Here’s what Ron Lippitt, Lumen’s VP of Global Services says, “The proper selection and deployment of legal technology is a critical element of future competitiveness. We believe the Brightleaf document automation platform is a clear advantage for law firms attempting to drive productivity and collaboration, while de-leveraging the traditional law firm operating model.”

We couldn’t agree more. And if you feel the same way, we invite you to join us for a Webinar on February 9th at 1pm EST. You can hear from Ron, our CEO Dan Gaffney, and Gabor Garai, Chair of the Venture Capital and Private Equity Group at Foley & Lardner. It’s bound to be an interesting discussion, so please join us!

Here are the details:

When: February 9, 1:00 p.m. EST/6:00 p.m. UK
Guest Speaker: Gabor Garai, Partner, Foley Lardner
Moderator: Dan Gaffney, President & CEO, Brightleaf Corporation
Host: Ron Lippitt, VP of Global Client Services, Lumen Legal
Duration: 60 minutes
Cost: Free!
Register Now: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/630530546

And you can read more about our partnership with Lumen here.

So Kent, tell us a little bit about your background:

In a single word: varied.  For the first 10 years of my post-college life, I was a teacher, then a high school counselor, and then an elementary school principal.  It was, for the most part, a good experience, and it taught me a great deal about listening effectively and working with people to find both a common goal and common ground.  For the last 30 years, I’ve been helping  small to mid-sized companies  build their business relationships and grow their market presence.  It may be a bit telling, but I was selling personal computers before there were PCs.  Remember the Apple 2C?  Yup, a 64k powerhouse.  It was a fun and exciting time.

Why do you feel document automation is important?

Being as objective as I can be, I’d say document automation technology is not just a convenience, it is truly now a necessity.  The same way the ballpoint pen replaced the quill, and the same way we now talk about terabytes as opposed to 64k, well, the “cut and paste” of the past  is making way for true automation, and that makes this an exciting time.  It’s all about giving the attorney with the drafting expertise the tools to work efficiently and consistently. 

(We told you he was neat!)

So now that you’re with Brightleaf, what do you plan to do?

I plan to find those law firms out there that may or may not be aware that there is a better way to do things.  Brightleaf brings the newest generation of state of the art solutions to the legal marketplace.  My focus is to bring this solution to as many firms as possible and to change the world. Or at least change the ways attorney work…

You’ve been to LegalTech several times. What’s your impression of that show?

Come mid-winter in the legal profession, there’s no place else I want to be.  LegalTech is it.

Last year we made a mad dash to Magnolia Bakery on our way out of town. We were NOT going to miss those cupcakes. Any NYC highlights you’re looking forward to?

For me, it’s Trattoria del’Arte and their seafood risotto.  Then maybe a cupcake or two.

We love a guy with a good appetite. And of course, one who gets that the legal marketplace is changing. If you’d like to meet Kent, come visit us next week. We’re in book #432 and look forward to seeing you there!

For law firms, this conversation has been going on for some time. The economic downturn (read: collapse) of 2008 caused some serious soul-searching in the industry, and law firms have tried myriad ways to adapt (see e.g. layoffs, mergers and staff moves to interesting locales). So we thought we’d lend a helping hand and suggest some ways law firms can slim down, shape up and get more sleep in 2012. Here goes:

1. Buy some toys. As evidenced by Google’s $12.5B takeover with Motorola Mobility, the mobile market isn’t just heating up, it’s hot. Lawyers need to spend some quality time doing things other than pounding out emails on their BlackBerry’s. Take a look at all the things mobile technologies can do now. See how companies are interacting with their customers on mobile sites. Figure out what this “cloud” stuff is all about. Your clients care about this stuff. And so should you.

2. Learn to love something new. In-house lawyers frequently talk about their desire to have their outside counsel understand their business issues. This is a tall order for lawyers who have no business experience. Most law firms assume that because someone has two degrees from elite universities, they’ll be an excellent lawyer. But here’s a thought – what if those two degrees came with a few years in a business setting, an MBA or an understanding of profit and loss?

