I decided to name this blog “Legal Mosaic” for a number of reasons.
- I am a visual person and, so, try to inject visual images–and metaphors– into written and oral presentations. They help to tell a story, and good lawyers are usually good storytellers. As a recovering trial lawyer, I think of them as demonstrative evidence.
- I also love baseball, another staple in how I express myself. I wanted to name this site, “touching the bases” but GoDaddy called me out at the plate. Look for a future post on how law imitates baseball.
- So back to “Legal Mosaic” and what’s behind it. A mosaic is a picture or decorative design made by setting small colored pieces, typically stone or tile, into a surface. Some mosaics are representational, their image easy to discern. Others are more abstract, leaving the viewer to “put the pieces together “ and to draw their own meaning.
- And so it is with the state of the legal delivery system. The legal mosaic was once representational: the law firm dominated the foreground. But no more. Today, there are a legion of figures in the legal supply chain. The mosaic is not readily recognizable. How to make sense of it?
This blog will endeavor to create a clearer image of how the legal supply chain is pieced together today as well as how it might be reconfigured to create a more integrated picture. In so doing, it will examine what it means to be a lawyer today and what skills not typically found in law firms or taught in law school might be most useful for tomorrow’s lawyer.
It will also examine ways that legal consumers can recast their deployment of legal resources–both in-house and outsourced–to create greater cost reduction, risk mitigation, efficiency, and transparency and, thereby, to better service their client(s).
