Category: Uncategorized

  • Litigation costs orders in England and Wales: 1278 to 1999

    Litigation costs orders in England and Wales: 1278 to 1999

    Graeme Johnston and Will Whawell / 26 January 2024 Graeme is CEO of Juralio Ltd. Formerly a solicitor working in, among things, litigation in England and Wales. Will is Legal Project Manager at Excelo Consulting Ltd focusing on Value Based Pricing. The authors would like to thank Tony Guise for his kind review of this article in…

  • Impact of generative AI on legal work

    Impact of generative AI on legal work

    Graeme Johnston / 30 November 2023 This article addresses an interesting study published in early November 2023 about generative AI in legal work.It was conducted by three professors at the University of Minnesota Law School – the full text is here. My purpose is not to comment significantly on it, but simply to summarise it…

  • A week in the life

    A week in the life

    Graeme Johnston / 12 November 2023 Off in the West Highlands this weekend (photo taken a few minutes before finalising this post)  Reflecting on the week just past. Software product management is certainly one of the harder things I’ve done. It involves things like: Understanding complex needs of diverse people working with the law in…

  • What drives better value for money in legal services?

    What drives better value for money in legal services?

    Graeme Johnston / 1 November 2023 Let’s start with an example of another complex problem with multiple, debatable causes. Western European countries have radically lower road traffic fatalities than the United States. And the gap has widened in recent years. Why is that? There’s clearly no single cause. Let’s take just three factors, which I’ll…

  • Legal services downturn: survival or progress?

    Legal services downturn: survival or progress?

    Graeme Johnston / 20 October 2023 In periods of reduced demand for transactional and financing work, the playbook for major law firms typically includes two main strategies reducing cost (mainly staffing) and ‘managing the equity’ (reducing partner numbers, or the share of some partners)  targeting more of the kind of legal work that arises from…

  • Addressing legal process fragility

    Addressing legal process fragility

    Graeme Johnston / 10 October 2023 In this piece, I’m going to discuss fragile, robust and antifragile approaches to the process – as opposed to the substance and documents – of legal work why it’s worth paying attention to a realistic way to achieve robustness and antifragility more systematically within an organisation, rather than it…

  • What Juralio does, who it helps and how

    What Juralio does, who it helps and how

    Graeme Johnston / 28 September 2023 We have an important release approaching in November, so it seems a good time for a fresh summing up of what Juralio does, and who and how it helps. For those who want further detail (this is the legal sector after all!), there’s a postscript – sections 4 and…

  • Legal costs: magic vs process

    Legal costs: magic vs process

    Graeme Johnston / 21 September 2023 Two things I came across at lunchtime today: An interesting-looking new book on fear as a prism through which to understand world history. It explores historical cases in which fear, whether well-grounded or manufactured, has led to change. Hobbes, Machiavelli, political manipulation, pandemics and more.  A US legal website…

  • Ten conversations about LPM and LPI in UK law firms

    Ten conversations about LPM and LPI in UK law firms

    Graeme Johnston / 8 September 2023 This article summarises ten one-to-one conversations I had in August and early September 2023 with people involved in LPM (legal project management), LPI (legal process improvement) or both in the context of UK law firms. The conversations were an attempt to understand and share, in a qualitative way, how…

  • Legal costs in complex work: action and reaction

    Legal costs in complex work: action and reaction

    Graeme Johnston / 5 September 2023 This article discusses the development of ways to bill for complex, unpredictable work – in particular, hourly billing some of the ‘billing countermeasures’ (a personal usage, inspired by ECM) which have developed in response to concerns about the over-reach of hourly billing some emerging possibilities and a couple of possible…