3. Start talking. We commend those law firms who have taken to sites like Facebook and Twitter. But are there any firms out there who have used these sites as anything other than virtual ad space? As one expert put it, social media is a conversation, not a broadcast. So firms need to learn how to engage with their clients – both old and new – in a social setting. And in case you haven’t heard, we here at Brightleaf have a cool new way  firms can do that.

Got some ideas for turning 2012 into the year of the law firm? Tell us about them!

Interesting post this week by Kevin O’Keefe at Real Lawyers Have Blogs.  Kevin posits that Flipboard, the fast-spreading social magazine publishing platform, should probably be the way that legal content creators syndicate their stuff out to their audiences.  His well-reasoned logic goes like this:

1. Flipboard has a clean, beautiful interface that its readers love.

2. Flipboard is already on 4.5 million iPads and just released an iPhone version

3. If a legal content provider wants to create its own publishing app, it will compete against Flipboard on points  #1 and #2.  And when it comes to an iPad user’s apportioning of screen space for icons, Flipboard is probably going to win.  Because that’s the reality of mobile apps (even mobile legal apps): you aren’t just competing for market share against your competitors; you’re competing for screen share against the hundreds of thousand of other apps that could be occupying your icon’s space.

As Brightleaf CEO Dan Gaffney has written in these pages, lawyers themselves increasingly need to use new technologies to connect with prospective and existing clients.  As they do, they’ll face a similar dilemna…should they try to distribute that content to clients and prospects using their homegrown websites and e-mail marketing systems?  Or should they try to leverage mobile apps that flexibly syndicate that content?

We have strong thoughts in this area.  Drop us a note if you have any questions or want to chat further.

Exactly five months earlier, that paper’s recurring Business Day feature ran this article.  Here’s the quick summary: top tier law firms, concerned about labor costs, have begun splitting their incoming attorneys into two tracks: a highly paid partner tracks and a lowly paid, non-partner track.  The article  blamed this trend on several factors–the economy, competition from non-traditional sources, growing client dissatisfaction with legal costs on repetitive or process-intensive work, a teeming oversupply of law school grads.  Then it made the dismal prediciton that the legal industry will continue to lose “many of the lucrative partner-track positions for which law students suffer so much debt.”

Four months prior to that sad nugget, the Times’ regular Business Page queried “Is Law School a Losing Game?” in a feature that bluntly deconstructed the sconomics of attending law school. Those economics works like this: (a) most students rack up something like $150,000 in loan debt to get their JDs; (b) they do so because of the promise of high-paying BigLaw associateships; (c) very few of them ever secure such associateships; (d) the majority face increasingly bleak employment prospects; (e) those prospects seem unlikely to improve.  So…why do students bet so much on odds that seem so long?  Quoting Indiana Law School professor William Henderson,  the Times placed much of the blame on the schools and the “Enron-style accounting” they use to keep students and student loan dollars  rolling in.  For a genteel broadsheet that still refers to athletes as “Mr. Jeter” and “Ms. Sharapova,”   this was especially strident stuff.  Besides reverberating througout legal and academic circles, the article touched off one of 2011’s few moments of true bipartisanship, as Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Charles Grassley (R-IA) both went upside the ABA’s head with stern rebukes.

That’s not all   In the months leading up to that noisome tiff, such varied sections of the paper as Legal/Regulatory, Education, Economics, and Fashion & Style, each weighed in on the hollowing out of the law school value proposition.

[Aside:  The Fashion article is notably odd.  It begins ostensibly as a commentary on a new ABC law drama called "The Deep End."  After just a few paragraphs th0ugh, the author veers sharply away from the over-considered grooming and bottomless self-involvement of the show's young AmLaw associate characters and sails squarely into a dissertation on the economic problems faced by their real-life counterparts.  In the end, the reader is left with the impression that “The Deep End” is some ratio of law school debt to anticipated legal profession earnings.  Which is a shame, because I really wanted to know more about  the show.  I'm sure it had to be transcendant broadcasting fare.  I don't know how it could only have lasted five episodes before ABC pulled its plug. People, I guess, just don't appreciate Billy Zane as much as they should.]

