While the legal industry is beginning to appreciate the need to embrace technology, the business models that big law firms and legal departments rely on have stayed stubbornly unchanged by broader market forces.

Dentons and its legal technology incubator Nextlaw Labs hosted a panel discussion, titled “Alternative Legal Business Models,” on April 5 to discuss some of the ways that legal practitioners could and already are reshaping their business structures and billing frameworks to adapt to modern needs. Mary Juetten, Traklight and Evolve Law founder; Dan Lear, director of industry relations at Avvo; and Monica Zent, founder of Foxwordy and ZentLaw, each spoke to a room in Dentons' Palo Alto office about their experiences navigating new terrain around these alternatives.

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Finding a New Way for Fees

Flat fee billing is often posed as a replacement for the billable hour, but Juetten explained early on that there seems to be a lot of confusion around the role of time tracking in a flat fee law firm structure.