If they'd have asked me (or perhaps 95% of the over 1,000 people who have voted in the Volokh Conspiracy poll), I'd have told them the last thing they should be doing is invoking the DMCA. Instead I'd have recommended:

• applying an appropriately liberal Creative Commons license,


• holding a mashup contest, and


• showcasing the winner and the top 9 runners up on the firm's home page.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Then: consider how a virtual law firm (or a very forward thinking conventional one) might be in the perfect position to leapfrog ahead by eliminating the CRM (customer relationship management) line item from its technology and marketing budgets, and instead adopting a client driven, "vendor relationship management" approach to business development.

As Tom explains, lawyers in mid-sized firms (and also in more larger firms than people might expect) are consistently working annd billing more hours than associates. There is no "leverage" and in many mid-sized firms the partner/associate ratio is 1:1 (or less).

What has happened, especially since the notion of minimum billable hours got applied to partners, is that partners hoard work and do not delegate it to associates. The reasons are pretty clear - if your compensation and review is based on making your own quota of billable hours as a partner, then, even though you are defeating the basic economic purpose of having a firm and using leverage with associates, you will make sure that you have sufficient work to make your own billables quota first. In firms that use "billed" or "collected" hours as a measure, the tendency to hoard is even greater.

Tom's post does an excellent job of describing the phenomenon and explaining the many negative consequences that flow from it. Tom's suggestion of a more rational compensation scheme for mid-sized firms is mandatory reading, especially if you are a parther (or a partner-to-be) in a mid-sized firm.

My own take on this is that the work-hoarding partner phenomenon is one of the most insidiously destructive forces at work in law firms today. If you ask senior associates and young partners why they have left firms, it is rare not to hear some variation on this theme.

I applaud Tom for asking the questions and proposing a starting point for finding a solution.

The money quote:

The firm gets a bonus out of the new approach. The firm gains a farm team out of which the future partners and leaders of the firm will come.

It should concern us that Tom has to remind us of the basic truths he notes in his post. More firms, however, should be concerned that the farm team has already left the ranch.

[Technorati tag: gonzo marketing]

The Wired GC has now weighed in with a thoughtful and thought-provoking post taking a client's point of view, the first of what he promises will be several posts on the topic. I can't wait to read them all.

The Wired GC stirs the pot with a couple of must-read observations, but here's the money quote:

(We of course know it’s not about price-fixing.)

Hmmm, there's that one hyphenated word.

I remember an earlier round of associate salary increases back in the dot-com era when I was on my firm's hiring committee. As we considered, all the issues you read about in the discussion of the economics of these issues and the need to raise salaries to attract new lawyers, a good number of my friends in small law firms kept using that hyphenated word - "price-fixing." I never bought their arguments.

The category of this post is called "Provocations." Here comes the provocation and we'll see what discussion we get.

In recent months, I've noticed a ratcheting up of the "protections" of the legal profession from within - stories about lowering the rates of bar exam passage, decisions that law firms can't use certain types of advertising (pit bull ads anyone?), other efforts on preventing "unauthorized practice of law," and and now law firms all over the country raising starting salaries by same amounts in all but unison.

Is the legal profession begging for outside (governmental) investigation, intervention and antitrust regulation?

I'm just raising the question to see what people think, not necesarily as a reflection of my own opinion.

Thanks to the Wired GC for asking some tough question. I highly recommend his post.

The article then goes into detail about what might and might not be permitted in the rounding of time to the nearest billing increment. Read it yourself. I'll simply note that some of the examples referred to specific questionable practices that looked suspicious on their faces.

The most interesting comments are from a law professor who suggests than ANY rounding should be prohibited. In other words, time entries would become 5 minutes, 24 seconds, rather than .1 hour. The technology, she suggests, is available to do this. This might give new meaning to "being on the clock." Before long, embedding chips directly into lawyers' brains might make timekeeping even more accurate.

You might want to read this article right before you read Ron Baker's recent comments about lawyers as knowledge workers.

This might also be a good place to plug my recent white paper on improving time capture for lawyers, a topic which might have become much more interesting to lawyers, especially those in Kansas.

If this article makes you think about alternative billing models, Tom Mighell and I wrote a couple of columns about resources on this topic here and here.

Technorati tags: law practice timekeeping legal ethics billable hour between lawyers

So, it seems that IT departments may be beginning to come to terms with "UGC" and its inevitability as part of the corporate environment. As to the important related policy decisions, though, I certainly hope the norm will be for these to be the ultimate province of other parts of the organization.

I've heard the terms "homesourcing" and "insourcing" to refer to outsourcing work, including legal work, to the US Midwest and other "non-coastal parts of the US. It's an idea that starting to get a lot of discussion and some traction, including in the discussion of Law 2.0. One more piece of "the world is flat" conversation and a new meme to watch..

Thanks to Rob McMay at BusinessPundit.com for the explanation and links.

Technorati tags: farmshoring outsourcing insourcing homesourcing Law2.0