So the Times’ “series” on student-school-firm-client economic model has lasted much longer than “The Deep End.”   But with almost every section of the paper except  maybe Sports weighing in over the past eighteen months, it’s almost feeling  more like a gang-harangue than a series. 

Which is why I was wholly unsurprised while waiting in line at Starbucks today to glance down at the Times front page and see “What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering” staring back at me. 

The article’s thesis—law schools architect their curricula to teach law students three years and $150,000 of stuff other than how to practice law—is hardly a novel one.    But if you view that thesis along the line of cases the Times has been making against the student-school-firm-client model, it all feels particularly damning. 

(Aside #2: Yes, I did learn the phrase “line of cases” while I was at law school.  So that’s one thing at least…Also, I learned that it was important not to snicker every time a professor referred to a case as being ”seminal.”  And I think there might have been more than one of those Oliver Wendell Holmes guys. )

Connecting the dots, here’s our little drawing of the  Times thesis:

(1) The core mission of a law school is no more to educate students than the core mission of an insurance company is to pay out claims.  Insurance companies live to collect premiums; law schools live to collect premium tuitions.  Everything else is just a means to those ends.

(2) To collect these tuitions, schools intentionally create in their students unrealistic expectations about the likelihood of landing a high-paying job in the legal profession.

(3) Spurred on by these expectations, students become increasingly willing take on more student loan debt than is economically rational.

(4) By guaranteeing higher and higher amounts of this debt, (before ultimately taking over all of it), the federal government keeps creating larger and larger piles of money for schools to chase.  And schools, unsurprisingly, chase that pile.  Which might explain why we’re building more and more law schools as the legal industry is hemorrhaging more and more jobs.

 (4) Law schools–and the professors they employ–simply do not consider it their responsibility to teach their students the skills they will need in order to do the jobs that will pay off these massive loans.  As today’s article points out, a recent survey revealed that as many as half of law school professors have never practiced and the median practice experience level among all professors is somewhere around one year.  This doesn’t make those professors bad people.  It does mean that the things they do (produce scholarly and sometimes esoteric law review articles) and the things their students’ employers do (practice law) are fundamentally different things.  It also means that someone has to assume the cost of training those students how to practice once they begin practicing.

(5) For a long time, firms have been hiring these untrained graduates and billing their time out to clients at hundreds of dollars an hour while those graduates train on the job.  This effectively transfers the cost of that training from the schools (who don’t feel they need to provide it) and the firms (who need it) to the clients.

 This feels an awful lot like a bubble, right?  People paying sums they can’t afford for things that likely will not be worth those sums…paying those sums because the sums’ recipients are shading value propositions of what they sell…cost and risk are being offloaded onto unrelated third parties.  In fact, it feels especially like one particular bubble.  Try this…swap in these phrases: homebuyer for law student, mortgage for student loan,  mortgage industry for law school,  Fannie Mae (federal mortgage guarantor) for Sallie Mae (federal student loan guarantor), collateralized debt obligation for student loan guarantee,  taxpayer for client, and taxpayer for taxpayer…and the logic holds.  This is because both housing bubble finances and law school finances depend on the same three things:  (a) payees (schools/mortgage industr)y being blind to or disingenuous about the risks of signing up for what they’re selling; (b) students/purchasers committing irrational faith to the proposition that their purchase will appreciate in value  (“My degree/house will be worth so  much money to me that it almost doesn’t matter what it costs…besides….EVERYONE I know is doing this!”); (c) a market-wide practice of passing the bucks by transferring costs and risk away from sellers and onto third-parties (guarantors, taxpayers, clients).

The trouble with bubbles, of course, is that a system dependent on transferring risk to third parties (economists call this “negative externality”) is that eventually that third party is going to refuse to accept, or become incapable of accepting, more of that risk.  And then, in Yeats’ words, “things fall apart, the center cannot hold, a blood-dimmed tide is loosed upon the earth.” In the case of the housing crisis, this market risk rejection began on a sharply involuntary note with gigantic buyers of mortgage debt collapsing overnight.

