[Ed. Note: Today’s post comes from guest blogger, Steve Nelson from The McCormick Group. – GL] Representatives from virtually all large law firms are claiming that innovation is critical to their future. Indeed, in the recently released Altman Weil, 2020 Law Firms in Transition Survey, 75 percent of the responding firms reported including innovation initiatives in their strategic plan and also have created special projects focused on innovation. But when it comes to empowering professionals within the firm to move those initiatives forward, a McCormick Group White Paper revealed quite a different story.  We found that a majority of…

The 2020 PLLIP Summit is set to kick off on Friday, July 10th.  For the first time ever the Summit will be presented as a virtual event.  While over the past several months, we all have experienced and possibly, over experienced Zoom, WebEx, Google Hangouts, and FaceTime, the Summit promises to be an unforgettable experience.  We asked each speaker to provide some insight into what you can expect from their session.  Keynote Address: Reinventing the Modern Law Firm From Information Out: Embracing the Power of Practical Innovation and the Impact of Raising Your Profile Ari Kaplan, the 2020 Summit…

  While we have a few comedic moments on the podcast (usually unintended), we actually have a real-life comedian, Eugene Cipparone, join us on this week’s episode. Eugene is a lawyer, who took a few years off to join The Second City comedy troop in Toronto, before working his way back into the legal industry as Goodmans, LLP’s Director of Professional Support. With the pandemic, the need for support, and KM resources became critical. Eugene’s ability to understand the needs of his firm and his ability to engage members of the firm in training by telling a comical story…

After 68 episodes and 75 guests, I am concluding the In Seclusion Podcast miniseries today with special guest, David Lat from Lateral Link. Back in March, David announced he had contracted COVID-19, and spent some two and a half weeks in the hospital, much of that time in the ICU. For many of us in the legal industry who knew David from his days running Above the Law, his experience with the virus made the issue very real for us and we followed Twitter and the news closely as he finally came out of the hospital, and is now…

Since Justice Antonin Scalia was not available to be on the podcast, we reached out to Northwestern Law School’s John Paul Steven’s Professor of Law, Andrew Koppelman, and Jackson Walker Labor & Employment attorney, Sara Harris, to fill in. Justice Scalia believed in the concept of textualism when it came to the Court interpreting the law, without allowing one’s personal political bias to play a role. According to Merriam Webster, textualism is “a legal philosophy that laws and legal documents (such as the U.S. Constitution) should be interpreted by considering only the words used in the law or…

This upcoming week will be the final week for the In Seclusion Podcast. It’s been a great run, and I hope that you listen to the final episodes. Last week I had a fantastic and diverse group of guests who shared their stories of life during a pandemic from the perspectives of race, changing jobs, losing their jobs, data security, and looking and writing about the future. We’ve all handled this period of seclusion differently, but we have all learned from each other at the same time. Check out last week’s episodes, and join me as I wrap up this…

On March 23, 2020, I launched what I thought would be a three or four-week project. A daily podcast, called In Seclusion, asking legal professionals how they were dealing with the changes resulting from working from home during a pandemic. My fifteen to twenty-episodes ballooned into 60+ episodes. Lawyers, law librarians, law students, law professors, courthouse personnel, marketing, and many more legal professionals shared their stories with us. We’ve heard how they’ve adapted, what were the good and bad things about working from home, and what permanent changes were going to happen in the legal industry. It’s been a…

I had a chance to talk with a number of people for the In Seclusion Podcast recently who have been holding down the fort, in one way or another, to make sure the wheels of Justice and the economy keep turning. Some of us had to look out for those still caught in the justice system. Some remained in the office to make sure others didn’t need to. Some of us found new ways to provide training and professional development processes. Some of us leveraged the crisis to try new experiments. And some of us made sure that the stories…

We wanted to produce a special episode of The Geek in Review to discuss the tragedy surrounding the murder of George Floyd and the protests which are going on over the past ten days. While we focus our discussion on the legal industry, the issues are certainly not limited to lawyers and legal professionals. We’ve dedicated the entirety of the episode to this topic. Just two months ago we had Bryan Parker on the podcast discussing the need to have a better return on investment when it came to legal talent. In the year 2020, two months feels like two…

As we approach the three-month mark of the pandemic and alternative working environments, it is important to remember that we still provide a service that is focused upon the needs of people. On the In Seclusion Podcast last week, I talked with four consultants and business development professionals to see how they are adjusting to these unique times. The common theme was that we needed to have more personal and professional discussions with our clients, not less. What that means, however, is that those conversations need to be sincere, relevant, helpful, and empathetic. Clients are drinking from a fire hose…

This week on the In Seclusion Podcast, the discussion began a pivot away from how are we adjusting to working remotely, to how are we planning the slow progress toward reopening some offices. Let’s be honest, it is very possible that some legal professionals never go back to the office full time ever again. But, for some, getting back to the office is seen as essential for both their job, and maybe even their sanity. Take a listen to the five episodes from this week from a diverse group of legal professionals around the globe. Monday, May 18th – Navigating …

While most of us in the legal industry were still finding their sea legs when it came to working from home, today’s guests were planning a moon shot experiment of creating a virtual legal conference completely from scratch. Haley Altman and Alma Asay from Litera Microsystems talk with us about their experiences in creating and producing The Changing Lawyer LIVE! virtual conference back in April. There were some victories, and some challenges along the way, but the end result was pretty impressive. As we enter the Summer, many other organizations are looking to do some type of online/virtual conference to…