The Wall Street Journal published an article today called “First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Law Schools.” The basic premise is that the costs are outweighing the benefits. The authors claim that the total cost of going to law school is around $275,000 which leads to higher legal fees to citizens as it…
Recently, the New York Times published an article called At Well-Paying Law Firms, a Low-Paid Corner. In short, the paper is reporting that some very well known firms are hiring lawyers at cut rate prices (less than half) of what associates on partner track are making at the firm. And these cheaper resources are performing…
One of my absolutely favorite lawyers has started a blog: Reliance on Counsel. It’s written by Rich Baer, currently the general counsel and chief administrative officer at Qwest Communications. It’s going to be a must read for anyone wanting to see how one of the most innovative lawyers in the country thinks. Rich has promised a…
I thought I had seen about every possible way that a startup could market itself. Until now. Ladies and Gentlemen, I now present you Brightleaf’s marketing “materials” for their launch at LegalTech in New York this week. (In all seriousness, they are doing a great job with their automated document platform and more instructive videos…
Today, the Silicon Flatirons posted a report called Law 2.0: Intelligent Architecture for Transactional Law. It is the work product of a half-day roundtable held at the CU law school featuring an international gathering (yes, we had someone from Canada) of lawyers, academics and technologists who are passionate about the future business models of practicing law. The…
If you are a reader of this blog, or Brad’s you know that we are keenly interested in the ideal that we should be able to arrive at a model document set for venture financings. Whereas, I argued that he’d never succeed in coming up with a standard set of seed documents, I used the…
Law.com has a great interview with Rich Baer, General Counsel and CAO at Qwest. I find 99% of interviews worthless, but this is one of the few that allows the reader to actually understand the subject a bit. The premise of the interview is that Rich is moving on from Qwest after the announced merger…
I recently got a demo of Spindle Law, a new crowd-sourced legal research site that’s part legal treatise, part wiki, and part lawyers’ forum for discussion. Spindle Law organizes the law hierarchically with topics leading to ever-narrowing legal rules. Instead of searching the text of cases or other authorities and then teasing out the legal…
My partner Brad recently wrote a blog post commenting on the proliferation of standardized seed financing documents. The post was motivated by the highly-publicized release of the fourth instantiation of such a standard series of documents, this time by Ted Wang at Fenwick & West with collaboration from a group of bay-area early stage VC’s…
The guys over at Legal River emailed today and let me know about a new product offering that they’ve come up with called Attorney River. Attorney River is trying to help improve upon the lawyer directory model, i.e. Martindale, which has not seen a lot of innovation in the last few decades. Attorney River allows…