Escaping the Leverage Trap: Part 3 of 6 — The Compensation Reset
still optimize for hours. Here’s why compensation is the linchpin, and a
Escaping the Leverage Trap: Part 2 of 6 — The Practice Area Playbook
the same pace. A 5-tier framework shows what moves when and how to
Two Disruptions, One Industry: Why the Legal Market Is Splitting in Half
At 9:47 AM on February 3, 2026, a managing partner at a mid-sized litigation firm watched roughly $8 billion evaporate from Thomson Reuters’ market cap. By lunch, RELX had shed billions more. The catalyst: Anthropic had launched a legal plugin for Claude.
Escaping the Leverage Trap: Part 1 of 6 — The Forcing Function
On October 8, 2024, Micheal Dineen, vice president of data science at Brightflag, published the number that should have ended every managing partner’s lunch early. Am Law 100 firms had raised their blended billing rates by 10% in a single year, pushing the typical blended rate to $1,057 per hour.
The Email Disclaimer Delusion: Why Your Signature Block Won’t Save Your Privilege
In June 2014, a senior litigation counsel at Unilever sent an educational email to 46 managers in her organization. Buried inside the email’s confidentiality disclaimer, she hid a message: respond with a specific phrase in the subject line, and you win a prize.
The Email Privacy Illusion: Part 3 of 3 — What Healthcare Figured Out That Law Hasn’t
In March 2018, a family law attorney in Columbus, Ohio, discovered that her client’s estranged husband had been reading every email she sent for eleven months.
Your Phone Calls Are Being Recorded: The Privilege Risk No One Is Discussing
In November 2019, a family law attorney in Columbus, Ohio, learned that her client had recorded every phone conversation for the previous fourteen months. Not some calls. Every call. Strategy sessions before depositions. Candid assessments of the judge.
The Email Privacy Illusion: Part 2 of 3 — You Encrypted Everything. It Doesn’t Matter.
In 2014, three weeks into a wrongful termination production at EMC/Kazeon, a paralegal flagged an anomaly in the plaintiff’s email collection. The plaintiff’s attorney had used a properly configured Microsoft Exchange server with Transport Layer Security encryption.
The Spy in Your Pocket: Why Attorneys Need an Air-Gapped Phone
masquerading as e-commerce.\” Here’s why attorneys need separate work
The Email Privacy Illusion: Part 1 of 3 — Your Free Email Account Is Reading Everything You Send
In September 2016, a paralegal on our Kazeon eDiscovery team at EMC finished imaging the email account of a solo practitioner in Northern California. The collection order covered four years of client communications.