The Greatest American Lawyer

Regurgitation Thursday: Our Duty to Help Other Lawyers Be Professional

Topics covered in this episode of GAL Radio:

• Restoring the legal profession back to its professional status

CIRCA March 5, 2005: Our duty to help other lawyers be professional

Welcome to GAL Radio brought to you by the Greatest American Lawyer Blog. Once again, we continue to look back. Back to 2005. To some of my earlier blog posts. Today we’re going to look at a post titled "Our duty to help other lawyers be professional."  This is a post that I did in March of 2005 after receiving a letter from an attorney essentially suggesting that I had made statements that I had not, looking to leverage our conversation into something that it wasn’t. It happens on occasion. It happens to all of us. We run into a lawyer that seeks to gain advantage at the expense of professionalism. In our local bar in Grand Traverse,County we have a huge problem. Many of the lawyers, especially the ones over 50, really do dislike each other. There are warring factions within the bar and not near the camaraderie that you typically find in a local bar association in a small-medium sized town. I, myself, have been physically threatened by local attorneys to the point where judges actually had to call bailiffs in, in order to ensure that my physical safety was ensured. We must start with lawyers, if we are to restore our profession to its professional status. So without further ado, here is a post back from 2005 Our duty to help other lawyers be professional:

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Regurgitation Thursday: Building the Service-Centered Firm

Topics covered in this episode of GAL Radio:

• Customer service as a priority within your business model
• Alternative billing and innovative business models for law firms

CIRCA January 25, 2005: Building the Service-Centered Firm

Welcome to this edition of GAL Radio brought to you by the Greatest American Lawyer Blog. This week, we are looking back to a post I drafted on January 25, 2005 called Building the Service-Centered Firm.  The point of this post was that law firms are so focused on hourly billing that they forget that they are service firms, and that customer service needs to be a priority within the business model.  If we are indeed a capitalistic economy, then why haven’t law firms been more motivated to focus on client service?  It seems that too many firms simply want to get people on their retainer agreements and bleed the client dry.  So here’s my rendition, my rereading of the post from January 2005 called Building the Service-Centered Firm:

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Regurgitation Thursday: Non-Solo Karma

Topics covered in this episode of GAL Radio:

• Buildings and Grounds of the Grand Traverse Commons
• My new office

CIRCA January 14, 2005: Non-Solo Karma

Play GAL Radio: Non-Solo Karma

Here are some great photos of the Grand Traverse Commons:

Regurgitation Thursday: Re-Defining Legal Value

Topics covered in this episode of GAL Radio:

• Alternative billing and delivering value to clients
• The benefits of value-based billing

CIRCA December 28, 2004: Re-Defining Legal Value

The question presented is can lawyers provide legal value to clients in fewer hours and thus less cost? Anyone who has worked in a law firm knows the answer is a resounding 'yes' in many types of cases and matters.  Lawyers must,  however, commit to find legal solutions for clients as opposed to creating problems which 'front' for an excuse to bill (or allowing an angry client to make poor decisions which provide little value but drive costs up), (2) to handle cases and matters which are within your core talents and (3) farm out issues and matters to other 'value billing lawyers who specialize in such matters.

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Regurgitation Thursday: How to Quit Your Law Firm

Topics covered in this episode of GAL Radio:

• How to quit your law firm.
• You don't need your firm as much as you think you do..
• You don't need to sneak out the back door with files and clients.
• What would the Greatest American Lawyer do?.
• Jump.  Jump.  Jump.

CIRCA December 26, 2004: 

The ‘I Quit’ Conundrum I can appreciate why many lawyers want more certainty about where they are going to land before they jump out of the plane.  This usually involves looking for shared office space or your own rental space. Do you tell other members of the local bar under illusion of confidentiality or other potential resources that you are leaving before telling your law firm?
I have to laugh at the thought that just popped into my head, “What would the Greatest American Lawyer (“GAL”) do?”   

Play Show: The ‘I Quit’ Conundrum

Regurgitation Thursday: Who is The Greatest American Lawyer?

Topics covered in this episode of GAL Radio:

• Practicing towards an ideal rather than a minimum number of billable hours.
• Clients could use a super hero to protect them from their own lawyers.
• How to tell when someone you know has been abducted by aliens.
• It’s the end of the year and the hourly billing clock will start again on January 2.  Now is the time to reflect and consider your own plight as an attorney.
• Jump.  Jump.  Jump.

CIRCA 2004: 

I have already been asked the question, “Why did you call this blog “The Greatest American Lawyer?”  No, I am not referring to myself (I shun egos and refuse to include my own name in my firm name, as I did back in the mid-1990s when I founded my first firm out of the trunk of my fancy car), but to an ideal.  The Greatest American Lawyer is a set of standards which I aspire to, which standards I will share with you as I embark on my new non-solo practice.  These ideals fly in the face of what many of us have come to understand as the common methods of legal practice. These standards focus on both the “professional” aspect of what we do without compromising our right to receive value for value delivered.  Here is the remainder of the post from 2004 called Who Is The Greatest American Lawyer? And check out the GAL Radio broadcast below while you are at it with the original post re-read by GAL with insights and commentary not found on the original post.

