Legal & Law Firms

how a law firm works as a business: the partnership and why it cannot sell equity, equity versus salaried partners, the leverage pyramid, the billable hour and the fee models replacing it, lateral hiring as the growth engine, mergers and Swiss verein structures, panel procurement, conflicts of interest as a commercial constraint, bar rules on advertising and ownership, and the pressure from ALSPs, the Big Four's legal arms and in-house teams.

4 Lektionen · etwa 1 h

law firm finance: matter-level profitability instead of headline hourly rates, realisation and write-offs, lock-up as the sector's cash disease (WIP days plus debtor days), the arithmetic of the leverage ratio, partner compensation from lockstep to eat-what-you-kill, profit per equity partner and how it is flattered, a partnership's capital structure with partner contributions and no equity market, pricing beyond the hour with capped and fixed fees and retainers, matter budgeting and scope creep, and client e-billing audits.

8 Lektionen · etwa 2 h

business development in a firm that is barred from advertising like a brand: reputation as the product, the directory submission machine of Chambers and Legal 500, referrals between firms and the reciprocity economy, panel tenders and the beauty parade, thought leadership and client alerts, league tables as marketing, the tension between the individual lawyer's name and the firm's brand, relationship partners and client listening, and visibility inside AI answers now that clients ask a model before asking a colleague.

8 Lektionen · etwa 2 h

data in a law firm: time recording as the primary asset and its quality problem, matter and client data, pricing analytics built from historical matters, knowledge management and precedent banks, conflicts-checking data, e-discovery and document review at scale, UTBMS codes and client-mandated reporting, lateral and pipeline analytics, and privilege and confidentiality as a hard boundary that rules out most ordinary data architecture.

8 Lektionen · etwa 2 h

AI in legal work: drafting and reviewing documents, contract analysis, research and the hallucinated-citation sanctions that followed, technology-assisted review in discovery, what happens to the billable hour when the work takes an hour instead of ten, clients demanding the efficiency be passed on, closed deployments forced by privilege, due diligence at speed, and the duties of competence and supervision that make a partner answerable for a model's output.

8 Lektionen · etwa 2 h