Arrival of Foreign Legislation Firms in India 

Posted by abdul wahab on July 2nd, 2022

A possible upside to the recent economic downturn is that numerous previously accepted business models are increasingly being revealed as needing substantial reinvention or even total elimination. The billable hour/leverage law firm model for legal services is one of these brilliant increasingly maligned business models, and is currently appearing to stay threat of ending up in the dustbin of history. Specifically, even those who benefit handsomely from the billable hour, like the Cravath firm's many 0 hourly lawyers, now realize the fundamental irrationality of charging a customer for time spent as opposed to value provided. This alone should signal that change is in the air.

Notwithstanding the growing conversation about the requirement for alternative client service models, I fear that nearly all IP law firms will either make an effort to disregard the desire for change or will respond by offering only incremental modifications with their 台北民事訴訟律師 existing methods of providing legal services for their clients. As someone with considerable experience coping with IP lawyers, I believe that, unfortunately, the conservative nature of all IP attorneys ensures that IP firms will more than likely lag behind in client service innovations. Thus, I'm of the opinion that many prestigious and historically highly profitable IP law firms will in the near future cease to exist.

I reach this conclusion consequently of various salient experiences. In one of these brilliant, several years ago, I approached a managing partner of a well-known IP law firm with suggestions of how exactly to decrease the amount of attorney hours expended on client matters. In those days, the firm was beginning to see considerable rebel from clients about the cost of routine legal services. I noted to the managing partner that he could lower the cost non-substantive e.g., administrative client IP matters, by assigning such tasks to lower billing paralegals. His response to this idea: "If paralegals did the task, what can the first and 2nd year associates do?"

Obviously, the central premise of the managing partner's response was that in order to keep carefully the gears of the firm's billable hour/leverage partner model turning smoothly, he needed to keep the young associates busy billing by the hour. The existing paradigm of his law firm required that it keep hiring associates to increase partner leverage and ensure that they efficiently billed clients by the hour, with an important portion of every associate's billed time directly going into the partner's pockets. Left out of this business design was if the clients' best interests were properly served by the model that best served what the law states firm's partnership.

Clearly, this law firm was not well managed, that might serve being an excuse for the managing partner's self-serving perspective on client IP legal services. However, my experience as a corporate buyer of IP legal services further revealed that that the billable hour/leverage partner business model was an arrangement that frequently ut the client--which was now me--after what the law states firm's interests.

Being an in-house counsel spending several 0K's annually for legal services at numerous respected IP firms, I consistently felt that when I called outside counsel for assistance the initial believed that popped to the lawyer's mind was "So glad she called--I wonder how much work this call is going to result in?" More regularly than not, I obtained the sense that my outside IP lawyers viewed my legal concerns as problems for them to solve on a hourly basis, much less problems that might affect the profits of the company which is why I worked. The difference is subtle, but critical: the context of the former is lawyer as a service provider, whereas the latter is lawyer as a small business partner.

Against these experiences, I was not surprised at what I heard recently when discussing my feelings concerning the billable hour/leverage model with somebody friend at among the top IP specialty law firms in the US. This partner echoed my sentiments about the requirement for innovation in IP client services. However, she also indicated that many of her firm's partners don't recognize that there is a problem with the direction they currently provide IP legal services for their clients. As she told it, many of her more senior partners have been living well on the billable hour/leverage model, so they really currently see little need to modify their behavior. My partner friend nonetheless realizes that her law firm is critically ill and will probably soon experience something comparable to sudden cardiac arrest. Sadly, she's not really a member of her law firm's management and, since there is no upper level recognition that change will become necessary, it would serve little purpose on her behalf to improve her concerns to those partners who could effect change (and would not likely be politically expedient for her to complete so).