Remember this? This lesson comes in handy when reading a new Law.com article entitled Law Firm Cost Recovery is Here to Stay. The article discusses the results of a survey by Mattern & Associates about law firm cost-recovery practices. Among the types of costs studied are overnight delivery, outgoing faxes, copies, telephone calls, legal research [...]

The last two posts here at LRWP have focused on issues that arose in the wake of my participation in a panel discussion on alternative legal careers that was part of Getting Back in the Game: How to Restart Your Career in a Down Economy, a day-long seminar on June 16 sponsored by the New [...]

As I mentioned in my last post, last week I participated on the alternative legal careers panel at Getting Back in the Game: How to Restart Your Career in a Down Economy, a day-long seminar sponsored by the New York City Bar and Vault.com. On Friday, David Lat posted his report on the panel over [...]

Yesterday, I participated on the alternative legal careers panel at Getting Back in the Game: How to Restart Your Career in a Down Economy, a day-long seminar sponsored by the New York City Bar and Vault.com. So I was understandably eager to see how the press covered the event. The first article I had a [...]

A September 2001 article from Legal Consulting firm Altman Weil, Inc., entitled Fiscal Management of a Law Firm, strongly supports the use of contract lawyers to increase a firm’s profit margin. The article discusses three key fiscal performance measures for all businesses (including law firms)—cash flow, revenues or collected fee receipts and profit margin—and identifies [...]

On Tuesday, June 16, I’ll be speaking on an alternative legal careers panel as part of Getting Back in the Game: How to Restart Your Career in a Down Economy, a day-long seminar sponsored by the New York City Bar and Vault.com. The panel runs from 1:45-3:00 p.m. Here’s the full program agenda: 9:45 AM [...]

Last week, the National Law Journal reported that a California plaintiff’s lawyer has filed a class action suit against Chadbourne & Parke, alleging that the firm engages in a pattern and practice of billing its clients based on hourly rates charged by online legal research providers, even though the firm actually pays a flat rate [...]

Often, articles in the mainstream legal media about contract lawyers focus on the large law firms that, through staffing agencies, hire armies of attorneys (either foreign or domestic) to do document review work. So it’s refreshing that Downturn May Have an Upside for Contract Attorneys, an article in today’s National Law Journal, discusses the world [...]

AttorneysInTransition.com is a new website from Law Bulletin Publishing Co. that focuses (not surprisingly) on issues of concern to lawyers whose careers are in a state of flux. While you’re there, check out my guest post, The Road Less Traveled: Working as a Contract Lawyer. Also, make sure you read this post for more details [...]

From April 2-4, I had the pleasure of attending ABA Techshow in Chicago. The much-anticipated keynote speaker was Richard Susskind, author of The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services. Susskind’s presentation expanded on his central thesis, which is that, in the next ten years or so, advances in technology will change, in [...]