While the rest of you have spent the past three weeks sipping eggnog and draining champagne flutes, I’ve been on a mountain in Argentina — and it’s not because I needed some alone time after finally reading the comments to my posts. I’m down here trying to get to the top of said mountain, and...Read More

Once upon a time, I would have taken the Sidley Austin Word Processing Department back behind the bleachers and gotten it pregnant. To be able to drop off marked-up docs at 1 a.m. and have edits turned by 10 a.m. — assuming the slackers who deigned to leave at midnight hadn’t given WP too much...Read More

When I was in Biglaw, I got to know a few people at the investment banks that were our primary clients, folks who were at the same spot on the bank totem pole as I was on the firm totem pole. I think I met a few of them in person, mostly because one of...Read More

One thing I never had to worry about in Biglaw was having a client compare me to a website. I can’t recall any investment bank or Fortune 500 company calling me up and saying, “We did some googling over the weekend, and we found this website that can do everything you do for far cheaper....Read More

I’ve always thought it was pretty cool that as attorneys our minds have been trained to the point where they can be billed out the same way a tiller or a factory drill can. Sometimes I wish I could double-dip by billing out other parts of my body while somebody’s getting my mind. (Surely there’s...Read More

The legal industry has never been resistant to change. Observers and pundits often like to throw around the idea that the legal industry is just now coming under fire from technological change and commoditization of legal services. The practice of law has always been evolving, however, due diligence, precedent, and a monopoly on providing legal services has...Read More

Recently we asked the ATL audience to help us get an empirical grip on the market for Continuing Legal Education. More than 340 attorneys from around the country — a good mix of law firm associates and partners, solo practitioners, in-house counsel, and others — shared with us their preferences and practices in meeting their...Read More

Are you sitting in your office cranking out nondisclosure agreements for clients to use in their M&A deals? I have some terrifying news for you: There’s a native-English-speaking law school graduate in India who’s willing to do that work, too. And he costs about $25,000 a year, all in. How does that compare to what...Read More

In SmallLaw, no ones cares what grades you got in law school. No one cares if you were on a journal. Few people even care where you went to school. It could be Harvard or Thomas Cooley. Doesn’t matter. When I opened my own practice and started making pitches to clients, I learned quickly that...Read More

Dick the Butcher was a minor character in the middle work of a trilogy of plays the Bard wrote about Henry VI. I’m a Shakespeare fan, but I have to say, I find the Henry VI plays a little dull (“plodding” is probably the best word to describe them). Part 2, the least plodding of...Read More