Edge International Global Survey of Partner Compensation
Every few years, Edge International carries out a short global survey of partner compensation in law firms. It was very much the brainchild of our late and much-missed colleague Ed Wesemann, assisted by Nick Jarrett-Kerr. Over the last twelve years it has been interesting to track the trends across the world as firms have steadily […]
Retirement Benefits – Does your Firm Provide a Nest Egg?
For many years, a generation of law firm partners has become accustomed to funding their own retirements through personal savings and schemes. They know that their naked-in-naked-out style of partnership means they will never be able to extract value from their years of effort. However, partners in highly profitable first-generation law firms – those they […]
Lateral Hires and the “Slam Dunk” Myth
This is an edited extract from the second (and much expanded) edition of Ark’s best-selling report Tackling Partner Underperformance in Law Firms by Nick Jarrett-Kerr, released in April, 2018. It seems logical that both law firm growth and the plugging of a skills and market gap can be met by hiring a partner with […]
Ten Steps toward a Happier Firm
I have been involved in the management of professional service firms for upwards of twenty-five years, and during that time much of my effort has been directed towards helping firms to develop and build what might loosely be described as “success” – strategic success, financial success, business development success, organisational success and positioning success (relative […]
Another Look at Practice Group Analysis
Many law firms now have sophisticated methodologies for assessing or measuring the profitability of their practice groups, and yet many stumble across one of three typical issues. Many firms do not have a clear definition of their practice and industry groups. The issue is that firms often have too many specialised groups with some overlapping, […]
The Fading Power of Niches
It has often been stated that only two broad strategic directions are available to law firms, summed up in the often quoted platitude “Get Big or Go Niche”. Over the last few decades, many boutique firms have successfully followed a niche direction by doubling down on particular areas of focus and creating depth in sectors […]
Remodelling Change Projects
A couple of years ago, I proposed a three-stage programme designed to revive stalled strategic projects – repainting the vision, remodelling the project and changing the project team or team leader. The remodelling (second) stage of that programme suggested that if a project has stalled or remained uncompleted, it sometimes helps to modify the initiative […]
Three ways to revive difficult strategic projects
Many law firms of a reasonable size may well have conducted some form of strategy review within the last five to ten years. This makes many partners of law firms and indeed their leaders somewhat resistant to further reviews, especially if much of the previous strategy remains unfulfilled or in cases where the more intractable […]
Prioritising Initiatives – Avoiding the Seven Deadly Sins
I have often noticed that firms do not always seem to prioritise initiatives sufficiently carefully. My experience is that one or more of the following seven things get in the way of proper planning and implementation: He (or she) who shouts loudest for resources will often get them; Prioritisation is decided on positions of power […]
Helping Partners Jump Hurdles
Just about every law firm strategic plan requires some degree of business development planning and activities. For three reasons, however, lawyers often find the related areas of marketing and business development difficult hurdles to jump. THE PROBLEMS Doing what we have always done For decades, lawyers have been able to restrict their marketing strategies and […]