The Red Velvet Lawyer

"What Hot's and What's Not in the Legal Profession" Red Hot practice areas?  Energy, regulatory, health care. Hot practice areas?  Financial services, IPOs, litigation, labor and employment, intellectual property, real estate, and corporate. Getting Hot?  Interns rights, privately held and family business, education, elder law, and ADR. So says Bob Denny in his 25th trends report released on December 3, 2013. Bob Denny, founder of Bob Denny Associates, Inc., identifies trends in the legal profession at least once a year.  His last report came out in June 2013. His consulting firm, founded in 1974, provides management, marketing and strategic planning services to over 800 companies, professional firms, and non-profit organizations throughout the United States, as well as in Canada and the Caribbean. His report also identifies practice areas seeing less action (cooling off), the hot geographic areas for law, marketing and business development...

You'll have to read Richard Susskind's Tomorrow's Lawyers (2013) or his more in-depth book, The End of Lawyers (2008).  Both books are very good and essential reading.   He argues that the shifts in the legal market are permanent, accelerated by the 2008 market collapse, and reflect several things.  First, corporations and in-house lawyers are demanding more-for-less from outside law firms.  This demand undercuts the ability of traditional law firms  to use new lawyers to do document review and due diligence reviews.  My earlier posting in this series talks about my experience as a young lawyer doing exactly these tasks.  In addition, law firms will no longer be able to expect clients to pay for a new lawyer's on-the-job training.  Hence, law firms are hiring associates with some practice experience, de-leveraging the number of associates per partner, and farming out the document review to tech based reviewers.  They are also f...