Legal Mosaic Essays on Legal Delivery

<strong>Legal</strong> <strong>Mosaic</strong>: <strong>Essays</strong> on <strong>Legal</strong> Delivery
What’s a Quality Law Firm?
Lawyers are not going out of business. And certainly the handful of
brand differentiated firms are not, either. But the business of law is
casting a harsh light on the utility and necessity of the traditional law
firm structure. After all, clients hire lawyers, not law firms.
Justice Potter Stewart’s celebrated “I know it when I see it” obscenity
test also applies to law firm quality. No one can quite say what it is, but
most attorneys and clients claim to know it when they see it. This is a
very subjective standard in a metric driven world.
Law Firm Quality Measures: Hearsay and Brand
How can you tell a “quality” law firm? Simple answer: hearsay. And
brand.
It’s remarkable that a huge global industry like legal service is so devoid
of quality metrics. And it’s ironic that lawyers and clients substitute
assumption for evidence when it comes to judging law firm quality.
Other businesses and professions, of course, have long utilized quality
metrics. Take baseball. It has had performance metrics from its opening
pitch. In the past few decades, a second generation of baseball metrics
has come into play, measuring the impact of performance on outcome.
The baseline performance metrics remain, but the focus is now on how
that influences outcome. Call this the Palsgraf metric: but for a player’s
contribution, would a different result have obtained?
Why do law firm metrics fail to reach first base? And how is law firm
quality evaluated apart from brand and hearsay?
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