This past week, American Lawyer.com posted a video of a conversation with Ernst & Young's Global General Counsel, Trevor Faure, discussing the future of the law firm model, as well as the client model.
Some of the highlights of the interview include:
- Currently, GC's are facing the application of world class business methodology to the practice of law.
- Attorneys across the board are being asked to increase coverage, compliance, and client satisfaction, while minimizing costs and stabilizing headcount.
- To do this, attorneys need to -- on some level -- define, measure, and analyze elements of the business, including financial efficiency.
- If GC doesn't address the issues of efficiency, then Finance or Procurement will.
- While lawyers may be conservative by nature -- and perhaps not the most comfortable with data and financial management -- they are nonetheless facing demands for financial efficiency driven by globalization.
- The challenge for lawyers is to become business astute, which means facing the imperative of translating complex, subjective, unpredictable services into some sort of metric-based management.
- This challenge applies to every size of law firm or general counsel.
- Even when the economy completely rebounds, the re-evaluation of the attorney/client relationship is not going to revert to pre-recession status, because...
- Globalization is a one-way street. The movement of capital around the world seeking the highest return is resulting in both law firms and clients building and designing efficiencies that they are not likely to give back.
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