Decades ago, companies hired outside counsel as a trusted advisor to guide them through difficult decisions. Today, most companies hire outside counsel more out of necessity or fear, and large law firms are often criticized for spending needless hours undertaking detailed study of issues which are, at best, tangential to the core business problems faced by the company. Law firms representing leading corporations typically embrace a culture of billable hours, and multidisciplinary issues are either ignored or are relegated to ancillary practices as an afterthought.
Today’s businesses face complex legal problems requiring creative solutions, developed through a cost-effective approach realizing the efficiency that businesses demand. We have spent our careers representing major U.S. and international corporations. We saw that there was a need for our clients to have legal and non-legal professionals producing a unified work product, in order to provide real world business advice. We saw that there was a need for skills at negotiation and dispute resolution, rather than simply for aggressive and expensive litigation. We saw that there was a need for corporations to be able to choose to work based on alternative billing arrangements that reward success, and to break the traditional pyramid structure for staffing legal matters.
Eisenstein Malanchuk LLP was formed to meet those needs and to recreate the model of law firm as trusted business advisor.