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Mentor
Leaving after one year to another biglaw firm?
Coach
Mentor
Insight on Kirkland & Ellis?
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The irony is that most of these individuals from PE groups will only request to see physicians when it comes to their health or that of their loved ones.
Mentor
100%. Also, I do the same. I always only see MDs or specialists. And it’s not ironic that PE folks do this, they don’t give a shit about literally anything they can’t squeeze a dime out of.
Only big corporations are benefitting from midlevel creep. Healthcare costs won’t go down with midlevel providers. Only quality of healthcare goes down.
Biggest losers are the common folk.
Corporate ownership of law will not bring legal costs down nor make biglaw more affordable to the common folk. If anything it will make legal assistance more expensive, while lawyer salaries on the other hand will fall.
You really think if society continues to lower salary for specialists and biglaw associates, they will continue to attract motivated and capable individuals who are willing to sacrifice their twenties and early thirties?
You’ll be left with folks who went into NPs/PAs. These are folks who don’t want to go through physician training nor assume physician responsibilities but want to make physician salary.
Just ask most new NPs/PAs why they didn’t go to medical school and the answer is almost always the same — they didn’t want to sacrifice personal life. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Something has to give. In this case, the quality of patient care.
Subject Expert
Yep and to cut costs they’ve allowed NPs to basically see patients with extremely little oversight by doctors. One of those NPs could have killed my aunt this week by giving horrible advice that my mom (a doctor) said was wrong and told her to go to the emergency room immediately or she might die. It was pretty bad. Same could happen to law. That’s what you get when you put some balance sheet savvy MBAs in charge with no concept of how to discharge our professional responsibility obligations and no care about the clients
Agree to disagree. Sounds like you’ve been bitten by a PA/NP. Maybe some rejected you even if you are a doctor? And paralegals can’t practice law by the way, so wrong comparison. Paralegals are more like MAs.
I hadn’t thought of it this way, but I think the health care analogy is very powerful. Even “high quality” healthcare has gotten scarily bad, and a huge factor is that doctors are stretched far too thin in the name of higher profits. It’s pretty much gotten to the point where you have to effectively self-diagnose and hope a doctor agrees with you (or hope whatever’s wrong with you easily shows up on a scan) because they have so little time to critically think.
Every PE acquisition of a medical practice was only possible because senior doctors cashed out at the expense of their junior colleagues. So as long as law firm partners don’t put their personal financial interests above those in line behind them we should be all set!
Mentor
Phys 1 even moreso than PE, the biggest scams are nonprofit hospitals, those can be effectively owned by doctors groups as mgmt
FYI - Utah and Arizona have already loosened regulation to permit non-lawyer ownership: https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/loosened-lawyer-regulations-show-promise-utah-ariz-stanford-study-says-2022-09-27/
Mentor
Law firms just don’t have goodwill the way hospitals or doctors groups do. In part that’s bc there isn’t a structural undersupply of lawyers, but in part that’s bc law firm revenue is highly personal to the providers and it is very easy to move providers. If PE tries to squeeze value out firms by raising rates on clients and forcing partners to increase leverage with an army of mediocre underpaid associates, clients will just leave. A smarter PE play would be to build a legal services / process company by welding ironclad to axiom and one of those walmart biglaw firms with offices in every city like dentons or DLA piper to cover the spectrum of services.
Yeah but the only problem with this is that law firms are owned by lawyers lol
Mentor
At various points lawyers have tried to hire non-lawyer business leaders but lawyer egos always seem to get in the way and i think in practice the most they do is advise executive committees
Seems to work fine in the UK.
Mentor
A1 what caused the decimation?
Subject Expert
Doc how much pto do you get?
4 weeks PTO and 1 week CME
True, but ID lawyers would tell you that reality may already be here with how much the carriers control their work, their time, and all the cuts made
Mentor
Why do you think the retail ID market remains so horrible? Carrier micromanagement and underpayment seems to fall away as soon as you get to higher end ID work, so while ID has been this way for a long time the model hasn’t spread. Is it that carriers don’t care if they actually win and their model is more about creating settlement leverage by making litigation more painful for the PI attys?
