Apple founder Steve Jobs famously questioned the value of market research:
A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
Business Week Online, 1988.
We built [the Mac] for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not.
Latest from Flat Fee IP - Page 5
Using Court to Price Patents: What’s Wrong With This Picture?
This is what our legal system aspires to be and do.
This is the very different purpose for which patent litigants are using the legal system.
What’s wrong with patent litigant’s use of the courts is explained in the
Should Lawyers Use Dropbox?
Last week a prospective litigation client suggested we use Dropbox to share confidential and proprietary information relating to a technology startup. This gave me access to the information that I needed to price the matter, the information was far too voluminous to simply attach to an email, and, perhaps most important in the client’s eyes, “Dropbox
Getting Interviewed by Client: Be Less Annoying
Matt Homen (“Six Minutes on Client Service Design“) suggests breaking down the client service experience to identify and deliver value on what “drives the client freakin’ crazy” about the experience. For example, waiting in an airport check-in line is part of the experience of going to the airport. By focusing on what the
Tax and Accounting Practice Lags Behind New Normal Model
Not unlike many of my colleagues, I’m spending what is turning out to be an amazingly beautiful Spring weekend in the Bay Area preparing tax returns due next week – most specifically those of my law business,
Confluence Law Partners. What I’ve discovered is that there are key components of Confluence’s model that don’t fit
Big Data and Legal Knowledge Engineers
The NY Times’ declaration that we have entered the Age of Big Data suggests we are ever closer to realizing author Richard Susskind’s (“End of Lawyers?”) predictions for lawyers.
What is Big Data? According to the NY Times:
A meme and a marketing term, for sure, but also shorthand for advancing trends
Low Cost Response to New Internet Naming Options
Internet naming is going to get a lot more interesting now that generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs – the word to the right of the dot, as in “.com,” “.org,” or “.net”) are expanding from the 22 options currently available to domains ending in brands, products, hobbies, political causes and just about anything else. Canon
What Makes Associate Successful in a Flat Fee Firm?
HInt: it’s not how many hours they bill; in fact, we’ve studiously avoided setting a target number of billable hours. Another Hint: it’s not following the sage advice (for associate survival in BigLaw) given to me by one of my hardened BigFirm associate cronies: “Don’t Panic and Assume Nothing” Instead, to quote from the memo
Hourly “Safety Valves” for Flat Fee Litigation
A safety valve in a flat fee litigation agreement that puts off for a later date the negotiation of fees for late phase activities such as trial should probably include at least a default hourly fee pending the re-bargaining of a new flat rate. (Yes, notwithstanding my strong bias in favor of flat fee pricing,
Quora: How to Cut (Hourly)Fees
Quora, the hot new Q&A site, has people asking whether it is “the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years?” the “Next Red-Hot Web Start-Up” or could be “Bigger than Twitter” (“[i]t’s smart. Really Smart”).
We couldn’t resist seeing whether the Quora community had tackled the subject of hourly vs. flat fee pricing