How soon are changes coming to your practice

Lots of people are talking about changes in the legal profession and have been following the issue for over four years now. Obviously, changes are taking place (moves to alternatives to billable hours, rethinking large firm management procedures), but coming from New York big law and now a conservative legal department in a company, those changes are barely noticeable.

I read a recent quote by a partner at Seyfarth Shaw which sums up the reason for this phenomenon (paraphrase): never underestimate the power of a group of lawyers to argue  that a minuscule deviation from the status quo is a revolutionary change.   I had to laugh.

When are the smartest people in the room going to experiment with innovative business practices? Will real movement only be reactionary, the result of a domino effect: Heller, Thacher, Dewey, your firm ....

Culture of Perpetual Success

I have been reading a lot of articles lately about the value of calculated risk and failure in ultimately achieving success. Of course, those articles were not in the legal journals, business and management journals mostly. The concept of taking risks and learning from mistakes is not taking hold in the legal world. Most of the voters in our last poll appear to agree. 75% of those polled voted that the practice of law does not allow for learning from failure.