Smarter Relationships in Legal Services
The Practice
November/December 2019
In the flow of Smarter Law, the progressive lawyer drives better personal performance as an individual and by doing so improves the performance of their legal department or law firm; consequently, tho
November/December 2019
Smarter Law
A Smarter approach to legal services uses the broadest possible range of proven processes to improve personal, professional, and business performance. This range inevitably spans left-brain thinking (logic, analysis, math, and data) and right-brain thinking (creativity, emotions, diagrams, and pictures). This is modern behavioral economics applied to law; its successes comprise intricate behavioral insights and detailed econometric processes.
Updated Terms of Service
It is no secret that clients are changing the ways they do business with law firms. Perhaps less attention, however, has been paid to how law firms are responding to these new demands. To help bring these perspectives to the fore, we interviewed two leading law firms to learn more about their approach and how they conceptualize these issues from an organizational standpoint.
Taking Care of Small Business
There are good reasons to focus on clients with the largest budgets and the most sophisticated in-house legal capacities. At the same time, the market for legal services is filled with a myriad of actors, including millions of small and midsize businesses (SMBs), who also rely on high-quality legal work, albeit not at the scale of large corporate actors, and need to find lawyers.
From Budget to Best Match
In the HBS case study “Catalant: The Future of Work?,” Thomas Eisenmann, Jeffrey F. Rayport, and Christine Snively examine the rise of Catalant, a platform that connects business clients with skilled freelance talent to help execute their projects. What might a Catalant Legal look like? What holes in the market for legal services could such a platform help address?
Shopping for Law Firms on Amazon
The IP Accelerator is designed to connect sellers who use Amazon’s marketplace with designated IP law firms that can help them apply for U.S. trademarks for their brand and products. The goal is to encourage sellers to bolster their intellectual property and brand rights; however, this also represents a potentially significant foray into the legal services market for the massive company.
Making an Executive Decision
Joost Maes, founder and head of Egon Zehnder’s legal, regulatory, and compliance practice, spoke with David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, for a conversation on identifying the right lawyer leaders for companies’ needs.