Coach
Isn’t California allowing some non barred individuals to represent people in court? How would they even work.
Clear a debt record, name/gender change, unemployment claims, expunge a criminal record, adopt a child, there is ZERO value add from an attorney.
There are still regulatory requirements and other professional rules that strictly prohibit non lawyers from practicing law, accessing client files, violating attorney-client privilege or taking any part in the decision of legal representation. Non-lawyers can provide equity and guidance on marketing, business strategy, and other business and administrative functions. Owning an equity stake doesn’t allow non lawyers to be involved in decisions about anything relating to a client engagement or the practice of law. I don’t see PE trying to indirectly squeeze more hours out of a person (partners at some firms already do that) or raise rates (part of the strategy is to make rates more competitive than traditional law firms that have a lot of overhead and real estate). Higher profits will come by the ability to leverage other professional services (think big 4 accounting) and investments in AI and legal technology. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a perfect system but if the counter argument is that equity partners aren’t ever greedy, associates aren’t ever treated poorly by being overworked or laid off when hours dry up and that most of big law makes long term investments on the future with equity capital and not operating on an antiquated model then I’m not sure what’s worse.
The changes to the model rules isn’t specific to PE. It eliminates Rule 5.4 allowing for non-lawyers to hold an equity stake. Not all new models are PE sponsored but instead add folks with complimentary skill sets to lawyers (like financial advisors or software developers) creating new business plans.
I’m not saying there aren’t downsides. I just think the viewpoint is shortsighted. PE or not the legal world (like other industries) is changing and being disrupted by new technologies, generational shifts in values, salary wars for talent with too many firms participating though many of those firms don’t have the revenue or client base to sustain the pace, a seismic shift in remote work and what is likely to be an accompanying wave of certain years of newer attorneys who haven’t benefited by the apprentice type training juniors who work in firms often relied upon as they gained the building blocks needed to practice law.
While I don’t think law or the need for lawyers will go away, the practice of law is going to look a lot different over the next several years and whether or not the rules change won’t stop that trajectory. Legal software, AI, data analytics, and further technological advances will change the job (like it has in the past). How legal services are provided, and how clients pay for services are just some examples. Look at salary distribution curves for new lawyers over the last 25 years and see what the bimodal distribution curve looks like now. The current firm model is simply unsustainable.
Many lawyers don’t have the management or leadership skills to run organizations, lead teams or manage other people, and law schools often don’t provide that sort of training. Most firm structures are inherently flawed because it is the people at the top with the most influence and ability to make changes to firms and they are often the folks with the most to lose if they make them. Big law is notorious for burning and churning through associates and many of them trade their time for lots of money to pay off loans or achieve financial stability with no long term plan to remain in private practice. Those in firm leadership positions often have monetary incentives directly tied to certain practice groups, clients, or certain other attorneys at the firm. All these things cause conflict and dysfunction too that a non-attorney stakeholder won’t have.
The models I have seen so far focus on technological savviness to make processes more efficient, knowledge more easily accessible and communication clearer. If anything, leveraging the strengths of business people and new capital may allow faster client support and more legal work accomplished in a shorter period of time. I’m not sure the basis of your conclusions that hours are higher and everyone would be more miserable. Sure PE wants to make as much money as possible. They’re going to try to do that using business tools, offering synergistic services and more technology. When law firms are pinching pennies or get greedy they cut staff, eliminate bonuses, and raise hour requirements. PE will leverage the tools and strategies that firms DO NOT have and where they will get the most ROI.
The reality is that the industry will continue to change and every lawyer needs to continue to evaluate and navigate all the uncertainty but non lawyer equity interest only scratches the surface of what will affect the industry and the livelihoods of lawyers.