For the law school bubble, the market risk rejection is a lot simpler…and hopefully a lot less blood-dimmed:  clients just started saying “no.”  Today’s article cites two stats familiar to legal industry mavens:  about half of law firms have had clients push back on paying for work done by 1^st year and 2^nd year associates; and a greater number have been pressured about flat or alternative fees.  Again, the concept is hardly novel.  Echoing a recent ACC survey, the ABA reported last month that over 20% of all legal departments now refuse to pay for work done by 1st year (and in some cases, 2nd year) associates.

So, the third-party client rejecting the cost and risk ain’t new.  But the rate of that rejecton and the feelings underlying it are on the rise.  That feeling is expressed most plainly in today’s Times by Jeffrey Carr, general counsel of FMC Technologies and  a leading advocate for reform of longstanding legal economics:

”The fundamental issue is that law schools are producing people who are not capable of being counselors,” says Jeffrey W. Carr… “They are lawyers in the sense that they have law degrees, but they aren’t ready to be a provider of services.”

The larger question is when will law schools be ready to be providers of providers of legal services.

You may also be hearing your own free-range lawyers bark the word “app” more and more as the look up from their thingamajiggies. If so, you’ve likely noticed that their usage of “app” feels a bit uneven for a profession that’s so consistently persnickety about its definitions. (And I’m not just saying that because I have a document on my desk whose first 28 pages are reserved for defining the terms it uses in its remaining 76 pages).

We’re awash each day in emails that tout “Five Must-Have Lawyer Apps.” We’re pelted by blog posts with (slightly hacky) titles like “App to the Future: How to Make Your Small Firm More Efficient.” After reading just a few of these, it becomes pretty obvious that there’s very little consensus about what an app actually is and even less understanding about why apps excite people or inspire devotion in users.

So, with our characteristic lexicographical lawyerliness, let’s see if we can help find the common ground. At our first stop, Merriam-Webster, we find “app” defined this way:

Source: Merriam-Webster Online
App: noun \ˈap\
Definition: An application.

Okay…THAT cleared thing up considerably. Thank you, Merriam. Thank you, Webster. I don’t know which one of you came up with that etymological nugget of uselessness. I just hope you didn’t strain yourselves too much in the process. Moving on…

The Oxford Dictionary. We know, we know…hardly a bastion of cutting-edge techspeak. But, THE authority on precise, detailed meaning. Let’s see what they’ve got for us

Source: The Oxford Dictionary (online)
app (app); noun
Pronunciation:/ap/
a self-contained program or piece of software designed to fulfill a particular purpose; an application, especially as downloaded by a user to a mobile device.

Hm. Marginally better, I suppose. At least Oxford had the manners to define what an “application” before telling us that an app was one. But, what’s with the indecisive “especially” hedge they toss in at the end of the sentence?  Are they telling us that an app is just an application? Or…a mobile downloaded one?  Or  is it an applicatio…that’s also kind of sort of maybe a little bit particularly especially the kind of application that get downloaded mobile-y. Is that one definition or two?  Or one-and-a-half?

Feels like about one-and-a-half. I guess that to Oxford, a good example of an app would be the Microsoft Project installation on my PC at work.  But an especially good example of one would the “Grover and the Monster at the End of This Book” story-widget that causes my two-year-old son to keep swiping my iPhone. 

Shocking Spoiler Alert: Turns out Grover IS the titular monster at the end of the book.  And his panic attacks,  mounting as each page turn brings him closer to book’s end, are for naught.  There’s probably some sort of deeper lesson there about how we are each in the end our own anxieties. If so, it was lost on me.  I’d just like to get my phone back.  And I’d like to get a clearer definition of  what these app things are.

Right. Well. If Oxford couldn’t help, let’s head southwest to Cambridge and see what the rivals have for us…

Source: Cambridge Dictionary Online
app /æp/ noun [C]
Definition: (Information Technology). Abbreviation for application or application program: a computer program that is designed for a particular purpose. See also killer app…

Okay. Other than the revelation that these things–whatever they are–can apparently kill (do NOT tell Grover…he just can’t handle this sort of news), Cambridge seem to be going with the staid, vanilla…”an app is just an application…” approach. While that’s not particularly illunimating, at least they’re not caught in the dissembling it’s-sort-of-one-or-two-things middle.  Oh…wait…there’s more…

Definition: (Communications). Abbreviation for application or application program: a small computer program that you can download onto a mobile phone.

