Welcome to the Law Firm Disrupted, a briefing from Law.com editor Dan Packel that surveys new competitive pressures on law firms and how their managers are coping, plus insights on the tactics and tech employed by would-be disruptors. Have an opinion? Email me here. Want to be alerted to this dispatch in your inbox every Thursday? Sign up here.

It’s a tough time to be running a business of any variety. On Wednesday, I was out with a friend who founded a small tech company, and earlier in the day he’d been forced to lay off five employees as a result of excess capacity and dwindling demand. Of course, he wasn’t happy about having to do so.