Author: Jordan Furlong
Jordan Furlong is a leading analyst of the global legal market and forecaster of its future development. Visit his website and blog. Email jordan@law21.ca. Twitter @jordan_law21.
Legal services: starting from scratch
Suppose that, tomorrow, you needed to create a business that provides legal services – but law firms had never been invented, and you didn’t have that reference point to use as a template. Being a sensible and forward-thinking person, you might come up with an entity that featured many of the following characteristics: A privately […]
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Where next for alternative legal services providers?
There have been two distinct waves of foundings of alternative legal services providers (ALSPs): one from 1999 to 2007, including outsourcing companies such as Integreon, Axiom, Relativity, Consilio, Exigent, Pangea3 and Lawyers On Demand; and then another from 2010 to 2015, including the new wave of tech companies such as Neota Logic, Ravel Law, ROSS […]
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The intangible law firm
A view from across the pond. Remember all those ludicrous predictions you kept hearing about how law firms were some day going to invest heavily in intelligent technology that could do legal work? Funny thing about that: some day is today. Here’s what’s actually happening, right now, with advanced technology in law firms: Kira Systems’ machine-learning document […]
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Blogging for law firms
In all the recent excitement over the three famous brand options, we sometimes forget that blogs started it all; equally, we can confidently predict that if unforeseen disasters were to befall social networking, blogs would be the last ones standing. As before, this post will look at the use of blogs in the enterprise context, […]
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Twitter for law firms
It’s easy to use Twitter poorly, something millions of users demonstrate every day by updating their followers about what they’re doing, thinking or feeling at any given moment. There are extremely few people whose opinions and emotions are so compelling and central to the public good that we should hang on every character (up to […]
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LinkedIn for law firms
Speaking generally, I’m much less bullish on what LinkedIn can do for law firms than what either Facebook or Twitter can offer. I’ve come to view those as dynamic platforms that offer interesting and even exciting possibilities for law firms to tell their stories and shape their online personas. LinkedIn, by contrast, is more a […]
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Facebook for law firms
Should law firms develop a presence on the social networks? A small minority of individual lawyers actively network on blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter and perhaps also on Facebook, though the majority are infrequent users of these services. Now law firms themselves are taking tentative steps to establish an official presence. In the first of a series […]
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Beyond collaboration
In his groundbreaking book The End of Lawyers?, law professor and futurist Richard Susskind discusses ten types of “disruptive legal technologies” that will shred the existing business models of most law practices. One of those forces is “closed client communities” that draw upon their members’ collective wisdom in legal matters to produce a knowledge database […]
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