Legal OnRamp reduces costs for legal work through information sharing.

Byline: Minnesota Lawyer Staff

Many small law firms have the capacity to perform outsourced legal work for corporate legal departments, but lack the connections.

A virtual Internet meeting place called Legal OnRamp is providing a mechanism for small-firm lawyers to meet in-house counsel who are looking for ways to cut their costs for farmed-out work.

Created by Cisco Systems, Inc., Legal OnRamp is dedicated to the principle that law firms and legal departments can produce less costly results by working together in a cooperative, information-sharing fashion.

Cisco's general counsel, Mark Chandler, made the argument for Legal OnRamp earlier this year during a widely distributed speech at Northwestern School of Law.

"The most fundamental misalignment of interests is between clients who are driven to manage expenses and law firms which are compensated by the hour," Chandler said. He described law firm economics as "the last vestige of the medieval guild system to survive into the 21st century."

Chandler's central point is that changing technology will doom the traditional methods of operation employed by law firms. The traditional methods, he said, were based on law firms' privileged access to information that clients needed. But he said that in the modern electronic age, access to information is much easier for everyone.