Is the next legal trend the officeless law firm? Yes, says entrepreneur Craig Johnson, whose newest venture depends on it, according to the Recorder, a daily legal newspaper in San Francisco. Virtual Law Partners was unveiled by Johnson and 14 other lawyers, who see it as mutually beneficial for lawyers and clients. Because billing rates don't include office-related overhead and the firm has done away with minimum billable hour requirements, clients save money. And because lawyers can work from home, set their own rates, and retain 85 percent of what they bill (while still charging relatively less than big firms), their life-work balance gets an upward boost. Johnson, who co-founded Venture Law Group in 1993, aims to break from the current formula by being just like other big firms with hundreds of lawyers, but without the actual building. But not everyone is jumping on the virtual law boat just yet. Peter Zeughauser, founder of law firm consultant Zeughauser Group, has doubts that the virtual model can handle the type of work that bigger firms with a heavier infrastructure can manage. Still, Johnson sees the half-as-expensive-as-big-firm rates as a draw to the diverse clients that his lawyers will service. "The thing that makes it almost a slam dunk," says Johnson, "is the incredible price umbrella from the big firms. When you charge $400 an hour and have clients think it's a bargain, how could you not succeed?"

For firms dependent on the deals of the financial world, the times are looking tough, and slimming down around the edges is the reality of the day, reports Crain's New York Business.com. "This has not been a great year for law firms," said Aniello Bianco of Hildebrandt International. "When you have people who are not busy and you don't anticipate them becoming busy, law firms have to trim." The quiet, targeted layoffs that began last year will likely continue and even increase this year and into 2009. Lawyers in New York, the Wall Street pulse of the financial times, are disproportionately hard-hit by the economic slowdown. Some firms are delaying start dates of new hires in order to save money, offering stipends in the meantime to discourage defection to other firms. Nonfinance-focused firms have the luxury of cherry picking the top talent skimmed off the competitors' losses, plucking a few bright stars out of a potentially troubled talent pool. And for those downtrodden New York lawyers, location is everything. That Big Apple, Big Law past has helped some land a new spot in a new city.

Getting back on the legal track after taking a side street to, say, raise a family or pursue another career interest, can be a challenging experience. The Legal Times reports that at American University's Washington College of Law, a re-entry program is being launched to assist with that very journey. The course breaks the curriculum down into four focuses, the first being self-assessment and goal setting. The second addresses rŽsumŽ and cover-letter updates, followed by schooling in the realm of that quickly changing beast, technology. The final step is a one-on-one coaching session with the executive director of the program, Linda Mercurio, whose ultimate goal is to help the returning lawyers to "regain a sense of self as a professional" and "successfully prepare the participants to cross that bridge" that leads to the workplace. Though the program is cosponsored by the Women's Bar Association of D.C. and the National Association of Women Lawyers, it is not exclusive to women, and already some men have expressed an interest in participating.

Digital discovery is more expensive than ever, reports the Wall Street Journal, sometimes even prohibitively so. The cost to reproduce and turn over digital data, particularly in complicated civil cases, is dramatically driving up litigation costs, sometimes to the point where cases with little merit are settled rather than tried, for fear of the potential expense. Or, deserving cases go unfiled because the "cost of getting the information is much higher than what the case is worth," said John Raiej, chief of the Rules Committee Support Office of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Volumes of information have gone from megabytes to terabytes for cases concerning big corporations. Houston attorney Sam Guiberson offered that the problem results from companies not realizing that information retention is part of a normal business practice. When facing litigation, enormous allocations of money must then be spent to reconstruct information. "The solution begins with corporations and other business entities understanding that litigation is part of the due course of their business," said Guiberson.

Stress resulting from difficult economic times can bring otherwise stable employees to the brink of breakdown, which can mean succumbing to so-called desk rage directed toward their colleagues, reports the New York Law Journal. Unfortunately, employment lawyers are witnessing an increase in occupational abuse and violence. A 2001 study found that 23 percent of respondents had been driven to tears by stress in the workplace, 10 percent had witnessed workplace violence at the hands of a colleague, and 42 percent reported hostile shouting and other verbal violence. More recently, and more startling, is a research paper published this year by Paul Spector, an industrial and organizational psychology professor at the University of South Florida. Out of a national workforce of around 100 million, 3 million workers "confessed to pushing, slapping or striking a colleague on the job." Just like traditional sexual harassment education, workplace abuse education may be the next important training focus for the office, as well as a clear company policy in terms of occupational violence. Offices are aiming to prevent abuse litigation by thoroughly making clear at seminars and training sessions that "workplace bullies" will not be tolerated. After all, a lot more than lunch money is at stake these days.

Instead of a chair at your desk, what about a treadmill? Texas Lawyer shares the story of Ross Robinson of Winstead PC's Dallas office, who is busting a move to the speed of 0.7 miles per hour all day at his workstation. Having become accustomed to his standing workstation a few years ago, Robinson decided to take it a few steps further after reading about a study performed in 2005 by Dr. James Levine at the Mayo Clinic, which found that NEAT, or nonexercise activity thermogenesis, is very possibly a deciding factor between obesity and thinness. Robinson, a shareholder in Winstead's intellectual property group, estimates that he spends about 80 percent of his day taking baby steps on the treadmill, to the tune of six or eight pounds lost in a month. "I don't even think about it. It's so slow," says Robinson. "Even at a mile an hour, you are just barely moving." Sounds like slow and steady really does win the race!

Is the job market splitting into two equally difficult to navigate markets? On the one side, according to Robert Half International, is the overstuffed talent pool in some fields, leaving employers with many qualified applicants to choose from, and jobs that are hard to find. On the other side are fields such as accounting and technology, where not enough qualified applicants exist, and recruiting is becoming more and more difficult, with in-demand employees difficult to coax out of their positions unless an extremely attractive offer comes their way. According to the survey's findings, Generation Y workers (born between 1979 and 1999) are the most difficult to recruit, possibly because of their expectations surrounding flexibility, career advancement, and pay. Pay is an issue all around, considering the rising prices of health care, food, and fuel, and negotiation is becoming ever more important for both employers and potential employees. Companies that are running leaner aim to recruit fewer, but higher quality employees, and are willing to negotiate compensation packages in order to lure top talent.