Hi there,
New Year’s greetings! 🎉
Our PERSUIT team is trickling back from a well-earned holiday office closure, and we are refreshed and ready to ring in a very promising 2024.
Naturally, what everyone wants to know is:
“What’s in store for 2024?!”
Well, at this time last year, we were talking about a looming recession, firm layoffs, and how AI would soon replace 44% of the work currently performed in legal.
We all know how that turned out. 🤔
At the close of 2023, firms were still asking for embarrassingly high increases to their annual rates and giving out record-breaking bonuses. 🤑
That recession never quite happened. At least yet. 📉
And while firms and in-house teams are diligently working to leverage new technological capabilities — including AI — we are far from replacing nearly half of the legal workforce with an army of AI bots. 🤖
(Although to be clear, AI is absolutely transforming legal. It’s all just a matter of time.)
So although this is supposed to be the newsletter issue where I retrospect on the past year and tell you what I think is in store for the one ahead, I’m going to keep my crystal ball flavored powder dry for just a little while longer 🔮 ...
What I CAN tell you is what your peers — GCs, CLOs, litigation heads, and other senior legal leaders — were most interested in learning more about in 2023.
When we looked back on the many resources we made available to the in-house community over the past year, here are the questions and concerns that by far were top of mind:
- How legal departments can grow their influence in the C-Suite and the rest of the organization.
- How in-house teams can ensure more diversity from their outside firms.
- Getting lawyer buy-in for new technology.
- How to engage firms in conversation about their AI capabilities (and stay tuned for the results of our latest firm survey on AI!).
- Tips for surviving annual rate negotiations and how to push back on firm rate hikes.
- How to partner more effectively with your firms, including using panels to secure innovative value adds.
- How to know if you’re getting a good price for legal services.
- And last — but certainly not least — figuring out how to effectively use value-based pricing and other alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) in sourcing outside counsel.
On this last point, I’m particularly excited to introduce our latest resource — a collection of our best guidance, training, and articles on value-based pricing, including:
- Where value-based pricing sits in the hierarchy of alternative fee arrangement types and for what types of matters they work best.
- Why we see in-house teams increasingly using value-based pricing to source their matters with outside counsel.
- All of the other questions that our clients and prospects most ask about AFAs and value-based pricing.
So friends. I’m curious.
What else would you add to this list of topics that we might not have covered in 2023?
And what are your best predictions for the legal industry in 2024?
Cheers,
Jim
