What Ails the Large Law Firm? Will the Real FutureFirm Please Stand Up

“What Ails Big Law?” was written in the early summer of 2009, shortly after the completion of FutureFirm 1.0—a “collaborative competition” in which teams of law firm partners, in-house lawyers, and junior associates competed with one another to create a law firm that would survive and thrive over the next 20 years. This essay reported the surprising results of the competition along with my own commentary on how these results could be used by BigLaw to adapt to changing times.

Upon completing the essay, however, I filed it away. Back in 2009, law firm leaders had too many emergencies on their hands to listen to the unsolicited advice of a legal academic. Although I thought my analysis had merit, the timing was wrong. A better course of action was to let events play out.

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