Law Firm Management

Some practical lessons for creating, launching and institutionalizing this practical case management approach across the firm.

Objective financial factors are easy to measure ' but they should not be the only considerations in determining partner compensation.

A LinkedIn profile update alerting a user's contacts about her new job did not necessarily constitute a solicitation of business that ran afoul of her non-compete agreement, a Massachusetts trial judge has ruled.

While the document review aspect of the discovery process generally receives the majority of attention because of the expense and time involved, the collection of potentially responsive electronically stored information (ESI) can also represent a major expense and logistical challenge.

The concept of the attorney-client privilege seems pretty straightforward in, for example, a criminal case. However, as any in-house attorney knows, this concept becomes pretty murky when applied to attorneys working inside entities: Who is the client? Which attorneys are covered? Are those attorneys always covered? Which communications? With whom? On what subjects? The questions are endless and the situations are complex.

Almost 30 years ago when I began my career consulting to law firms, the then managing partner of Donovan Leisure Newton & Irving used that term to refer to the months of October through December. It was his way of pointing out to his fellow partners that the necessary activities of practice management that so many of them had avoided for the first nine or 10 months of the year now had to be addressed.

AccessData's interoperable e-discovery, mobile device discovery and forensic analysis applications collect from nearly any data source and cull case data for highly targeted review. This platform addresses all phases of the e-discovery life cycle and with these tools in place, we offer effective and expedient e-discovery services to our clients while passing the resultant cost savings on to them.

For decades, litigation was typically associated with large paper files piled on conference tables and oversized boxes being wheeled into courtrooms. The closest thing to technology that many people ever connected to litigation was a Dictaphone used to narrate notes for transcription.