Also in this issue, our Law Office Management column takes stock of the state of legal process outsourcing in Canada. We tackled the issue a few years ago when Canadian law firms essentially had their heads in the sand about it and were not prepared to outsource any legal work to India or anywhere else. Well the world has changed, the economy has changed, and, most importantly, the demands of clients have changed. There’s only one place for law firms to go then. The landscape is evolving but there’s still a long way to go before Canadian law firms get to the same place as many of the big global legal service providers.

Law firm consultant Jordan Furlong said in a recent speech in Toronto that he’s hearing that company CEOs are telling their legal departments to cut 25 per cent of their budgets for outside counsel. There’s no way numbers like that aren’t going to cause even the law firms in this country that didn’t feel the full, hot blast of the economic recession to make some changes. And for those that haven’t, it’s time.

The profession here is becoming integrated into the global practice of law, with at least two Canadian firms joining the ranks of multinational law firms this year. And there’s likely more to come — DLA Piper anyone? It’s not just U.K. and U.S. brands; transpacific firms, too, are soon coming to our shores, predicts Furlong. The globalization of law along with changes in regulations here giving paralegals and notaries more scope and even the possibility of non-lawyer ownership of law firms as well as greater segmentation of legal services mean it’s time to adapt or die.

So what can Canadian law firms do? Furlong has three suggestions: invest in systems that can streamline and even revolutionize what lawyers do and how they work; abandon the clock (“give tradition the boot”) and provide value and service measured by the end result — not the time and effort it took to get there; and lastly, rethink legal talent by being flexible and moving talent outside your walls.

As Furlong says: “The old rules aren’t going to apply anymore. The good news is that the new rules have yet to be written.”