Resources

Our Musings

Beyond The Client Survey

This is an article about benchmarks that law firms can employ to measure client satisfaction beyond the feedback they may be already getting from larger client surveys.

Developing A Personal Marketing Strategy

This discussion is devoted to the concept of developing a marketing strategy on a personal level, rather than on a firm, client or team level. It is a very pragmatic approach to building your practice with the types of clients you hope to work with, the nature of the work you would like to be known for and the profit levels that you wish to attain.

Succession

In our over thirty years working with law firms we have noticed that a great many partnerships have not done any succession planning within their firms - succession at the firm management level, succession at the group management level or succession at the client level.

Going Out On Your Own

This is a short checklist of the Do's and Don'ts that you should consider if you are thinking of starting your own firm.

Advisory Boards

There is an old saying that goes; it can be lonely at the top - especially if you are a busy managing partner trying to maintain a modicum of personal practice while also chartimg a course for your firm's growth. Perhaps a concept in use in the non-legal business world can help you achieve your goals.

A Look at Current Practices in Client Teams

A current survey of 93 law firms suggests little or no improvement in building client teams. Formal planning is far from standard practice and client satisfaction audits are rarities. Meanwhile, corporations are continuing their convergence initiatives at an accelerated pace.

The Best Law Firm Leaders

Are you a great leader? Compare what you or your partners bring to the role of firm or team leader to our observations of the characteristics of the best law firm leaders we have encountered over our thirty plus years around law firms.

Growing Your Practice

Being optimists, we feel that the bottom has been put in and the economy is starting to come back, however slowly. With that in mind, we have created a short checklist of strategies that firms, teams and individual lawyers may wish to consider as they start to rebuild their practices and expand their books of business.

Strategies In A Downturn

Twenty possible strategies that every firm should consider when the economy and your firm profitability head south.

Strategy Basics

Today, most firms realize that business planning is crucial to just surviving. Hopefully your firm wants to do more than just survive. In order to do so you must create a set of strategies that will give you a significant advantage over your competition.

Partner Compensation

First published by the Law Practice Management Magazine of the American Bar Association, our article on partner compensation systems, describes the variety of ways that a firm can allocate compensation and the strengths and weaknesses of each of those methodologies.

Planning a Law Firm Retreat

The rapid growth of law firms in the past decade has created some new and unique management difficulties. With firms' size, and the complexity of global legal practices, coordinating the availability of partners to perform any management function beyond routine meeting attendance is increasingly difficult. The problem of finding partners to assume leadership roles is compounded by the feeling of many partners in large firms that they are functionally employees rather than owners. The values of the partnership model to which many law firms aspire are becoming difficult to achieve in a modern professional service organization. The problem is further compounded in large multi-office firms where partners not only don't know their fellow partners from other offices well, they may not have even met each other

Alumni: A Competitive Weapon

As law firms, we often look at our brethren in the accounting field for ideas on how to better optimize our businesses. After all, the accountants were the first to develop practice groups which most law firms have now emulated. They were the first to develop client teams, which many of us now also imitate. That raises the question: Why have we been so slow to create alumni groups which the accountants have used for years?

Five Questions for Counsel

So often we see lawyers who have a meeting with a General Counsel where all they can think of to discuss is “How Can I Sell You More Stuff”. In order to build a strong relationship with your client companies, I would respectfully suggest that this is entirely the wrong approach. As the old saying goes, “Clients don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”. To properly serve our larger corporate clients we need to know more about them, not just the files that they send our way.

Merger Red Flags

We have developed a short checklist of the top ten items firms must be aware of and address when considering a merger. While many of these apply to acquisitions, this list is really aimed at firms who are truly merging as equals.

Industry Groups

What is it that the accountants have figured out that the lawyers are slow to embrace? Quite simply put, they have realized that the best organization is organized along client driven criteria rather than an internally driven criteria. Organizing by industry is client focused while organizing by practice area is firm focused.

Attributes of MP's

Our careers as consultants and advisors to the legal profession have brought us into contact with literally thousands of Managing Partners throughout North America and the world . Over the years we have observed certain characteristics that the most successful managers have in common.

Innovate Now

It wasn’t that long ago that solid, major companies like IBM could expect to grow and prosper by simply by maintaining a “steady as she goes” approach because they had proprietary software that kept their clients locked into their hardware. Change occurred very slowly back then in the dark ages. We all know that the last twenty years has seen that incredible change has overtaken every industry. For years change was slow with companies like IBM or TWA or Xerox. Now look at them. What happened was that they were sluggish in realizing that the terrain changed shape faster than they could change their basic concepts, technologies and marketing definitions.

Top 25 Leadership Quotes

Ponder what it takes to be a true leader with these practical quotes that will lead you to a more precise understanding of the secrets to effective leadership .