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WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

YOU DON'T WANNA KNOW  - When you go out for a romantic evening at Buffalo Wild Wings, the waiter stops by your table to ask how your food is. Even your cellphone provider asks you to take a customer service survey after keeping you on hold for 167 minutes. But law firms, which live and die by the quality of their client service, appear to be actively avoiding feedback from the clients they serve. The letter Morgan Stanley Chief Legal Officer Eric Grossman sent to outside counsel earlier this month attempting to push them back to the office full-time was uncomfortable for law firms in large part because it forced many of them to reckon with and respond to actual direct feedback from a client. Believe it or not, that's a rare occurrence for many firms. In this week's Law.com Trendspotter column, we look at why more firms aren't conducting client satisfaction surveys and interviews—and why avoiding those conversations is a very bad idea. Before we dive in, I'm interested to hear what you think: Should firms be conducting client feedback surveys/interviews or is their usefulness overblown? If you're in favor of firms seeking client feedback, what are some best practices to make sure that what the firm gets back is honest and actionable? Let me know at [email protected].

BEATING BAKED-IN BIAS -  Diversity Lab is piloting another new program, the Mansfield Rule for Workflow, which aims to take some of the inequity and implicit bias out of the work assignment process at law firms, Law.com's Lizzy McLellan reports. The program, which has taken the form of an app, is being piloted by two large law firms, Nixon Peabody and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, which are both investors in Diversity Lab's Move the Needle Fund. According to Lisa Kirby, chief intelligence and knowledge sharing officer at Diversity Lab, the app is a directory that allows lawyers to designate what kind of experience they want to gain. From the leadership side, it allows people forming teams to easily view available team members who are from underrepresented groups, and aim for 30% of them to be from those groups. Kirby said the traditional methods of assigning work at law firms have become an issue because "they tend to have cognitive biases baked into them." "We know too that access to high-quality work assignments is the most influential factor" in professional development, Kirby said. "It can lead to this initial inequality that just gets more entrenched and more severe over time."

UNDELIVERABLE - Drone delivery company AgEagle Aerial Systems and members of its board were hit with a shareholder derivative suit Tuesday in California Central District Court. The complaint, filed by Glancy Prongay & Murray, accuses the company of perpetuating and exploiting rumors that it had partnered with Amazon in order to inflate its stock price. Counsel have not yet appeared for the defendants. The case is 2:21-cv-06056, Granja v. Drozd et al. Stay up on the latest deals and litigation with the new Law.com Radar.  

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EDITOR'S PICKS

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WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING

DÜSSELDORF DEBUT -  Yingke Law Firm, a major Chinese firm, has expanded its German presence by opening a second German office under the name YK Law, Law.com International's James Carstensen reports. The firm has launched with two Chinese and two German partners in Düsseldorf, a person at the firm said. The Chinese partners are Yingke lawyers Hui Lu and Jingwu Li, who are also admitted to the bar in Germany. The German lawyers are Timo Schneiders and Zhechao Li, who was previously an in-house lawyer at Traffic Engineering Association in the West German city of Bochum. Until now, Yingke's only German presence had been in Berlin through a partnership with Berlin-based firm Dr. Köhler und Partner, headed by Andreas Köhler, launched in 2015. Düsseldorf is known for being home to a large contingent of Asian companies and communities. The Düsseldorf firm's focus will be advising and supporting Chinese companies' German activities.

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WHAT YOU SAID

"Now with the rising cases, it's not just a matter of efficiency, but it's a matter of safety."