The Legal Department Is Savvier and Has More Options In the Form of ASPs and Legal Technology. It's Time for Law Firms to Embrace Change. AI Is a Key Ingredient In Doing So.
<i><b>Dealing With a Job Loss</b></i><p>The chances are that many of us will either be terminated or laid off from at some point in our careers. It happens. How you deal with the loss of a job and get back on your feet as quickly as possible is what's important.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made significant changes to certain Internal Revenue Code provisions dealing with highly compensated employees. Among these are restrictions (in the form of excise taxes) on compensation of certain highly paid employees of “applicable tax-exempt organizations.”
<b><i>Sometimes You Don't Know What You Don't Know</b></i><p>Over the last decade, the definition of competitive intelligence has evolved to be about all of the data and information I have access to that helps to isolate and leverage my firm's competitive advantage and close the deal on business development opportunities. The more data available to analyze, the better informed your decisions and strategies will be going forward.
There were elements of the corporate culture in the early Dot-com years that helped shape my perspective on the critical role marketing could (and should) play in driving tangible and bottom-line business results. Those shaping influences, when applied to law firms, can help us legal marketers realize even greater returns for our internal and external clients.
<b><i>The Bottom Is Eventually Going to Drop on the U.S. Economy, and Many Law Firms Won't Be Positioned to Handle the Fallout</b></i><p>No economic expansion lasts forever. That's a hard-and-fast truth of macroeconomics, one that's on the minds of certain law firm leaders.
At the Oscars in March, Best Actress winner Frances McDormand made “inclusion rider” go viral. But Kalpana Kotagal, a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll had already worked for months to write the language for such provisions. Kotagal was developing legal language for contract provisions that Hollywood's elite could use to require studios and other partners to employ diverse workers on set.
The law firm office cannot remain unchanged, as if frozen in time set to some date prior to the onset of pandemic, when the terms and meaning have all changed. In fact, the office must now provide benefits or an experience the lawyers and staff cannot get at home.
The legal implications of branding generally arise initially for companies during the process of selecting a company name and any initial product or service names. For drug development companies, however, careful consideration should also be paid to the implications of branding a clinical trial.
'Disconnect Between In-House and Outside Counsel is a continuation of the discussion of client expectations and the disconnect that often occurs. And although the outside attorneys should be pursuing how inside-counsel actually think, inside counsel should make an effort to impart this information without waiting to be asked.
