Linked: Cybersecurity Trends | 25% of Law Firms Have Been Breached
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Linked: Cybersecurity Trends | 25% of Law Firms Have Been Breached

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

Law firms are an attractive target because of the data, but also because it might be easier to breach a firm than it would be to hack the clients they represent. As the rest of the article goes on to describe, there are still too many firms without cybersecurity training, proper policies, or incident response plans. That is not going to keep things secure.

On top of that, as I’ve written before, the whole culture in firms is a problem. Anytime you have a large group of people in charge, (partners), who are often not to be questioned, social engineering gets a whole lot easier, and the likelihood that even some policy that exists might get ignored is pretty high.

Linked: Quinn Emanuel Says Lawyers Can Work From Home Indefinitely
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Linked: Quinn Emanuel Says Lawyers Can Work From Home Indefinitely

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

What I am also interested in though, is whether any other staff positions were given the same consideration. If the lawyer can work from anywhere, and the impetus is to attract the best lawyers that they can, there’s no reason the same thing can’t be said about many of the other (granted not all), of the staff positions, right? If the lawyers aren’t coming to the office, why do paralegals, assistants, IT, Accounting, etc. need to?

Does Quinn Emanuel value those folks, and want the top talent at those positions too?

Are Your Long and Late Hours Actually Making you Less Effective?
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Are Your Long and Late Hours Actually Making you Less Effective?

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

Look at it this way, if you’re a client of one of these companies, who do you want doing your work, the associate who hasn’t slept more than 4 hours a night in weeks, or someone who’s actually rested? Who is going to do a better job for you? Who is going to be most cognitively effective?

Why do we keep grinding away at the expense of our own cognitive abilities then?

An Example of the Complex Pressures Facing Law Firms

An Example of the Complex Pressures Facing Law Firms

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

So, if you are a firm with Morgan Stanley as a client, maybe the easy thing is to just say “hey, our huge client wants us back in the office and wants to have in-person meetings, so you’ve got to come back”.

But it’s never really that simple, is it? What do you do if your staff and lawyers really don’t want to be in the office full-time? What if some of the same people who first attracted Morgan Stanley to your firm are willing to leave to work at a firm that is more flexible?

Now that you are only recruiting among the legal folks who want to be in the office five days a week, is your talent up to snuff to keep Morgan Stanley as a client?

Linked: Attorneys’ Remote All-Nighters Are Fueling an E-Discovery Hiring Spree
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Linked: Attorneys’ Remote All-Nighters Are Fueling an E-Discovery Hiring Spree

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

But, should that mean that eDiscovery companies need to be on call to assist with anything beyond an emergency during those late hour sessions? I’m not sure what the answer is, but I know the expectation will definitely be that support is available, which creates a problem for vendors, notably they owe their employees some work-life balance as well. If I’m a project manager on this review, I shouldn’t be expected to be available for all of the variations of work schedules that will exist among a team of lawyers. Thankfully, this is something our industry has started to move away from, but truly moving away from it means hiring more staff to cover those odd hours.

In the absence of that staff being on board though, we are all risking massive turnover if we expect to have 24×7 coverage for these projects.

Is it worth it to set that expectation? Or should we consider something else?