Reflections of a Boston Lawyer

For years, lawyers and clients talked about alternatives to traditional hourly billing arrangements, yet little changed.  The financial crisis increased pressure on corporate legal departments to reduce the legal spend, and has led some of them to push for new ways of pricing legal services.  The mantra for this new mindset is "value," and the platform for many "value" adherents is the Association of Corporate Counsel .  The goal of the ACC Value Challenge is to better align the interests of lawyer and client, and better ensure that each partner to the lawyer-client relationship is sharing both in the benefit and in the risks of their work together.  Some lawyers and law firms are rising to the challenge by restructuring the ways they deliver and price their services, and some are not.  Some clients are pressing for new practices, while others are more comfortable with the old way of doing things. Some outside counsel are fearful of the types of structural changes

It is quite an event when the person responsible for our nation's, and much of the world's, money supply tells us that money isn't everything.  Ben Bernanke did just that in his commencement address on May 8th to the University of South Carolina class of 2010.  How does such a speech go so unnoticed? The idea that money can't buy happiness is not new, of course.  As a die-hard Beatles fan in my formative years, I memorized the lyrics to "Can't Buy Me Love" (and just about every other Beatles song before "I Am the Walrus").  Ironically, Hollywood film makers have made fortunes building movies around this theme.  And how many times have we misquoted the Biblical phrase, "money is the root of all evil."  The full phrase in English is:  " The love of money is the root of all evil," a condemnation of greed, not wealth.  Haven't we seen that admonition play out repeatedly in our time, from Milken to Madoff, from organized cr

Thanks to Linda Greenhouse's column in the New York Times, I was alerted to the address Justice Souter delivered at Harvard's commencement.  This is a must read that provides as clear a window to the most important issues at stake in our constitutional form of government as any I know.