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On October 7, HBR Consulting premiered the sixth annual 2022 Benchmarking + Legal Information Services Survey (“BLISS”) results exclusively on our interactive dashboard website for the 71 participating firms. We want to extend another sincere thank you to all the firms who continue to contribute their time and provide insights by completing the survey.  Participating in the survey helps to support and inform the larger law firm library community with key benchmarking data.

HBR Consulting recently hosted over 30 legal operations leaders for our CounselCommand Community Update. CounselCommand is HBR’s proprietary, tech-enabled services solution that provides legal analytics to law departments looking to improve data visibility and gain better insights to make informed business decisions. CounselCommand allows law departments to gather and collectively analyze data from disparate sources to manage costs, reduce risks, and accelerate business decision making.

HBR Consulting recently held its second annual Legal Information + Knowledge Services (LINKS) Conference. I had the privilege, alongside industry veteran Jean O’Grady, Editor & Author of the Dewey B. Strategic Blog & Director of Research at Venable LLP, and moderator Peggy Chevel, Senior Manager at HBR Consulting, to present findings from this year’s Start / Stop survey. I have previously commented that this survey has for years provided outstanding intelligence and insight into buying patterns of law libraries, but having now reviewed the raw data, I am excited to see how it is overflowing with wonderful nuggets.

HBR recently concluded the second annual Legal Information and Knowledge Services (LINKS) Conference, bringing together information and knowledge leaders, managers, and professionals from over 70 law firms.

I recently had the opportunity to speak on a panel at ILTACON 2022 regarding effectively managing outside counsel guidelines. Here’s a synopsis of my thoughts following an engaging panel discussion and related audience questions.

Fundamental changes in the way that law firms operate today have transformed the nature of collaboration across firm networks and information systems.

As our colleague Kate Jasaitis noted earlier, discussing how the law firm of the future will be built around collaboration, the pandemic ushered in a hybrid/remote work model for law firms and, with it, the challenge to balance having that model while meeting client demand. Lawyers and staff now desire greater control over how they work, assuming firm systems are available and easily accessible wherever and however they choose to work.

The pandemic sped digital transformation in the legal industry out of necessity, but what might have been deemed temporary is now here to stay. The American Lawyer reported in May 2022 that 79% of Am Law 200 HR departments expect “all or most” of their workforce to be eligible for a hybrid work arrangement this year.This increasingly mobile, dispersed workforce has new service delivery requirements and expectations that are fundamentally challenging the dynamics of integration and consumption of IT resources. Traditional on-premise solutions using virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) with tightly controlled end points simply cannot meet the new demands.

For the first time since 2019, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) Global Institute (CGI) returned in person to the Bellagio in Las Vegas. And what a time it was! Despite the pandemic, CLOC and CGI are both bigger than ever – CLOC’s membership now tops 4,000, CGI attendance was over 2,000, its largest yet on record, and there were over 100 exhibitors.

Doing more with less has been a refrain in the legal industry for years, becoming even more urgent during the current talent war. Every year, there seems to be more work, less time, and higher pressure to get the work done efficiently and cost-effectively. But as law departments and their law firms alike struggle with finding new ways to streamline their work, the data they need to inform better strategies sits at their fingertips, unused and overlooked. Enter the need for legal analytics. Legal analytics provide the foundation for data-driven, strategic decision making, helping legal organizations advance business objectives.