Several weeks ago, I had the occasion to speak to a business colleague of mine who is a marketing specialist. In that discussion, I was asked to explain Goodman Law’s practice involving start-up enterprises and the sorts of services that it provided. I tried to describe the process of serving entrepreneurs by helping them develop strategies, refine their business plans, and, in general, fulfill the function of legal “go to” person. I tried to describe that the kind of services provided to “new” business clients demanded that I be familiar with a number of legal areas, including corporate law, intellectual property law, employment law, immigration law and a number of other practice areas. Read more >>

Unlike business persons, lawyers are often confined by ethical rules that are linked to their license to practice law. For example, lawyers, generally, cannot combine operations with non-lawyers. Lawyers cannot engage in certain kinds of advertising and are, in general, not allowed to split fees with other lawyers. Read more >>

As the economy worsens and savings disappears, the traditional one breadwinner model has accelerated its decline. This means that the option that women have had to leave the work force in favor of child-rearing is fast becoming less of an option. At the same time, it cannot be denied that the traditional Law Firm Model has been no friend to women. Relatively few women have been able to last long enough to achieve partnership, and for many who have, they have been forced to make significant personal sacrifices. Read more >>

Does the Inter-Firm Collaboration Model potentially provide a higher quality of service than the Traditional Law Firm Model? In certain respects, this is an unfair question, because whether or not a client receives an excellent quality of service depends, first and foremost, on the quality of the attorney (or attorneys) involved, but in terms of which model may be better positioned to attract new talent, to exploit experience, and be more efficient and cost effective, the momentum may be shifting more in favor of the IFC Model. Read more >>

On 12/28/08, we posted our first installment about a new law firm practice model called the Inter-Firm Collaboration Model, or IFC Model for short, which purports to be a more efficient and less costly model of organization than the traditional law firm. As described in that post, the object of the IFC Model is to harness the efficiencies, and low-overhead characteristics, of modern solo-practices, to create a more flexible and dynamic type of law practice capable of servicing larger scale clients.
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