Business of Law

The Elephant In The Room: Advancing Women To Partnership

Despite more focus and investment, the numbers continue to show little progress in advancing women to the top tiers of firm leadership. Considering the irreversible nature of the transformation of the market for top talent, it is time to start experimenting and innovating from the core, rather than from the periphery, say Anusia Gillespie and Scott Westfahl of Harvard Law School.

How Midsize Law Firms Can Minimize Cybersecurity Threats

It can be challenging for midsize law firms to develop an enterprise cybersecurity program that mitigates the eminent threat of data breach and meets the regulatory and compliance requirements of the firm and its clients. This challenge becomes daunting when considering the steady rise in client audits, say K. Stefan Chin of Peckar & Abramson PC and John Sweeney of Logicforce.

A Conversation With Keesal Young CISO Justin Hectus

In this interview, legal industry analyst Ari Kaplan discusses the Electronic Discovery Reference Model questionnaire with Justin Hectus, chief information security officer at Keesal Young & Logan, a Pacific Rim-based law firm with a national litigation practice.

Weekly Column

Innovating For Wise Juries: Matching Experts

In the penultimate installment of this series, Stephen Susman, Richard Lorren Jolly and Dr. Roy Futterman of the NYU School of Law Civil Jury Project answer a question on many legal analysts’ minds: What if both sides’ expert witnesses sat in a hot tub discussing the case while a jury watched?

Rebuttal

The Rise Of Midsize Firms

Recently, this publication featured an op-ed in which one law firm partner contended that midsize firms will be the next casualty of the legal market, due to a supposed inability to compete with BigLaw or boutique firms for business. Though we can expect to see Am Law firms continue to lead the market in megadeals and life-or-death litigations, by all indications midsize is on the rise, says Ronald Shechtman of Pryor Cashman LLP.

5 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Submitting Litigation AFA

Outside counsel should be able to articulate why she is proposing an alternative fee arrangement for this matter. If the client has not requested an AFA or the case is unusually difficult to budget with accuracy, this might not be the case to propose an AFA, say attorneys with WilmerHale.

How Mobile Apps Can Benefit Your Practice

Despite the boom in mobile application development, many lawyers are still reluctant when it comes to using apps in their daily work. Attorney Sean Cleary explores the benefits and shares some recommendations for apps geared toward attorneys.

Rebuttal

The Future Of Litigation Finance Is Analytics

In a recent Law360 guest article, Christopher Bogart of Burford Capital LLC claimed that "while theoretically well designed to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, big data and AI currently lack the ability to do so usefully in a commercial litigation financing context." But AI can manage many of the tasks that litigation financiers would otherwise perform, says Eva Shang, co-founder of Legalist Inc.

Series

My Strangest Day(s) In Court: The Life Partners Bankruptcy

The bankruptcy courtroom was filled with interested investors. They hung on every argument and every word of testimony. When Life Partners management argued that the allegedly fraudulent business model worked just fine, they cheered, recalls Joseph Wielebinski of Munsch Hardt Kopf & Harr PC.

Where AI Meets Cybersecurity And The Legal Profession

Artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to be a major focus for the legal community, whether as an isolated topic, as it intersects with cybersecurity, or within the legal profession itself. Each of these raises unique concerns for attorneys, says Randy Sabett, vice chair of Cooley LLP's privacy and data protection practice group.