Murmurs of Change in BigLaw Practice, But Where’s the Proof?
Rachel Zahorsky is an ABA Journal legal affairs writer.
Corrected: Georgetown University Law Center’s annual symposium on the future of law firms included many of the familiar faces that have pushed for new law firm structures, compensation and apprenticeship in recent years.
But where are the unusual suspects, I thought.
As one lawyer put it last week at the Washington, D.C., conference: It took iTunes less time to revolutionize the music industry than for significant change to touch law practice.
The fact that two managing partners of Am Law 100 firms had previously told me they had no intention of abandoning hourly billing—and a third didn’t know what the Association of Corporate Counsel Value Challenge was about—doesn’t bode well for any ripple effects from the current change movement.
At the conference, Jeffrey Carr, FMC Technologies’ general counsel, said he had asked his outside counsel to send their summer associates to shadow him for week. The idea was to expose them to in-house work and build client relationships (assuming they would get job offers from the outside firms). Not one law firm accepted Carr’s proposition.
The audience audibly gasped at this admission, but I wondered how many were really surprised.
Even keynote speaker Richard Susskind, the British academic and author of The End of Lawyers? addressed the need for a little less conversation and a little more action. (Please!)
Susskind alluded to the heat aimed at Kirkland & Ellis chair emeritus Thomas Yannucci by fellow panelists and audience members for failing to provide evidence of significant change at the top of the BigLaw food chain.
“You can’t tell a room full of millionaires that they’ve got their business plan wrong,” Susskind said, hinting at how little incentive there is for the top five U.S. firms to change.
Which leaves the question: What will incite one to break rank? Decreased profits per partner? A mass exodus of big clients? Or some upstart firm barreling into their private party?
And could actions by one Big Five firm send a wave throughout the top 200 that finally overflows the tipping point of change? I’ll be here, waiting to see.
Last updated on March 31 to add a link and correct the publication date of The End of Lawyers?, which was November 2008.
Correction
Post was last updated on March 31 to add a link and correct the publication date of The End of Lawyers?, which was in November 2008. The Journal regrets the error.
