Stealth Discrimination: A model for choosing and managing your leaders
If you find yourself responsible for the leadership of a law firm of a significant size, then you need no convincing to realize that you have far too little time to accomplish even a small portion of your objectives. In many cases, you still carry a client load that most mere mortals would find overwhelming. […]
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 Cultural Lenses through which We Examine Law Firms
Cultural differences define and influence every aspect of law firms’ operations, reputations and financial success. Describing a law firm’s culture is difficult, even for people who know the organization intimately. When asked to describe a culture, people typically resort to words like “collegial” or “democratic.” While terms like this may convey a general sense of […]
Drive Law Firm Success by Helping Each Lawyer Succeed
(This article was originally published in the February 2017 edition of TLOMA Today, the newsletter of The Law Office Management Association of Ontario.) In my many years of consultation with law firms around the globe, I have learned that the most successful firms are those that offer the best leadership for their individual lawyers. One of […]
Forget Systems and Structures – “Getting the Job Done” Is the Key
Successful businesses and law firms succeed because they get the right things done. They determine a vision, identify strategic key objectives, strategies to achieve those, make decisions around these and then make sure they are implemented. This gets results – the real test of everything. Too often I think firms and even my consulting colleagues around […]
Big Firms in Small Cities: Go Virtual!
Eversheds Sutherland! Norton Rose/Chadbourne Parke! Arnold & Porter/Kaye Scholer! If it’s such a bad idea to get bigger to create scale and capability, why are so many smart leaders at so many leading firms doing it? As a regional or mid-market full-service firm, it’s easy these days to feel pretty un-validated by all of this […]
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 […]
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 […]
Career Planning for Managing Partners
Law firms often debate the advantages and disadvantages of professional managers as opposed to traditional lawyer managing partners. Each comes with different attributes and experience. The professional manager is sometimes viewed as just a hired hand and needs time to learn the business of law, but has management knowhow. The managing partner has credibility and […]