Should Law Firms Listen to Students?
April 3, 2007 | Filed Under Law Firm Trends, Legal Ed
The WSJ Law Blog provides an interesting link to a new group of law students, Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession. They raise some valid concerns in their Cluetrain-like manifesto entitiled “Principles For a Renewed Legal Profession.”
It will be interesting to see how this group takes hold. Thus far all members appear anonymous as far as I can tell. Far be it for me to criticize that…
The students offer the suggestion that firms should “link partnership with working hard, not working long…” Actually, partnership, especially equity partnership, is also linked to working on getting and keeping clients. I know when I was in law school I presumed clients sort of grew on trees; certainly there was nothing in the course catalog on legal marketing or client service.
In addition, the group offers that a target of 3,000 hours at some firms (!!) should be reduced to 2,200.
I hope the students continue to do research on this; 2,200 billable (and collected) hours is no small feat, unless you have a year of block-billing-friendly M&A deals or major litigation.
The group seems to understand that you can’t get max pay without max work at a max rate when it notes that members are “…willing to accept reduced salaries in exchange for better working lives.” But when that offer letter arrives with a $150,000 starting salary, it’s really an interesting decision.
The more law students head into their first job with eyes wide open instead of shut, the better. There are initiatives underway to make legal service delivery more productive for firms and clients. I’ll take a look at one of these on Thursday.
Harvard Goes Corporate
March 27, 2007 | Filed Under Legal Ed, Governance
One of the things this corporate lawyer feels is that law school did not prepare me very well for a career in commercial law (except for a business planning class taught by this esteemed professor).
Harvard Law School shows some savvy in a recent issue of their alumni bulletin by detailing the work of eleven members of their faculty in the area of corporate governance.
One caught my eye:
Finally, the newest member of the corporate law faculty has been delving into the world of innovation—specifically, how parties to contracts can be more creative in designing their deals. Since joining the HLS faculty this academic year from the University of Virginia School of Law, Professor George Triantis, an expert on corporate finance and commercial law, has been focused on the ways that lawyers and clients produce novel and creative contractual terms. In a yearlong seminar, he has been looking at some of the factors that promote or impede innovation, including the impact of judicial, legislative and regulatory action, and in a recent article, he examined ways of anticipating litigation in contract design.
While we would never want to commercialize the ivory tower, I applaud HLS for taking a bit of a realistic look at some of the issues corporate lawyers face.
On the other hand, law school does allow me to wax poetic about Shaffer v. Heitner!
iCLE and iTunes
January 26, 2006 | Filed Under Legal Ed, Law 2.0, Technology
Will you soon be able to hear Stanford Law’s Lawrence Lessig lecturing on Intellectual Property Reform through your iPod?
Forbes relates an interesting story about how Stanford University is putting course lectures and other Cardinal content on the web through Apple’s iTunes for free download (I was unable to find it on iTunes before I hit my deadline…).
Moves like this can accelerate something else: lawyer CLE options through podcasting technology.
Robert Ambrogi saw the potential for podcasting and lawyer CLE almost a year ago. Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog picked up on it, and Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell were also on the trail. ALM’s Texas Lawyer has put up some examples, as has the LA County Bar Association.
What is fascinating about Stanford’s experiment is that it is giving it all away. This could be disruptive for some business models attached to education and podcasting. It’s probably a Top 10 university strategy for now. But down the road, who knows?
While this trend unfolds, here’s an idea for lawyers. Put up short podcasts on iTunes (say 5 minutes or less) that aren’t ads, but offer concise information on topical areas of the law. It could be better marketing than 95% of what’s out there (which is advertising, is expensive, and very different).
Why? Because one truth lies just beneath the surface of search and the Internet. It is this: when someone finds you, they are interested in your topic and primed for action. Maybe not a fat retainer, but some step toward a potential relationship. Most other advertising is just spraying a fire hose randomly and hoping you hit a customer who’s on fire.
We’ll be listening…
Update: A law student reader here in the Midwest let me know that Slashdot is covering the Stanford/iTunes story; I see Cynthia Brumfield has as well.
Update #2 (29 Jan 06): Here’s the Apple iTunes U site. In addition to Stanford, the University of Michigan School of Dentistry sinks its teeth into iTunes U. ABC News has more.
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