Post Category → BigLaw

Startup Law Hack: Get to Know Your Associate

One common gripe that you’ll hear around the startup community is that a startup using a large law firm will simply be “thrown to a junior associate.”  If you’ve read my post “In Startup Law, Big Can Be Beautiful” you’ll understand my perspective on this.

Junior associate can mean someone who is truly clueless about what they are doing.  But with the right firm, it can also mean someone who:

  • has been assigned tasks appropriate for their skill level, with senior-level oversight
  • has access to other more experienced (read: expensive) attorneys when they’re actually needed
  • has access to institutional knowledge and resources within the firm to efficiently handle most of your basic needs, and
  • because they are early in their career, will be much easier to get ahold of than a senior attorney managing dozens of much larger clients.

Much like how properly-run hospitals efficiently distribute work, with the assistance of technology, between specialists, general practitioners, nurse practitioners, etc., you won’t find any problem with being assigned (not dumped) to a junior associate if the firm you’re working with knows what its doing.  You’ll get better service because of it.

The logical conclusion of this is, when you approach a firm, you should care just as much about the junior associate assigned to your company as you do about the partner/senior attorney.  Research their junior associates, and don’t be afraid to request one.  This will probably surprise the firm a bit, but there’s nothing wrong with making sure you are well served both at the senior and junior level.  Within any firm, there can be wide variance between associates who are there just trying to earn a paycheck and pay off debt, and those who love working with entrepreneurs and have the credentials to show it.

The Ad Hoc Law Firm?

The other day I wrote a post, In Startup Law, Big Can Be Beautiful, in which I reflected on the trend of boutique law practices popping up in the startup space, and whether large law firms really are as out-dated in this area as today’s zeitgeist would suggest.  One theme of the post was the notion of startup law being integrated, much like healthcare, in the sense that input from many specialists is often required to provide proper counsel to a client.  Boutique practices are obviously at a disadvantage in this respect because their whole model is built around not having teams of lawyers in dozens of specialties under the same roof: they call this “overhead.”

I recently came across an article with an extremely interesting concept: the ad hoc law firm. It talks about how solo practitioners and boutique practices, at least in some areas, are creating networks through which they can consult with one another and scale when required, but operate independently when not.  From a theoretical and economic perspective, this certainly sounds like the best of both worlds: you have capacity equivalent to a large firm built into your network with specialists and generalists on call when needed, but you only pay for what you use.

I posted a question on quora, which unfortunately no one has answered, asking what sorts of process boutiques and solos have in place to make this kind of system work.  The area that really interests me is how technology can be used to facilitate this concept.  Right now it seems that most boutiques simply call a specialist when they need one, and then begins a process of probably checking conflicts and transferring the necessary documents over.  Consulting outsiders seems to carry far more friction than it would inside of a firm.

But what if all the boutiques/specialists in this “network” operated on the same platform, and scaling was simply of matter of “inviting” others to a particular deal, much like you invite someone on LinkedIn or Basecamp. A few clicks and all the requisite checks and file access could happen automatically.  Going one step further, what if these networks had a shared document management system, through which they could share work-product with one another? That would address another advantage mentioned in my post: that volume and experience curves favor large firms.

That sounds like a powerful idea, and if someone’s not working on it already, there’s an enormous market opportunity to be grabbed.  Cloud-based law practice services like Clio and Lawloop are well-positioned to go after this, but right now it seems they’re focused more on connecting attorneys within a single firm.  Some form of Google+-esque granularity would need to be built in to accommodate a wider network.