Now I’m really confused. Merriam-Webster says an app is just an application. Oxford says it’s just an application, but maybe a skootch more a mobile device downloaded one. Cambridge says it’s an application if you’re talking about IT and a mobile download if you’re talking about communications. But none of them even begin to explain with any kind of precision why apps excite people.

Any one else want to weigh in?…?…?

Source: PC Magazine
Definition of: app
(APPlication) The term has been used as shorthand for “application” in the IT community for decades. However, it became newly popular for mobile applications in smartphones and tablets.

Not particularly precise, I suppose. But explaining that the definition of “app” has transitioned (or is transitioning) from one user group to another.  Maybe it just needs a little time to unpack its bags.  Maybe it’s too soon for a hard-edged dictionary definition of “app.” Maybe, with the passage of time and a little more syncretic term-settling, we’ll have a better and more universally acknowledged handle on what these things are.

No.  That’s not it.  You can tell, just by the way our lawyers and their free-range ilk say the word, that their experience of it is different.  It isn’t just an application.  And, with apologies to an aforementioned and overwrought Muppet, it isn’t just a mobile widget.

Maybe, instead of trying to define the “what,” it would be more helpful to focus on the “how.”  And that’s what Bill French of iPadCTO.com did a year ago today.  In his November 8, 2010 blog, French took the approach of describing how we interact with apps instead of defining what apps technically are. The result was much more useful.   As you will see from his definition, it’s the right-sizing of the app, the fit it makes between form and context, the seamlessness of its user interaction, that really defines it:

“Apps have become a meaningful abbreviation to technology that just works. Apps provide a common and easily understood idea that has been widely accepted as a solution – indeed a means to get stuff done quickly and effectively. Humans across the globe see apps as the pathway to achieving objectives, whether simple tasks or complex processes, and they’ve begun to vote on this model [literally] with gestures of resounding approval… Apps are quickly becoming the life-link between users and businesses – they represent the brand equity of that relationship and users can assess the benefits of an app at relatively low costs…”

The App-centric Enterprise and Why The Web May Soon Be Obsolete
Bill French, iPadCTO.com
November 8, 2010

Fast-forward to one day late in my Mom’s career.  (No…not the day she told an already mega-famous Jim Carrey, “They tell me you’re a comedian.  Good for you.  You’re such a polite young man; just stick with it and things will work out for your career.”  While true, that’s a story for another blog on another day).  I’m talking about the day she arrived in her office to find an alien device blinking soullessly on her beloved antique desk.  After regarding this intruder for a few minutes, she called Technical Services to determine its provenance and whether it posed any threat to her well-being.  She was informed, “Oh…didn’t you see the memo?  That’s your new computer.  We’re all going to be using them to keep track of our time from now on.”

I will leave aside any ironic comments about timekeeping being the first use law firms made of the greatest time-saving device ever invented.

Ever polite, Mom listened carefully to the voice from Technical Services as it extolled the virtues of the unwelcome newcomer.  Then she said, “Well…that’s lovely.  Thank you.  Now please come and take it away. I can’t see my rolltop desk because of it…And it’s blinking at me.”

Nothing against my Mom.  Got herself from a modest background through Vassar College and Yale Law School on scholarships.  Clerked at the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts.  Started at Ropes & Gray at a time when there was precious little support or opportunity for female attorneys.  Had five kids in six years, leaving the firm for a while in the middle of this run (but helping organize the Peace Corps during her “time off”). Then returned to work.  Then had a sixth kid. Then shortly thereafter, becoming the firm’s second female partner ever.  All the while doing a great job raising my five siblings, and a marginally okay job raising me.  So, y’know, hardly a woman afraid of challenge or change.  Just one who didn’t want a 20th-century device on her 19th-century desktop.

