Erin Levine is on a mission to provide affordable divorce services to expand access to justice. She told me she first looked to scale up her family law practice using technology, but quickly realized ABA’s Rule 5.4 on lawyer independence would prohibit her from raising capital from non-lawyers. That meant she’d have to run a technology company …
One of the great paradoxes of the legal profession is that lawyers are stereotyped as allergic to technology while simultaneously being at the bleeding edge of the way society interacts with technological advancement. The Association of Corporate Counsel Annual Gathering in Las Vegas, which I attended last week, provided a first-hand opportunity to explore this …
It’s not often that you open up the New York Times and see a major investigative story on a Biglaw firm. But in late August, the NYT Magazine ran a sprawling story on how Jones Day purportedly reshaped the American judiciary by masterminding and orchestrating the appointment of a massive number of conservative judges, including no less …
Corporations must look inside to define their own value system with respect to managing external counsel. Following this, the company is prepared for technology to help drive that alignment.
What do the legal departments of Volkswagen, Ikea, Jones Lang LaSalle, Citibank, and Caterpillar all have in common? Some amount of their legal work in Russia may have been made public this summer by hactivist group Anonymous’ action against Russian law firm Rustam Kurmaev and Partners, also known as RKP Law. I had written in Harvard Business Review about …
Last week, Sean wrote about the importance of values and ethics of the law firms providing services for corporate counsel, noting that, “97% percent of corporate counsel leaders told us they would take action if they discovered a law firm they were working with did not meet their ethical or values criteria.” This brings up interesting questions …
I’ve written previously about the rising importance of ethics in the selection of external counsel. Now I’ve got fresh proprietary data to back it up. I’m continuously hearing that law departments want greater alignment with their external law firms. It’s no longer good enough for Biglaw partners to do good work and serve as golf buddies. Corporations …
Why are law firms increasingly getting involved in geopolitics? As Joe Andrew, the founding global chairman of Dentons quipped in our recent sit down: “A good lawyer knows the law but a great lawyer knows the judge.” One could interpret that adage as implying a personal relationship between the attorney and the judge that is somehow more deterministic …
In the past decade, the Commonwealth has evolved from a way for the U.K. to create its own economic and soft-power spheres of influence with former colonies into a larger organization focused on trade among its members. Where on your passport would stamps from the 2022 Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) meeting originate? If you …
What’s most interesting is that lawyers from Jones Day, Morgan Lewis, DLA Piper, Cooley, and other major firms are now forbidden from entering Russia — for life. In a little-noticed act, Russia indefinitely banned over 1,000 U.S. citizens from entering the country a couple weeks ago. In a big departure from traditional sanctions tit-for-tats, many of them were lawyers. Why did …