Showing posts with label law 2.0. Show all posts
Showing posts with label law 2.0. Show all posts
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Add your lawfirm to our Lawfirm Directory (and get featured!)

Monday, May 17, 2010

 

In case you haven’t realize, the Nanotechnology Law blog adds a few links in the tabs: Lawfirm Directory and Add Lawfirm.

Lawfirm directory is a new feature aimed at collecting information about lawfirms practising Nanotechnology related issue. If you fill out the form and request a review, we will consider the application subject to further documentation provided by you.

Please note that the review is not an advertorial. If you request an advertorial, we will have to disclose it in the blog post.

Click here to download the list of firms and here (or scroll below) to fill out the form.

 

Related:

Solo Practicioner Lawyer, a Trend?
The future of work: no cubicle culture, smaller companies, working from home



 

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The future of work: no cubicle culture, smaller companies, working from home

Saturday, August 11, 2007

I am still on the Lawfirm 2.0 topic. This week's edition of business week issued an interesting report about the future of work. The articles are a good news for all (structured) procastinators, freelancers, solo lawyers, outsourcee and those who hates cubicle culture.

Take a look at one of the companies covered by the magazine:
It sounds like the corporate paradise of the future. Workers organize themselves, coalescing around natural leaders and gravitating to the most exciting projects. There are no middle managers, no hierarchies, no fixed assignments.
And its article titled "the wiki workplace":

Nourished on instant messaging, blogs, wikis, chat groups, playlists, peer-to-peer file sharing, and online multiplayer video games, the Net Generation will increasingly bring a heightened comfort with technology, inclination toward social connectivity, more emphasis on creativity and fun, and greater diversity to the companies they work for and to the companies they found themselves.

Eighty million young people are entering the U.S. workforce. Are today's senior managers ready?


The future is a designed chaos, and we love it ;)

Read more.






 

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Solo Practicioner Lawyer, a Trend?

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Wired.com released an article about career 2.0. One of them is lawyering:

The idea of working hard to pay your dues as a lawyer is outdated. The Wall Street Journal says the latest law firm trend is "de-equitization," which is a fancy word for kicking a partner in the pants and throwing him or her out the door. Since there is no longer a safe ladder to climb in big law firms, people will stop climbing and set up shop on their own.

Warning: Lawyers are the most unhappy of all professionals, according to the Colorado Law Journal. But people who work for themselves are among the most satisfied workers, according to Dartmouth economist Daniel Blanchflower (.pdf). Add the two together for a more balanced work life.

Preparation: Success as a lawyer is increasingly about client relations rather than providing Alan Dershowitz-style genius legal representation. Take some marketing courses in college since that's what you'll be spending time on once you hang out your shingle.

If this prediction is correct, we shall see that either the period of partnership tenure or the total amount of partners appointment declining from time to time, and at the same time solo or boutique lawfirm mushroomed. Another possible thing: once these lawyers 'disaggregates' and work as a solo practicioners, they might need to collaborate. Do we have the collaboration engine in place?

 

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Law 2.0 business model: filtering and aggregation

Sunday, July 8, 2007

I have discussed the application of the long tail quite lengthy in several post. Recently David Hornik said in his blog that those who will gain money from the long tail phenomenon are aggregators and filterers:

The aggregators are those web businesses that seek to collect up as much of the Long Tail content as is possible, so as to make their "stores" a one stop shop for content no matter how popular or obscure. The value to consumers from these content aggregators is that they need not shop in dozens of places on the web in order to acquire a diverse set of content. As a result, aggregators are able to extract a disproportionate amount of value for the sale of each individual piece of content.

The filterers are those businesses that make it easier to find the content in which we are interested, despite the increasing proliferation of content creators, hosts, aggregators, etc. Again, while these different filtering technologies may make it slightly more likely that an end user finds his or her way to a piece of obscure content, it will not likely be sufficient to catapult an artist into the mainstream. The beneficiary of the filtering is the end user and the filterer, not the content owner per se.
I have discussed the value of filtering in my previous post:

More choice = more freedom
More freedom = more welfare

# More choice = more welfare (False?)

Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore suggest that the syllogism above could be false. In his book, "The Paradox of Choice", he argued that more choices are essentially good as it reflects improvements, but, there are dark sides of having more choices:

1. Paralysis. We don't choose at all. Many people stays single, right? :)
2. Poor decisions and performance quality. We made bad choices.
3. Dissatisfaction, dissappointment. We are not happy despite our choices.
4. Opportunity costs. The cost in choosing stuff could even be greater than the stuff itself!
5. Time Pressure. Too many choice makes us feel like we are being rushed.
6. Escalation of expectation. When we spent lots of time in choosing, we expect that the stuff we finally choose is a good stuff. When we turned out wrong, we become dissapointed.
7. Self Blame. Good feelings gradually reduces. Bad feelings escalates and change forms.

More choices is better, only if it occurs in any of these two situations. First, Preference Articulation. If you really know hat you want, more choice is better. Most people never have this. Or, second, Alignable Option. If the options can be scaled down to the similar size. Most people never have this too.

How would this be applicable to the legal business? Well, I see several opportunities. First, there are many blogs out there preaching about the law. There are quite so many boilerplates provisions available for free and listing documents (containing contracts) available also for free. The point is how to aggregate them. Some have been doing this through blog aggregators.

Filtering is done by making the best recommendations for clients, which blawgs or which legal service, or which legal form is preferable.

Both arguments above however, comes up with several assumptions:
  1. The legal society willingly shares its content (some fact: nobody shares boilerplates provisions freely, its not like uploading photos in flickr)
  2. Big lawfirms disagregates and legal business is conducted as a small-business (some fact: web 2.0 does not seem to have the power to "disagregate" giant lawfirms, yet)
  3. There is a web 2.0 social networking tool that would enable "small-business" lawyers to collaborate with people from other lawfirms. (some fact: it may not be in the nature of lawyers to collaborate with each other, except when they are defending the same client, of course)


 

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Law 2.0: exchanges with mazyar hedayat

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Mazyar Hedayat posted in his blog a draft business model for Law 2.0. I'll give you a quot:

the business model of the website is simple: users post content for others to download, such as:

  • documents: pleadings, letters, briefs, memoranda, research
  • presentations: power-point, flash, PDF
  • media: videos, photographs
  • applications: applets or widgets

authors and items receive user ratings. highly rated authors and items are featured more prominently. revenue would be generated through

  • e-commerce: host site would take a fair % of the value of each transaction
  • advertising: start simply by deploying ads then work up to sponsorship
  • subscriptions: as mentioned above
  • licensing: application could be licensed for use within an enterprise
The content looks perfect to me. The means are already available. With Google Docs, Google Notebook, Flickr, You Tube and del.icio.us they are virtually already here. But, aside from Creative Commons, I have never seen any boilerplates provision available online for free. Why? What would attract the hourly paid lawyers to tag, post and share their docs on the net? Can the networking power of web 2.0. altered the way legal services are delivered?

If you have a say, join us in this conversation. Give a link and we'll link you back.