As we enter the New Year, chances are good you’re dealing with a predictable slate of demands on your time: setting compensation and budgets; managing details associated with the latest departure; and interviewing this week’s lateral prospect. All important activities, and worthy of serious attention; but none of these is likely to make the firm
Law Firm Departures 2016/2017: A Likely Source of Disputes
(As many law firms see their fiscal year close simultaneously with the calendar year-end, the risk of partner departures rise. The lessons identified in the March 2015 blog Law Firm Departures: A Likely Source of Disputes have not lost their relevance as 2016 closes and 2017 begins. That blog is reprinted here in its entirely)
Improving Your Law Firm’s Growth Prospects-The Importance of Discipline
For many law firms client expectations, increased competition (from traditional and non-traditional sources) and unreliable demand present formidable challenges. These challenges can be compounded as a firm’s senior lawyers age and succession gets added to a firm’s “to do” list.
Some firms have responded to these issues by growing through lateral hiring or merger
Preparing Your Law Firm to Compete in a Changing World
As staid and conservative lawyers and their profession may seem, it is undeniable that change is a part of their world. The change that has confronted the legal profession since the collapse of 2008 has garnered a lot of press, but lawyers and their firms have had to adjust to an altering world for a
Culture and Law Firm Stability
When you see the word “Culture” used in a discussion about today’s law firm environment, what comes to mind? A metric defying intangible that, though referenced in reverent tones in firm literature, bears little relevance to the bottom-line? Or, as a palpable reality that impacts human resources?
Or as something in-between?
Here’a a working
Trust and the Law Firm Leader
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. – Warren Buffet
In my professional experience, no attribute is more important for the leader seeking to turn around a law firm than trust.
In a Forbes article by David Horsager, the author eloquently articulates it. “Among all the attributes of
Law Firms Today-The Downside to an Unearned Raising of Rates
Over the last two weeks some attention has been given to the topic of law firms raising rates. Bill Josten recently wrote about information coming from Thomson Reuters’ Legal Executive Institute and Peer Monitor that suggests that raising rates may undermine firms’ goals of greater profitability. A similar report followed, also drawing on Thomson
Is Your Law Firm’s Market Disappearing?
There continue to be reports addressing the challenges facing the legal profession related to a falling demand for legal services and the increasing number of alternatives to traditional law firms.
At a macro level the demand for legal services has been flat to negative for the last decade. While larger firms have faired slightly
Law Firms Today-Preparing for an Uncertain Future
Forbes’ article Cab Companies and Law Firms Are Taking the Same Route presents the provocative view that law firms face disruptive innovation similar to the kind experienced over the last eight years by cab companies. Ride sharing innovation through the likes of Uber, Lyft and others has undermined the once financially formidable cab business.
Opportunity and the Law Firm Turnaround
When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.
John F. Kennedy
The Crisis at Kaye Scholer
I was sitting reviewing law business related articles recently. As the stories of doom and gloom and struggling law firms big and small continue to occupy