Play Show

Introducing Regurgitation Thursdays & GAL Radio ... This is Going to Be Ugly!

Oh man.  Reading back through some of my posts from 2004 makes me a little bit proud, a lot nostalgic but mostly amazed. I must have been crazy to think I could quit my partnership and start my own firm based on alternative billing techniques and business models?  Or was it aliens which drove me to jump .. jump ... jump?   Even if I was crazy or alien-inspired, I have to brag a little here.   Most of my 2004 predictions came true, and many of my dreams in the process.  

What I know for sure is that many of those early posts are worth re-reading.  Even better, how about we launch our own Radio station called GAL Radio and broadcast those posts as read by me as audio files, the author of the Greatest American Lawyer Blog? 

From here on out, every Thursday will be "Regurgitation Thursday" where we will dig up an old blog post, broadcast it through GAL Radio and, yes, comment on it ad nauseum. 

Sound fun?  I think you will enjoy listening to my 2004 insanity as much as I enjoy re-living it.  We already did one broadcast below.  Mark your calendars and make sure not to eat Chinese food on Wednesday nights.   This week will explore how and why this blog got its name, what I have in common with Rasheed Wallace and whether non-solo practice might be for you too. In the meantime, here is the GAL Radio show from last week.  Enjoy ...

Déjà Vu from 2004: Don’t call me a solo

Déjà Vu from 2004: Don’t call me a solo

Over the next few months, I will be re-posting some of my early articles as I launched the Greatest American Lawyer Blog, quit my partnership at my old firm, and started the process of reinventing myself and the practice of law.

2004.12.22 Don't call me a solo.

Don't Call Me A Solo! (Play GAL Radio)

I will not be a solo-practitioner when my shingle [make that a banner] finally gets tacked above my door. I am striking out to be a 'Non_Solo Lawyer.'   

I am after all already a node in the IP world filled with resources, information and other non-solos. The shared resources among practice groups in a 1000 person mega firm separated by walls, floors and cities are not much different (albeit smaller) than the world of non-solos connected together over IP.  Technology is the answer we have been waiting for.  Efficiency, communication, outsourcing and vertical specialization are the promise of correctly used technology. 

A pundit asked recently how big firms will evolve over the next decade.  Pundits answered in all sorts of ways.  But none mentioned that  solos tied together offering more options and talent than the largest firms with niche areas of specialization will become new competitors to the largest firms.  Non-solo practitioners with controlled overhead, nimble business models based on common principles but each built on the 'no-boss' principle will compete against the Goliath.  Why would any client want the best lawyer within the practice group in a firm, when they kind have the best in the state, country or world? The Greatest American Lawyer is in the house and its time to change everything we have come to know about the practice of law.  This site will chronicle my departure from a 10 lawyer 40 employee law firm in a medium United States town.  It will include everything any lawyer needs to know about starting their own firm, from business plans to technology, from software to office space. After all, if you really are the best at what YOU do, why would you want to allow others to tell you how and why to practice law?  If you have the confidence of the value that you can provide clients, you will succeed over time, over mountains and defiantly as a non-solo.

Introducing GAL Radio: The Greatest American Lawyer Blog Now Owns Its Own Radio Station!

You may have noticed a recent post titled "All Client Value Should Be Visible: GAL Radio Spotlight", we premiered GAL Radio which allows you to not only read the commentary and insights of GAL authors, but listen to them in a radio format (yes, we know it’s the same technology  as podcasting but who knows what that is, right?). 

Look forward to a regular broadcasting schedule and interesting guests over the coming weeks.  And remember, never pick a fight with a person who owns his own radio station.:-) 

All Client Value Should Be Visible: GAL Radio Spotlight

Launch Radio Player! If you were to check the hourly billing entries of many lawyers against the file, you would see a tremendous amount of activity, which is not reflected by any documentation.  In cases where there is documentation (such as a research memo), there isn’t a follow-up to the client providing them with the results of billed services. 

One of the benefits of an extranet system is that literally every piece of documentation, research, analysis, threaded discussion, digital files, etc. is uploaded into the system.  Moreover, we take the approach that you can’t provide value unless it is documented.  Our deliverables on the front-end are documented.  Moreover, we always take the background facts, cases, leverage, risk/reward analysis, strategy, and recommendations and put them into a mind map or other documented analysis for the client to understand.  In short, one of the deliverables is always a sit down or GoToMeeting with the client to go over the project deliverables and outcomes.