In-House Counsel - Spring 2010

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Baker & McKenzie LLP
Toronto Office
Brookfield Place
181 Bay Street, Suite 2100
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5J 2T3

able to grow without destroying our model so we need to
be extremely lean in our overall overhead to be able to
deliver the cost and value that we tout.”
Historically not very entrepreneurial, the legal mar-
ket is now in flux. While legal observers such as Jordan
Furlong (a monthly columnist for The Lawyers Weekly,
which along with In-house Counsel is published by Lexis-
Nexis Canada Inc.) do not believe that the likes of Dele-
gatus and Cognition are in direct competition with tra-
ditional law firms per se, he does contend that the new
up and comers do challenge the fundamental nature of
traditional firms. A lawyer and consultant to law firms
on strategic and tactical issues, Furlong believes that
these virtual firms (or dispersed law firms as he prefers
to call them) will at the very least test the underpinnings
of traditional firms, with its physical concentration of ex-
pensive legal talent in a high-priced centralized location.

“For many years we contented ourselves with a model of how a law firm should be set up and how services should be delivered, and there’s been very little competition to that,” observed Furlong, a consultant with law firm strategy and management consulting firm Edge International. “Now, we’re seeing a marketplace that is evolving and it challenges the traditional ways that clients have traditionally defined quality and reliability. We’re used to defining the quality of a law firm by its size, location, name and recognition. These are easy reasons.” END