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Friday, May 08, 2009
Law - The law firm of the future?
From the American Law Daily, an article from April 20th headed "The Future Comes to Bloomington." It begins:
Bill Henderson, the irrepressible Indiana University law professor, had a simple idea. To test the viability of the big-firm model--and look for ways to change and rescue it--he and Anthony Kearns, the lead risk manager for the Australian lawyers insurance operation, organized a clever role-playing game, a sort of Dungeons and Dragons for lawyers. FutureFirm, as they called it, is a case study of a hypothetical Am Law 200 law firm in trouble (Download Future Firm Competition). Teams of law firm partners, clients, law students, and consultants would spend a day and a half trying to devise a strategy that would allow the tottering Marbury & Madison LLP to survive for another decade. And in the process, the emerging PowerPoints and rump partners meetings would shed light on the current thinking of what firms in peril--and others merely facing the broader economic turmoil--might do to right themselves.In all, 44 players, 14 judges, and assorted hangers-on participated in the game last weekend at Indiana's Maurer School of Law. What emerged from the exercise was a surprising convergence of strategies that gave an outline to what a new model might look like. These strategies were not radical, and they attempted to address a variety of much-brooded-about problems among the big firms, including client billing revolts, associate dissatisfaction, peripatetic partners, and an unsustainable economic model. What emerged, of course, was governed by the choice of the participants. Included on the roster were members of experimental law firms--both the Summit and Valorem Law Groups--various refugees from big firms, clients with a record of welcoming or demanding different approaches, and a variety of agitators for change, most of whom are my friends. But in an era when the heads of major firms talk openly about abandoning the billable hour, and others admit that they've never embraced it, it's getting harder to identify the radicals by their pinstripes.
The competition was more than a game. Hildebrandt, the consulting firm, put up $15,000 in prize money (to be divided among the participating law students) and attached a consultant to each team.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on May 8, 2009 02:48 PM
Posted to General Law Related