All I really knew was that I had found the perfect place on the perfect wave, and I had remained there endlessly. Forever.
Allan Weisbecker, from In Search of Captain Zero: A Surfer’s Road Trip Beyond the End of the Road.
Law.com’s Legal Blog Watch email arrives with the news that our transatlantic legal brethren saw fit to increase their hourly rates in 2008. Some might say this is rather silly, perhaps even inappropriate, given the worldwide recession, but others could just as easily argue that never have lawyers been more valuable. (Who would say that? Ed.)
As this excerpt from the Blog Watch email reveals, White and Case lead the way in the ‘insanely high billable hour’ league:
According to the NLJ, nearly 71 percent of law firms reported an increase in the amount that they charged clients, compared with 2007. Partner billing rates at White and Case rose above the previous record breaking $1000/hour rates, topping out at $1,260/hour.
Mercifully, there is a rider to this, for it is also explained that White and Case explained to the NLJ that this rate was “representative of only two potential billing scenarios for clients” and “[did] not take into account a number of key factors, including blended rates and rates negotiated with specific clients”).
In other words, $1,260 per hour is… a bargain.
In this article, Gavin Ingham Brooke and Rohit Grover of Spada examine the importance of marketing and PR in a downturn. This article was originally published in Solicitors Journal, Practice Management Supplement, 28 April 2009, and has been reproduced by kind permission.
Environmental Reporting: Trends in FTSE 100 Sustainability Reports
In the latest of our series of white papers, Spada Research examines trends in environmental reporting. The white paper is available for download here.
Now available for download here is Spada’s latest white paper. Entitled ‘The Laity Bytes Back’, the paper looks at Web 2.0 and the professions.
In this paper, published in the International Journal of Business and Economics, David Brock, Tal Yaffe and Mark Dembovsky scrutinise large law firms, their strategies and measures of their effectiveness.
In this article, Gavin Ingham Brooke, MD of Spada, looks at how US law firms should approach hiring a UK PR agency. The piece is reproduced from Strategies – The Journal of Legal Marketing by kind permission of the Legal Marketing Association.
Towards 2012 – The New Legal Landscape
Spada’s white paper on the impact of the Legal Services act is now available to download here. The research recently featured on the front page of the Law Society Gazette.
Information Inflation: Can the Legal System Adapt?
George L. Paul, a partner in Lewis and Roca, LLP and Jason R. Baron, Director of Litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, discuss the “new inflationary dynamic” of information in this article from the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology. How do vast quantities of new writing forms challenge the legal profession, and how should lawyers adapt?
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