On June 1, 2020, we launched Beeman & Muchmore, LLP. The two weeks that followed were beyond our hopes and expectations. We thank our current clients for their continued loyalty and our new clients for the opportunity.
We wanted to pause from the busy job of establishing our new firm to acknowledge and share some of the attention that we have received. While it is a great pleasure to see our firm’s name in print, it is even more satisfying to bear witness to our message being understood, digested and then further disseminated. And for this, we are particularly grateful.
We identified the concept of “GigLaw” alongside the launch of our firm. “GigLaw” is our name for a platform to deliver the exemplary legal services of BigLaw – in our case, Oracle and other software licensing and auditing services – in a highly specialized manner that is free from the inefficiencies of the traditional full-service law firm. Picking up on and embracing our concept of “GigLaw”, on June 5, 2020, Scott Graham published a report in his biweekly IP briefing Skilled in the Art entitled “Meet the Duo Behind the Uber of Virtual Law Firms.” As Mr. Graham stated in his report:
Virtual law firms have become popular in the 2000s, but the formation of Beeman Muchmore this week feels like something new: a virtual firm combined with a microspecialty intellectual property practice. In this case it’s resolving licensing disputes over enterprise resource planning software.
All we can say is “Exactly.” Beeman & Muchmore is more than just another couple of BigLaw refugees who discovered that new technology can mean not paying rent and offering cheaper rates for their clients (although we certainly applaud the noble end of lowering BigLaw rates). Rather, Beeman & Muchmore is a platform for us to deliver the fruits of our years of experience in a highly-tailored manner – direct, unadorned and unburdened. As Mr. Graham continued:
‘Gig law’ is not meant to demean or devalue the work, Beeman says. The stakes can be enormous when businesses and their software providers get crosswise over licenses. But the disputes tend to recur throughout the market, and Beeman and Muchmore have a lot of experience with them, including the only known instance of an ERP dispute that ended up in court [Mars v. Oracle].
Soon thereafter, on June 8, 2020, Kamila Knaudt published an article in The Daily Journal entitled “New Boutique Specializes in Software Licensing Practice.” In addition to capturing our focus on software licensing disputes, Ms. Knaudt acknowledged our “GigLaw” model as a direct response to the evolution of client demand:
In addition to a very specialized practice, Beeman & Muchmore LLP wants to tap into the ‘gig law’ trends in legal work. ‘What we’re finding is that increasingly what general counsel want are outside counsel with highly specialized skill sets that can then just plug in and instantly perform the discrete tasks that need to be done,’ Muchmore said. ‘We’re calling it almost like a virtual general counsel’s office, where on their rolodex there are any number of people who can be called in particular kinds of disputes and then they just plug in effortlessly into the team to handle those discrete issues.’
And so, as we begin our third week in business, we thank those that have helped us spread the nuanced details regarding our unique practice model. It is our sincere belief and hope that by directly responding to client demand, our venture will help put the attorney-client relationship back to the center of the practice of law where it belongs.
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As you know, we intend to continue our long-standing practice of writing about the legal issues impacting software licensing and auditing trends, including those regarding Oracle Corporation. However, in recognition of the interest that our identification of the “GigLaw” phenomenon is garnering, we will also share our observations on the state of the legal market, especially those that we trust led to the inevitability of the “GigLaw” model in which we strongly believe.
Stay tuned for the end of this week when are scheduled to post Part I of a two-part post conveniently titled “The Road to ‘GigLaw’ in 10 Steps.”
Thanks again,
Art and Joel
Published on 6/17/2020
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