Law And More

Viewabill Software Displays Law-Firm Billing To Clients In Real Time - Alan Dershowitz Co-founder

"Viewabill markets software that allows clients to monitor attorney billing in real time, with an eye toward tighter management, smarter budgeting, and fewer surprises at the end of the month for in-house general counsel. Clients use a computer 'dashboard' to monitor attorney hours ..." Paul Barrett, "Clients Can Monitor Legal Bills in Real Time," in Bloomberg, January 29, 2015. Here is the article.

Finally clients are getting some kind of transparency on how the meter is running. And since it's happening in real time they can stop the clock, asking questions and registering concerns. A smart move is having Alan Dershowitz a co-founder. Even though dragged into the Lolita scandal, he's still a force in the legal sector. Having him behind Viewabill is like having Robert Spiro, of O.J. Defense fame, associated with LegalZoom.

Of course, Viewabill initially was a hard sell. It positioned and packaged the software as empowering clients to gain control over billing practices. The law firms didn't cotton to being monitored in quite that way.

So, as Barrett explains, Viewabill rebranded the concept. The benefit of the software is framed as allowing collaboration between the law firm and client in how the case is being managed. More than 100 law firms, including Reed Smith, subscribe to the service. 

Adam Levine, Former Bush White House Spokesperson, Sued by TPG Global

"Private equity firm TPG Global has sued its former global head of public affairs, Adam Levine, alleging in federal court that the former White House spokesman took confidential documents and threatened to disclose information to the press to harm the firm." - Greg Hazley, "Private Equity Giant Sues PR Exec Over Alleged Leak," in Odwyerpr.com, January 29, 2014. Here is the article.

Essentially this story comes down to the question: Is Adam Levine an authentic whistleblower or a professional attempting to get revenge on an employer which didn't promote him to partner. 

Levine joined TPG in 2008. In addition to the White House position, he had been an executive in communications at Goldman Sachs and a producer for "Hardball with Chris Matthews." His own spokesperson Barbara Rohn, reports Hazley, states that he lost that job with TPG after

" ... he had alerted TPG senior management to serious issues of non-compliance and defrauding its investors of millions of dollars in fees and expenses." 

The private equity group claims he threatened to leak information to the media, plant negative stories and secretly accessed the organization's proprietary and confidential information.

The complaint requests return of documents in Levine's possession, complete information about who already viewed them, and damages.  

Female MBAs In Finance Earn Less Than Males, Even In Same Niches

"In a survey of 9,965 graduating MBAs, conducted for Bloomberg BusinessWeek's 2014 business school ratings, we found a pattern of compensation inequality that was particularly pointed in financial services." - Akane Otani and Jonathan Rodkin, "Women Can't Get Equal Pay in Finance No Matter What The Do" in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, January 29, 2015. Here is the article.

Female law associates and partners who sense there is pay discrimination at their firm, based on gender, now know they are not alone. BBW found that the average gap for females on Wall Street, even if they worked in the same niches as males, was $21,872. 

However, the extent of this might be due to the reality that males tended to enter the most lucrative niches on a regular basis. Those included commercial and investment banking. Females tended to gravitate to the lower-paying categories of insurance, brokerage and pension funds.

Women in professional services, which are relatively well-paying, might not to want to rock the boat by generating any activism. That's analogous to when my generation of women (with our cute bow-ties) entered Corporate America. We were so grateful just to have been "allowed in." We made amounts of money beyond our wildest dreams.

UPDATE:

On Abovethelaw.com today, Staci Zaretsky has a post on sexism in the legal profession. Here you can read that. What prompted the article was that Zeretsky received an email requesting she stop covering that topic. So, of course, she didn't.

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Legal Blogs - They're Not Only Niche, They're Personal

"You should think of a blog as a niche magazine." - Kevin O'Keefe, "How Effective Is A Law Blog For The Entire Law Firm?" in Abovethelaw.com, January 28, 2015. Here is the article.

Because blogs are niche entities, expert about that medium Kevin O'Keefe recommends that lawyers in a law firm each have his or her own blog. A general law blog, containing posts about diverse issues in law, would turn off readers. They come to a blog for narrow or niche subject matter.

In addition to being niche vehicles, blogs are personal. They're not white papers. Therefore, from the get-go, the blog should embody the lawyer's personality, values, unique way of presenting and supporting a point of view and rhetorical style. 

Over time, the lawyer's voice might change. Everything else is changing. Readers will probably welcome that shift. After all, they are living out that change in real time. That the lawyer is picking up on it will strengthen the bonds with the audience.

 

McDonald's & BigLaw - The (similar) Pickles They're In

The McDonald's Crash will go down in history as happening in the year 2015. Its leader Don Thompson was ousted, which was akin to John Akers' being ousted from IBM in the early 1990s. Yeah, a big bang, by any way you measure it.

In Bloomberg Business Week, Susan Berfield looks at some of went wrong at McDonald's. At the top of the list she fingers the reverence for the "system" or the McDonald's way of doing things. Sounds a lot like how IBM had been. Remember the IBM Way.

Also, it sounds a lot like what triggered BigLaw's Crash in 2007, which most law firms haven't recovered from. There too the "system" or the way BigLaw did things was almost a religion. It hasn't changed much.

Highly paid first-year associates, who know very little about practicing law, are still hired annually. The power of partners still dominates. The billable hour still lives.

Both McDonald's and BigLaw ignored the sea change in the marketplace. When Thompson took over, every aspect of the business was under attack. That was 2.5 years ago and the changes introduced were incremental. Casual dining Panera became more and more attractive. And there wasn't that much of a price differential. We love the soup and Panera provides the recipe online.

