Canadian Lawyer

tech Support by danielle olofsson Big Law: selling and supporting what you know There are lots of disruptions in the legal profession but also tremendous opportunities that come with that. "Too many deans are wedded to running their schools as businesses for which U.S. News & World Report rankings supply the definitive means of evaluation. Too many special interests relating to the lending and debt collection industries make a lot of money off the growing lawyer bubble. Too many senior partners in big firms have become accustomed to extraordinary incomes and are unwilling to emphasize long-run values that don't contribute to the current year's bottom line." — Steven J. Harper, The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis T he above quotation summarizes why, according to Harper, the legal profession has become a bubble that will eventually (if it hasn't already) burst with devastating effects. Harper's book chronicles, in detail, some of the events that led to the downfall of firms such as Heller Ehrman and Dewey & LeBoeuf, as well as the decisions that have been made by what are now global firms to increase their revenues prior to mergers. He notes the erosion of individual firm cultures caused by a "hire and fire" attitude to associates and the push to increase revenue through expensive lateral hires with large books of business. There are surely many culprits besides greedy partners, cynical deans, and the debt collection industry responsible for the present state of the profession. For example, one could point to the fickleness of clients that has made long-term 18 august 2013 www.CANADIAN planning very difficult. Over the past 20 years, many clients have moved from loyalty to a single law firm to sending work to many firms only to relocate it again with certain "panels" of preferred service providers or, in the case of the TycoEversheds model, to return to exclusivity. Then there is the question Harper does not address in his study of who conceived the business model the faltering firms followed. Was it lawyers or consultants with no prior exposure to law? An argument could certainly be made that uncritical adoption of management styles that are ill-suited to the firms in question may have played a part in their demise. One could also cite, as Richard Epstein does in his review of The Lawyer Bubble, low-cost online law firms that threaten the L a w ye r m a g . c o m existence of the sole practitioner model and are challenging the rates large firms charge for certain types of legal services — usually the service firms use to train juniors — such as due diligence. Epstein's point, however, proves law schools are not failing students in as stark a way as Harper suggests because they are, in fact, producing graduates who are sufficiently innovative and critical of the legal profession to challenge it through alternative services. It is with these graduates hope for the profession lies. Although undisputable that law, as any profession, is evolving and there are perhaps too many law graduates with large debt loads and no corresponding employment, there are tremendous opportunities not only for recent grads but also for Big Law to "get it right."

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