This mini-parable of the blinking-computer-on-the old-oaken-rolltop-desk always reminds me that no matter how accomplished or intellectually curious a person may be, once they get used to doing things a certain way, it becomes difficult to get them to change that way.  Actually, it turns out that the more accomplished a person is, the more pronounced their resistance to change may be.  ”I have been successful when I do X, therefore X is the way to be successful.”  This is hardly surprising.  Evolutionary biologists correlate the degree to which a species has adapted to its environment with the likelihood that species will “win” by out-competing neighbors for resources within that environment.  Whether you’re a finch in the Galapagos or an fifth-year at Goodwin, the more fundamentally you adjust to the rules your survival depends on, the more likely you are to survive.  Seems logical enough, right?  Finches and fifth-years who morph to fit in live to have baby finches and become sixth-years. 

Precisely because of their high level of adaptation to their environments, however, evolutionary “winners” find themselves especially susceptible to environmental change.  If a finch’s beak is perfectly adapted to crushing seeds, they’re in trouble when drought or disease or new competition remove their one food source.  When you succeed because you are so tied into doing things one way that works in your world, you tend to miss out on changes to that world…even fundamental changes that threaten survival.  There’s even a technical term used across a range of disciplines–hysteresis–that describes the state where the rate of change in some organism or entity lags behind the rate of change in the environmental factors that act upon that organism or entity.  

Lawyers tend not to be as up-to-date on their hysteresis analysis as they perhaps should be. But after a few years and with the benefit of perspective and the clarity of hindsight, even these firms come to see how short-sighted their “X is the way to be successful” refrains really were. If you were around when lawyers resisting the adoption of email, then you know what I mean. It wasn’t all that long ago that I was told by (former) outside counsel that they were afraid that email would lead to clients sending new matters to them at 4PM on a Friday afternoon. It’s hard today to imagine practicing without it.  (It’s also hard today to imagine wanting to prevent clients from sending new matters to you).

Which perhaps is why we were struck by yesterday’s almost-true news that the world’s last typewriter factory had closed its doors for good.  (We say “almost true” because it appears that Chinese and Indonesian factories still make a vestigially small number of typewriters.  But not, it seems, for long. 

Dinosaurs have been gone from this world for a very long time.  But they ruled it for a much, much longer period–sitting atop the food chain for a period of time about  100 million years longer than the period from their extinction until now.

The same concept holds for typewriters.  They seem like such distant anachronisms now, but they were the predominant means of law firm document production for–what?–seventy or eighty years?  And have now been gone  for maybe twenty? For decades, law firms couldn’t have imagined getting work done without typewriters.  Now they can’t imagine getting work done with them.

So, to honor the almost-dead typewriter, do this…Look around your desk–rolltop or otherwise.  Take a peek around your office.  Walk the halls a bit.  Look for all the pieces of technology you use everyday.  Now try to pick out the ones mostly likely to make you look back on in a few years, unable to remember how you ever got anything done with it around.  Fax machine?  Desk phone?  Desktop computer?  Laser printer?  The evolutionary clock is ticking on all of them. 

Except the coffeemaker.  If Darwin wants our coffeemaker, he can try to come down here and pry it from the hands of our Director of Product Design.

[Why are you still here?  You shouldn’t be here.  Go here instead.  C’mon…go…]

—————————————— 

Good.  They’re gone.  Let’s talk about Pulp Fiction until they get back.

You remember 1994’s Pulp Fiction,right?  By Quentin Tarantino? When it hit movieplex screens Pulp Fictionchanged how popular movies tell their stories.  Since the early Greek tragedians, popular storytelling in visual media was always structurally the same: events occured chronologically across a three or five act story arc while tensions built and then ultimately resolved.  You might get an occasional flashback (Godfather II), or an out-of-sequence coda (the burning Rosebud in Citizen Kane) or an onstage recitation of pivotal off-stage occurrences (“Sorry Hamlet…Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ain’t coming down for breakfast no more.  Time to move to plan B”).  Basically though, on stage or screen, plots and themes and characters always just progressed sequentially and in rigid lockstep with each other.  Beginning.  Middle.  End.  Always.  Why such predictability?  That’s basically the way we humans operate.  A formula for doing something just builds by inertia, accreting over the years and hardening to the point where it seldom gets challenged, even after it has long grown stale.

