Standardizing legal services

Legal visionary Paul Lippe wrote a recent article about the lack of standardization in the legal profession and forecasts areas where he sees standardization is imminent:

• How clients assess and communicate about the performance of lawyers cries out for standardization, so clients can give consistent feedback, incent improvements in performance, and provide a consistent way for law firm leaders to interpret data.

• How firms charge for work on a “value” basis beyond simple time will be standardized, so firms and clients can compare like to like (products liability defense litigation in Arizona to civil litigation in Colorado).

• How firms share information with clients—now a crazy quilt of alerts, blogs, seminars, treatises, multistate surveys and podcasts—will migrate into a more consistent and integrated model.

• How firms and clients work together to construct documents, or make choices around contract terms will continue to simplify or we will all surely drown in complexity.

• The general way lawyers and clients communicate will standardize through “profile-centric” systems (not “social networks”), just as 15 years ago email became the standard communication tool displacing FedEx and the fax machine (remember that one?) and three generations ago the standard communication tool was “lunch at the club.”

Do you agree with him? Can you think of other ways?

I predict an upcoming poll out of this.

Full article here: http://legalonramp.com/index.php/What-Aspects-of-Legal-Services-Are-Most-Likely-to-Get-Standardized.html

NYCLA Tweeters Unite!

I am impressed by the tech savvy NYCLA members--33% of you use Twitter in your business development. I bet that is higher than the national average for lawyers, in fact, an ABA article from 2009, remarked that "Only 6 percent of lawyers in private practice and 4 percent of in-house lawyers use Twitter."  Who knew that NYCLA was on the cutting edge?

Rounding out the poll results 46%  of pollsters did not use Twitter; 13% use it, but not for business development; and a mere 6% never heard of it or thought it was a waste of time.

 

To see the ABA article, click here:

http://www.americanbar.org/publications/young_lawyer_home/young_lawyer_archive/yld_tyl_dec09_digital.html