“The Asia practice has been a priority for us from the beginning,” said Michael Moradzadeh, founding partner and CEO of Rimon in San Francisco. “I would expect Asia to end up being at least second only to the U.S., if not the same size as the U.S.” Rimon Law set its sights on Asia and applied to open an office in Hong Kong with two potential pipeline partners. An office in Hong Kong will be the third Asian office, following Shenzhen in 2019 and South Korea earlier this year. At Rimon, we believe there is a more modern and entrepreneurial way to provide the valuable legal advice clients need. By leveraging a distributed model and technological innovations that have already revolutionized many industries, our partners work seamlessly across jurisdictions and time zones while benefiting from a flexible and autonomous legal practice. COVID has made it impossible to ignore what many of us already knew: in a rapidly changing world, new tools and opportunities open the door to innovation and ultimately demand it. For forward-looking law firms, the professional landscape has never been more exciting than it is today. I was a partner at Orrick before joining Rimon. I chose Rimon over the traditional law firms I considered because Rimon gives me more flexibility in staffing my files, billing my clients, and splitting my time between billable and non-billable work. It also eliminated speculation and the policy of the partner remuneration system – a unique achievement. And yet, it provides the infrastructure I need to practice intellectual property litigation at the highest level, as well as an excellent team of lawyers to work with. In this new legal world, hourly fees are giving way to a value statement based on the value of the work done by the client rather than the hours spent by the lawyer, according to the report.
Two years ago, 22% of internal customers surveyed and 48% of partners surveyed saw value billing as a trend for the future. Today, 86% of customers and 88% of partners say they use the statement of value frequently or sometimes. Of the UK partners surveyed, 79% said the hourly rate was almost dead. If the partner successfully transitions to the role of business generator, he or she can reach the highest rank in the guild after many years and will be invited to take on an additional leadership role. Again, the lawyer is pushed into a position that has nothing to do with past successes or interests. Even in companies where AFAs are part of the tariff structure landscape, restrictive bureaucracies often prevent them from being widely used or put to good use. In 2020, Bloomberg Law found that 65% of law firms with more than 100 practicing lawyers performed 20% or less of their work under AFAs or did not follow this measure at all.3 In addition, Altman Weil`s 2020 survey of law firm managing partners found that a median of only 6-10% of corporate fees came from non-billable hourly rates.4 In 2019, Jae Um, Director of Pricing Strategy at Baker McKenzie, said: “I am a proponent of the belief that billable time is likely to persist for the foreseeable future, because where there are ill-defined or misunderstood needs at first, the hourly rate remains the easiest way to buy complex expertise.” 5 Before Rimon, I was a partner at Freshfields and Herbert Smith. Rimon`s model reverses the financial model of traditional law firms.
Experienced partners bring home more of what they bring to the table, without sacrificing the sophisticated camaraderie and support provided by the company. Almost 100% of my clients came to Rimon with me. Altman Weil warns that its “survey data has long shown that most law firms don`t want to change, aren`t good at it, and by and large don`t think it`s necessary. Each year from 2013 to 2020, law firm managing partners gave law firms poor ratings (a median rate of 5 on a 10-point scale) in terms of seriousness in changing service models. Less than 2% of law firm executives agree that law firms have changed as much as they should. In 2020, a majority of companies described their current progress as zero or early development in pricing, staffing and efficiency. “Rimon is at the forefront of legal innovation. Rimon is a highly selective entrepreneurial firm that combines the dynamic client service, teamwork and agility of a high-end boutique law firm with the extensive multidisciplinary experience of a large global law firm. Our clients are regularly represented in our 19 offices by our team of leading corporate, litigation, tax, intellectual property, entertainment and retail lawyers. Rimon`s enduring excellence, community engagement and innovation have been recognized internationally by Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, Chambers, Best Lawyers, Super Lawyers, Financial Times Innovation Awards, Atlantic, American Bar Association Legal Rebels, The Economist and many others. Rimon`s clients range from innovative technology startups to financial institutions and Fortune 100 companies.
Rimon`s lawyers have decades of experience even before joining Rimon. Rimon`s lawyers have been meticulously recruited from the upper echelons of major law firms, international corporations and universities. They have JDs, PhDs, LLMs, and MBAs from top universities in the U.S. and abroad. They have worked on multibillion-dollar contracts, won legal battles, and run universities. Their experience and training ensure that our clients always receive excellent and comprehensive advice. For more information: www.rimonlaw.com/law-firm-evolved Today, we have dozens of offices around the world, and our firm and partners have received numerous awards of excellence, including from Best Lawyers and Chambers. The COVID pandemic has underscored the value of the company`s modern, distributed model, which allows it to serve its customers and partners in an agile, value-driven manner, without being encumbered by overhead, bureaucracy, or even physical location. As brick-and-mortar businesses struggled to adapt to a completely remote environment and, even before the pandemic hit, find ways to offer their services at prices that customers deem reasonable, Rimon has continued uninterrupted to transparently provide high-quality, value-driven advice to our customers. For this reason, we have experienced 30-40% growth year after year since our inception.
I came to Rimon d`Orrick because it offers an excellent combination of depth and breadth, a perfect balance between quality and cost, and natural flexibility in time and space. Within a year or two of joining Rimon, I`ve gained a number of Fortune 100 clients, and in the last six months alone, I`ve worked on important issues with over 40 other Rimon partners. I now represent well-known Chinese technology companies such as Alipay and Xiaomi in various aspects of doing business in the United States, including significant litigation. I have also represented other Chinese/Taiwanese companies in ITC litigation and billion-dollar litigation. As law firms grew to hundreds, if not thousands, of lawyers, bureaucracy followed. In addition to billable hourly quotas, partners who know their own practices, customers, industries, and opportunities aren`t just freed from billable hourly quotas to make the most important decisions that impact their business growth. In fact, partners who have decades of experience serving their customers and adding value to their businesses aren`t tasked with making fundamental decisions that impact their practices and lives, including hiring lateral partners or employees, choosing which customers they want to work with, and even deciding where you want to work physically. Instead, these decisions are often made by remote committees or executives who may not have a real understanding of a particular partner`s practice and clients. * This estimate includes federal salaries and payroll taxes for your team, but excludes the cost of benefits or government payroll taxes. Calculations of incoming and outgoing revenues are only an estimate and depend on the relevant internal fees, which are variable and left to the discretion of individual lawyers.
Please contact mmorad@rimonlaw.com or jayne.ford@rimonlaw.com to apply for a side position or to find out more. All contacts will be kept strictly confidential. In this changing world, law firm structures can be vulnerable. Forty-six percent of managing partners said reducing and changing the available premium legal work would change the shape and size of law firms. Large firms have reported reductions in staff and long-term debt, as well as possible changes to the “up and out” pyramid structure of law firms. Only 30% of partners reported being married to the traditional partnership model. In law firms, the broad and disruptive impact of technology has already begun, shifting from support staff to senior partners. The legal industry has introduced new labor-saving technologies that reduce the need for time and personnel in legal and administrative work. Law firms have reduced their support staff and tried to move the back office to cheaper locations.
Law firms follow their clients through this process. Companies have embraced technologies that allow them to reduce staff and outsource functions. After making their own operations “lean and mean,” companies expect the same from their professional service providers. This new attitude has led to major upheavals in the legal landscape. Stress at Big Law is higher rates, with domestic clients hitting those hours to enrich financial partners. This model does not exist at Rimon.