Smarter Law: Transforming Busy Lawyers into Business Leaders

The definitive legal performance improvement solution cascades the transformation of individual personal skill sets into major improvements in corporate legal department and law firm performance, leading ultimately to new, mutually profitable client-law firm relationships.

To do so, Smarter Law uses the broadest possible range of proven techniques spanning "left brain" thinking (logic, big data analysis, agile, design, econometrics) and "right brain" approaches (emotions, neuro-linguistic programming, stoic philosophy, Rorschach inkblots).

From emotional intelligence to artificial intelligence, soft skills and hard data, this is modern behavioral economics in the Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell mold. It’s practical … and funny too.

Smarter Law comprises proven methods, data, and case studies for practical application to improve legal services: 

• “The Magnificent Seven” ways a lawyer can become an indispensable business partner and trusted adviser
• “The Maleficent Seven” behavioral resistances to essential change and how to overcome them
• Techniques that grew the Big Four professional services firms to over $30 billion in revenue that effectively cost nothing for law firms to implement
• Modernizing law firm business development to provide what clients really want, not just discounts
• How a client paid its law firm $4.75 million for work that only amounted to $350,000 of billable time and still saved itself $78 million
• Technology solutions with a return on investment of 507 percent
• Tender processes in which the client was able to pay law firm bidders more than their proposals and still reduce its spend by 44 percent

In 2010, Trevor Faure's first book (The Smarter Legal Model: more for less) pioneered law firm panel convergence and legal work disaggregation. That previous book was described by Ben W. Heineman, Jr., former GE senior vice president for Law as showing “... the holy grail of business productivity.”

Since 2011, as global leader of Legal Services for EY and then as head of independent consultancy Smarter Law Solutions, Faure has helped transform the performance of over 250 law firms, in-house legal departments, and individual attorneys around the world, and create client-firm relationships that deliver greater client value while enhancing law firm profitability.

The results of these successes represent the definitive performance improvement solution: Smarter Law. Not just "more for less" anymore, but a quantum leap to “better quality and rewards for less” for the first time.

EDITORIAL REVIEWS

"Faure’s insightful and practical analysis [is] more important than ever, and make this … a must read for any lawyer or legal organization seeking to thrive in today’s increasingly competitive and technology-driven global age.”

David B. Wilkins, Harvard Law School Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession, Faculty Director of the Program on the Legal Profession, Lester Kissel Professor of Law