Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession is the subject of the Ark Group's conference I'm attending in New York City. Here are my notes. Toby Brown is involved in Client Teams, Alternative Fee Arrangements and Knowledge Management at Fulbright & Jaworski LLP. He's also a recovering economist. This presentation focuses on the strong role KM... Continue Reading →
Matter-Based Budgeting [#ILTA10]
Budgeting transcends all sorts of fee arrangements -- whether hourly billing or alternative fee arrangements. So we should not limit the discussion to a particular kind of matter or billing approach. "This session [outlines] the essential elements required to develop a matter-based budget and how to track progress against it." Panelists: William Auther, Partner, Bowman... Continue Reading →
Planning Fallacy and Bad Estimates
It turns out that lawyers are human after all - at least with respect to their all too human inability to plan appropriately. Heidi Grant Halvorson recently published an interesting post on the planning fallacy, which is what psychologists call the inability to estimate accurately how much time an activity can take. Halvorson's review of... Continue Reading →
Recipe for Alternative Fee Arrangements
We'll be hosting 15 friends and family for Easter Dinner so I'm deep in the throes of menu planning. Since we always serve lamb, much of the recipe exploration has focused on side dishes. This search led me to a traditional companion to roast lamb: ratatouille. For those of you who have never sampled this... Continue Reading →
Wasting Your Life
After years of sitting quietly listening to the complaints, I've finally had enough. Critics of the legal profession and the billable hour speak of all lawyers as if they are identical, mindless billing machines. While many (but not all) of us do account for our time by the billable hour, that does not necessarily mean... Continue Reading →
Doing Time
What do lawyers and prisoners have in common? They share a fixation on time. Both groups are expected to spend a certain amount of time -- whether it be expressed as target billable hours or as sentencing guidelines. However, there is a noteworthy distinction between the groups: prisoners get time off for good behavior. While... Continue Reading →
Update on Alternative Billing (ILTA09)
Writing Alternative Billing Alternatives gave me an excuse to contact my friend, Jeff Rovner, for some background detail on the superb session he, Jeffrey Brandt,Thomas Gaines, and Eugene Stein presented at ILTA09. In our e-mail exchange today, he provided the following additional insights: In his original example, he proposed a 10% discount in rates for... Continue Reading →
Alternative Billing, Alternative Lawyering
Richard Susskind likes to be provocative. And, he's good at it. After hearing his talk at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, I found my mind churning with ideas of what it might be like if his vision became our reality. However, I soon felt stymied by the enormity of the challenge of changing... Continue Reading →
Above and Beyond KM 