class recently featured two panels of speakers, one consisting of large law firm managing partners and the other of large corporation in-house counsel.  I identified four major themes that struck me as dominating the discussions: (1) the improving profile of “Medium Law,” (2) the impacts of volatile lateral partner movement, (3) the in-house counsel’s quest for value, and (4) law firm financial structure as an obstacle to innovation.

I had my students–there are 45 enrolled in the class–prepare “reaction papers” for the combined panels, in which they were free to comment on what they heard however they wished. I had held off on my post until they handed in the papers so as not to influence their reactions. Remarkably, however, the four themes I discussed in my post were recurrent themes in the student papers. But there were others that dominated their discussions and which revealed something about how law students are approaching the so-called “new normal.”

  • The students were struck by the different emphasis the two panels placed on quality versus efficiency in the “value” calculus. While both panels placed importance on both value components, the students perceived that the managing partners emphasized selling quality while the in-house counsel emphasized buying efficiency. The in-house counsel were fairly blunt in this respect, which made a deep impression on the students.
  • The in-house counsel panel discussed the “disaggregation” theme extensively, with one panelist describing how legal matters are unbundled and farmed out to a variety of service providers. As this counsel put it, “I hire everything from $30 an hour lawyers to $1500 an hour lawyers–I find the right rate for the right service.” Although this struck the students as a sound business model, they were also struck by how much workload that places on the in-house counsel to herd all the cats. It’s like trying to be your own general contractor when building your new home. The students thus saw the potential value in Legal Project Management service providers, several of which will be appearing on panels later in the semester.
  • Indeed, many of the students asked why law firms can’t essentially reinvent themselves to house all of the unbundled services under one roof and charge out each of the various services at competitive market rates. Good question! Indeed, next week we will be hearing from some firms that have taken some steps in that direction.
  • Probably the most introspective and personal theme that ran through the papers had to do with training–as in how will they receive it. Let’s face it, the old model, for all its flaws now under the microscope, was a wonderful training ground for young lawyers. They got to see all the bricks in the litigation or transaction wall as it was constructed, and could observe high quality legal work all around them. My students expressed concern that they will not have that same opportunity as legal services are unbundled and farmed out to multiple providers and as their value comes under close scrutiny by clients and their own firms. Remarkably, many said they’d gladly take reduced salaries over their first few years at a firm if that meant they’d receive formalized and extensive training as the quid pro quo.
  • Finally, many of the students questioned the continuing viability of US legal practice restrictions. They wondered whether large US firms can compete with the more financially liberated UK firms in the global market, and whether state licensing restrictions really have a rational basis for practice fields that are national in scope. Although the panelists opined that change on this front would be very slow to come, the vibe from the students was that it can’t come fast enough for them.

I have to say that I was quite impressed by how deeply and insightfully my students thought about these issues. Of course, their main concern is about getting employment after law school, which many of the 3Ls have already secured, but my sense is that after hearing from our two panels they have a better handle on what employment in the legal industry will be like in this era of transformation.

Insights on the “New Normal” from Law Firm Managing Partners and Corporate Counsel

September 4, 2013 4:58 pm / Leave a comment

Last week in my Law 2050 class we held two panels of speakers–a panel of three BigLaw managing partners on Monday (Ben Adams of Baker Donalson, Richard Hayes of Alston Bird, and Steve Mahon of Squire Sanders) followed by a panel of three in-house counsel of large corporations (Reuben Buck of Cisco, Jim Cuminale of Nielsen, and Cheryl Mason of Hospital Corp. of America). First, my enthusiastic thanks to our panelists, who provided a lively, engaging, deep, and quite candid forum for the students.

Indeed, the speakers covered so much ground I could not possibly cover it all in one or even several posts. So what rose to the top in my assessment? Four things:

  • The Rise of MediumLaw. Both sets of speakers suggested that medium-sized firms (MediumLaw) are increasingly a source of competition for BigLaw and of legal services to large corporations, confirming Richard Susskind’s prediction that, while MediumLaw firms will face pressures to consolidate, they now have “an unprecedented opportunity to be recognized as credible alternatives” to BigLaw. One reason is the basic “world is flat” effect, making it easy to access legal talent everywhere. As for legal talent, all the speakers recognized that MediumLaw is brimming with top legal talent. The there is the lower fee structure a client is likely to enjoy by hiring a regional MediumLaw to handle a matter in the region. While all the corporate counsel confirmed that “bet the company” litigation or massive, complex transactional work is likely to go to BigLaw because of its repository of experience on such matters and ability to scale up to a matter of any size, there was no question that they considered MediumLaw a substantial and growing source of their legal service needs.
  • The Corrosive Effect of Lateral Partner Movement: Both sets of speakers emphasized the importance, now more than ever, of establishing strong relationships between firm and client. The corporate counsel stressed the need for firms to “know my business,” and the managing partners pointed to many new kinds of practices they are taking to get there. And both panels identified the acceleration of lateral partner movement as one of the chief obstacles. Indeed, when asked what keeps them up at night, the managing partners concurred that the fallout from actual and potential partner exits is a constant source of stress (though I imagine each of the firms represented has done its share of lateral partner hiring).
  • Value: The corporate counsel kept coming back to their primary concern in selecting outside counsel—value, value, value. What wasn’t as clear is how clients evaluate it and how firms are rethinking how they deliver it. For example, Cisco is well-known for using fixed fees arrangements for much of its work, but one of the corporate counsel suggested that fixed fee is not necessarily the silver bullet. If the fixed fee is simply a number that aggregates the expected revenue from an hourly billing method, how is that delivering better value? My strong sense from this representative group was that while firms and clients are willing to experiment with ways to wean off of the billable hour, there is no consensus yet on what alternative fee model will consistently deliver better value over time.
  • Law Firm Financial Structure as an Obstacle to Innovation:  A strong theme the managing partners panel returned to several times was how the nature of partnerships as financial entities constrains innovation. Firms manage tax consequences by flushing out profits and limiting retained earnings, which puts a disincentive on investing in R&D and makes experimenting in costly new business models or products quite risky. To be sure, the managing partners described some innovative practices–for example, one firm maintains a “venture fund” in the form of an allotment of “billable” hours groups of attorneys can apply for to free them up for practice development projects, with the firm standing behind accounting for the hours as counting every bit as much as hours actually billed to clients. As the partner from that firm explained it, that kind of practice development project is highly valuable to the firm, but not to individual lawyers if they don’t get credit for it, so they won’t do it with this kind of incentive. Yet the appetite for that kind of innovation necessarily is limited by the partnership financial profile as well, not just by the billable hour itself.

This is just a taste of the range and depth of topics our panels covered. Again, I can’t thank them enough. as for my students, I know from the “buzz” that the panels made a tremendous impression on them. They handed in their reaction papers yesterday, so I will soon learn just what that impression was!

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