Quick side thought:  If this could happen in a the theater and movie industries, which are ostensibly built on originality and individualism, how might the forces of inertia and accretion stifle innovation in an industry built on adherence to precedent, observance of community standard, and strict avoidance of risk?  Hmmm…let’s put that thought aside for a bit.  Maybe we’ll think of just such an industry.

Pulp Fiction abruptly changed this rigidity.  In the film, events occur in almost random order.  Plotlines just barely interrelate. Characters die in one scene, and then appear in later scenes that chronologically took place earlier.  Basically, it’s a complete re-shuffling of the traditional movie structure.  But it works really well because when Tarantino tosses out the accreted form (sequence…sequence…beginning, middle, end…), he focuses instead on the underlying purpose: storytelling.  Because of this focus on story over form, and because of Tarantino’s skillful technique, the center holds: characters develop; plot strings come full circle, tensions rise and resolve, all with great poignancy and salience.  As NYT reviewer Janet Maslin noted at the time, “far from confusing his audience, Mr. Tarantino eventually makes the film’s time scheme crystal clear, linking episodes with dialogue that may sound casual but sticks indelibly in memory.”

One indelibly recurring nugget of such dialogue conveys much character growth.  Throughout the movie, Samuel L. Jackson’s hitman character, Jules, recites, and alludes to off-camera recitations of, Ezekiel’s emotional prophecy against the Philistines (Ezekiel 25:17).

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is The Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”

As he profanely informs us towards the movie’s end (I won’t link to it, but if you search Youtube for some combination of the words Pulp-Fiction-Ending-Diner-Scene, you’ll find the scene pretty quickly), Jules is at something of an inflection point in his life when he drops his last Ezekiel 25:17 on us.  He’s been through a lot in the course of fulfilling his duties to his employer.  Now, he’s just going to walk the earth for a bit.  He doesn’t exactly know where he’ll end up or what he’ll do as he moves away from his previous role (a role he excelled at, by all accounts).  But he recognizes that he wants to guide others with what he has seen and learned. He’s trying real hard to be the shepherd.

And that’s really all I wanted to say about Pulp Fiction.  By rearranging the stale and accreted practices of his industry, Tarantino revitalized moviemaking, spawning scores of imitators and—for while anyway—making movies a bit less rigid and a bit more interesting.  He also makes us remember that it’s never really the existing structure that drives innovation, it’s the characters who emerge from that structure.

——————————————  

Oh.  You’re back.  See what we mean about Reliance on Counsel?  Someone who actually knows what they’re talking about writing succinctly and well about deep-rooted structural inefficiencies in the legal service delivery model. And then (wait for it….) actually suggesting solutions and offering to help.

Different, huh?  Better, right?  As we’ve noted before, too many legal blogs are thinly veiled attempts to get the reader to buy whatever legal service or technology the writer is peddling.

Baer isn’t selling anything. As Qwest General Counsel and Chief Administrative Officer he just quarterbacked the massive $20B M&A deal whereby his company got A’ed by and M’ed with CenturyTel without getting F’ed by the government. So, he’s sold enough for a few hundred lifetimes, thank you.

Because of the high-profile jobs he’s held, Rich has been in a unique position to observe how legal services can sometimes do disservice to the clients they’re supposed to serve.  Because of how well he did his last job, he probably has an audience that will listen to his suggestions about how these service providers need to adapt.  If he’s offering his help now in shepherding industry change, we should all be listening.

So, we encourage you to start reading and keep reading Reliance on Counsel.

Or we will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger.

Anyway, in the midst of all that was going on, I did notice this bit of legal marketing dissonance:  

not funny

Okay. The public is a bit frothed about radiation in Japan. And people love to make distant events about themselves. But come on…was this subject line really necessary?  

Just not funny.

Now I don’t think the author is being politically incorrect. A bit tone-deaf, sure. Captivated by their own self-sense of whimsy? Yup. Cringe-worthy unfunniness fanning the flames of hysterical overreaction.  Affirmative. 

And for the record, I think the collection noun should be “a cram of VC.”

The full video (and much more) will be available at booth 1504 when LegalTech kicks on Monday morning.  Stay tuned here for more.