BigLaw essentially also went the incremental route. That took the form of focusing on cost efficiency. Expenses were cut but they kept creeping up any way. Radical change was needed at most firms to re-start growth. A handful are doing well. The rest, unless they find a merger partner, could disappear. 

The system is so entrenched at McDonald's that the question bouncing around the media is if it can get its mojo back. The same question is bouncing around among management experts about BigLaw. One or both may surprise us. But I doubt it. 

On-Demand Economy - We're Ambivalent (That's An Understatement)

" ... a host of lawsuits [e.g. against Uber, Lyft, Handy and CrowdFlower], protests and forums organized by and for [on-demand] workers suggest that many flexible laborers feel less enthusiastic about the new model of work." - Lauren Weber and Rachel Emma Silverman in "On-Demand Workers: 'We Are Not Robots'" in The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2015. Here is the article (sub. req.) 

Just as when the Internet became a fact of life in commercial and personal relations, the on-demand economy will begin generating court verdicts about what's against the law. The wild-west or anything-goes ethos will be tamed.

As you well know, going if not gone are the days when posters on Facebook could assume that they could say anything and everything. Gone eventually will be the era when all too many of us on-demand workers are at the mercy of those who outsource the assignments. But that, of course, won't be soon enough.

There are, though, signs of progress. For example, as the WSJ reports, in response to a class-action lawsuit by on-demand workers about compensation against CrowdFlower, a "California district judge rejected its [settlement] offer in December, indicating the company didn't go far enough in compensating workers." 

Until the law catches up with the growing free-agent economy, however, we will continue to be ambivalent. On the one hand, just as contract document reviewer Alex Rich blogs on Abovethelaw.com, we recognize we are fortunate to have assignments. We all know those who continue to search for a traditional full-time position and have had to give up their apartments. There are fewer and fewer of those kinds of work situations. Chasing them can mean a ticket on the Homeless Express. 

In addition, some of us value the flexibility and the option to turn down work we don't want to. Both flexibility and the ability to say "no" are rare in the conventional workplace. The full-time employees in Fry's Supermarket here in conservative Arizona were chatting about family leave today. They recognize it's a legal right but the tone indicated they wondered how the powers-that-be will perceive employees who take it. 

On the other hand, we on-demand workers are continually hustling. It is Job #1 to land the assignments. Lots of folks are competing. When eLance (which has section for legal-service providers) posts a decent-paying assignment in communications, very quickly there are more than 25 bids. Likewise on Outsource.com, where you play to pay. A six-month subscription with Outsource.com costs about $130. The opportunity which pays more than $500 will immediately have about 15 bids, each of which "costs" the bidder seven to nine of the 30 credits alloted each of the six months of the subscription.

Job #2 is negotiating the terms and conditions. Good luck finding a fit with an organization which will pay a living wage. Given the gluts in fields like law and writing, there has been tremendous wage deflation. 

Job #3 is ensuring timely payment. What helps is having a middleman, such as eLance, doing the collecting. The client has to deposit the payment due in escrow.

If there's no middleman, then free agents have to develop a sixth sense about which organizations are planning from the get-go to stiff the worker. The best policy is to stick with known entities. Sure, that limits the playing field but it beats the soul-crushing experience of not being paid.

And, Job #4 is emotionally and financially weathering those times when demand is down. The holidays and periods of bad weather have proved to be horrific. Early this week, my communications boutique was slow. There were no bites about possible assignments from the snowy New York Metro area. That's where the money is. Only this evening things started picking up on the East Coast.

Of course, we free agents are not out here without concrete help. There is the New York Freelancer's Union. At the turn of the century, Mediabistro.com was founded with the mission to provide low-cost medical and dental insurance, courses, assignment leads and a virtual place to hang out for freelancers in communications. There will be much more of that. 

But the bottom line is that the courts, along with regulatory agencies, will be empowing on-demand workers to earn a decent living with dignity and less angst. Until then, we can expect the same kind of harried existence Everyman and Everywoman experienced during the First Industrial Revolution. Charles Dickens chronicled those hard times. On a bad day, you might read some of his novels. 

 

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Juan Monteverde: Faruqi & Faruqi Partner/Rainmaker Leverages "Too Drunk" Defense

"Embattled Faruqi & Faruqi LLP partner Juan Monteverde took the witness stand in New York federal court Monday to deny allegations that he sexually assaulted an associate after a holiday party in 2011, telling jurors he was too drunk at the time to 'consummate the act.'" - Max Stendahl in "Faruqi Atty Tells Jury He Was Too Drunk To Perform," Law360, January 26, 2015. Here is the article (sub. req.)

Does it hurt a law partner's reputation or personal brand to admit in a public forum such as the courtroom that he became so intoxicated that, well, sex was impossible? Time will tell. 

No matter how the jury rules in this sexual harassment trial, however, the brands of the firm Faruqi & Faruqi, rainmaker Juan Monteverde, and plaintiff Alexandra Marchuk have been bruised. The issue is if they have been blown up into a billion pieces which can't be put together again.

This is exactly why organizations and individuals are increasingly avoiding litigation. Discovery, followed by a trial, jury or bench, opens the door to all sorts of negative information being disclosed. 

Can Monteverde enter a restuarant, a client conference room, a beauty contest to pitch his firm's services, a negotiating table, or a courtroom on behalf of clients without anticipating snickers. All the world loves data about sexual performance or the lack of it.