Last week I was honored to give the kickoff keynote for the Portland node of the Global Legal Hackathon. The hackathon itself was to follow two tracks, Business of Law and Access to Justice, but I made my case that there are plenty of opportunities to cover both of those topics with product or...

Capturing an authentic, purpose-driven mission statement can have surprising benefits for your entire law practice or law firm. While most people think of a mission as something you do for marketing, studies have shown that purpose-oriented organizations outperform the competition when it comes...

Agile as a comprehensive methodology is fairly new. Although many concepts that are now considered Agile predate the term, we can trace the unified theory to a gathering of software developers and technology managers in early 2001. Frustrated by traditional methods for managing software projects,...

I’m a big fan of flat fees. They do a much better job (than hourly billing) at aligning the interests of the client and her legal team. And, when done correctly, they can simultaneously improve profitability of the work and allow the legal team to scale-up to serve more clients (at that...

When I ask law firm leaders about their mission, they often try to shake me off with something like “Oh, we already wrote up a mission statement as part of our marketing work.” News flash: If you think your mission is something that is only supposed to attract customers then (1) it...