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Cybersecurity Law & Strategy
Expanding Your Digital Strategy with RPA
Arup Das
Beyond improving efficiency, new advancements in Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, are helping lawyers do more billable work without hiring more people.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
The Time to Improve Administrative Performance Is Now
J. Mark Santiago
This article focuses on what a firm can do now that will improve future firm economics regardless of what the future may hold, identifying three areas that offer the great opportunity for improving a law firms’ economics and better positioning them for whatever the future may bring.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Law Firm Revenue Rose as Demand Dropped in the First Quarter of 2019
David Altuna and Gretta Rusanow
The legal industry saw greater revenue growth during the first quarter of 2019 than it did to start the strong year of 2018. However, the drivers of that growth were much different, as the demand growth that characterized 2018 gave way to a demand decline during the first quarter of 2019, and much of the revenue growth came in the form of cash collections from 2018 inventory.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
“Don’t Do Stupid”
J. Mark Santiago
6 Common Law Firm Accounting Practices That Need to Be Re-evaluated
There are a number of tried and true practices in law firms that need more thinking. Not because law firm managers are stupid; it’s just that some practices need to be periodically re-evaluated and adjusted to reflect the changing times.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Best Ways to Expand Key Client Relationships from the Lawyers’ and Firms’ Perspectives
Julie Savarino
Part One of a Two-Part Article
For a variety of reasons, many law firms and lawyers struggle to effectively cross-sell or cross-service. This article defines the specific and best actions lawyers and law firms can take to expand client relationships.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Lawyers: Being Paid Shouldn’t Be Like Pulling Teeth!
Peter A. Johnson
What Lawyers Can Learn From Dentists
Nobody enjoys visiting the dentist, but everybody knows you still must pay him or her on the day of service. Attorneys, however, have historically let the client lead the payment dance. Lawyers do the work and hope/expect to be paid without waiting too long or discounting the invoice too steeply. What can we do differently?
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Law Firm Mergers and the Economic Outlook for 2019
Marcus Dyer
As law firms endeavor to survive in an increasingly competitive world, one strategy picking up steam is the law firm merger. In this article, we recap law firm merger activity in 2018 and consider the economic outlook for law firm mergers for 2019.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
IRS Issues New Plan 457(f) Non-Profit Exam Guidelines
Lawrence L. Bell
Planning for executive benefits for top hat employees at non-profit organizations has undergone a frenzy of regulatory roadmap changes. Nonprofit NonQualified Benefits are largely directed and controlled by IRC §457.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Orion Prebill Survey Shows Law Firms Are Troubled by Inefficient, Paper-Heavy Prebilling Processes
Kevin Harris
Prebilling, the process of generating invoice drafts and circulating them for annotation/adjustment, is one of the most important monthly tasks a law firm conducts. Since prebilling involves bringing money into the firm, the more efficient the process becomes, the better off the law firm is financially.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Clients Drive Information Governance: Business Benefits Flow to Firm
Stephen Cole
Information governance and the protection of corporate data are top concerns for law firms. To ensure standards are met, some clients are now tying payment to compliance with Outside Counsel Guidelines (OCG). OCG have moved from guidelines to actual contracts that provide for indemnification of the client for cyber breach and violation of privacy laws.
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Marketing The Law Firm
Sales Speak: Overcoming the Doer-Seller Dilemma
Debra Baker
Rethinking Sales As an Act of Service
Lawyers are one of only a handful of professionals whose job requires them both to do the work and generate the business. This “Doer-Seller” Dilemma is particularly vexing for lawyers because of a long-held belief that sales is somehow beneath the legal profession and because lawyers have a limited view of what successful selling looks like.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Key Tax and Financial Considerations for New Law Partners
John Fitzgerald and Christopher Imperiale
Being asked to join the partnership of a firm is a measure of success as a legal professional. With that achievement comes tax and financial responsibilities that, surprisingly, few attorneys are fully prepared to deal with. These responsibilities include the unexpected individual federal and state and local tax filing and payments.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Work Opportunity Tax Credit and On-Boarding
Lawrence L. Bell
With the cost of doing business consistently on the rise combined with the increasing difficulty to find/retain great employees, there is no better time to pursue employment-based tax credits. There are both federal and state employment-based credits available that can help businesses offset income tax liability.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Case Study: California Law Firm Dowling Aaron Is Transforming and Modernizing Its Prebilling Process with Orion ePrebill Manager
Gregory N. Miskulin, Jamie Carstens and Lindsay Powell
Orion’s ePrebill Manager allows corrections to prebills to be tracked and applied in real time, with a one-click acceptance and approval process. Further, by distributing prebills electronically, attorneys can see the edits made by others, the overall net effect of write-downs, and how these affect the realization of both the working timekeepers and the client overall, in real time.
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Marketing The Law Firm
Lawyers: Being Paid Shouldn’t Be Like Pulling Teeth!
Peter A. Johnson
What Lawyers Can Learn From Dentists
Attorneys have historically let the client lead the payment dance. Lawyers do the work and hope/expect to be paid without waiting too long or discounting the invoice too steeply. Yet, here we are at the beginning of another year with many law firms still waiting anxiously for overdue checks to arrive. Shame on us for letting this happen. What can we do differently?
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
A New Philosophy for Managing Partners: Building Consensus Versus Managing As an Autocrat
Joel A. Rose
An Astute Lawyer-Manager Must Achieve the Appropriate Balance of Building Consensus Among the Partners
Applying management techniques to practice areas may introduce to the firm a new take on methods for enhancing profitability.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Overcoming Legal Finance Misconceptions In 2019
Ari Kaplan
As the volume of litigation continues to grow and the ability to manage it as a defendant or add to it as a plaintiff grows increasingly complex, legal costs will continue to rise in 2019 — and funding advocacy on both sides will remain a lingering challenge.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Athletic Coaches and the Tax Act
Lawrence L. Bell
When the Tax Cut and Jobs Act became law in December of 2017 there was a question whether some of the highest salaried employees at non-profit organizations would be exempt from the $1M remuneration tax. In the majority of states, the highest salaried employees are athletic coaches.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Are Cybersecurity Solutions and Consulting a New Revenue Stream for Law Firms?
Ishan Girdhar
The Big 4 accounting firms have identified legal services as an area for growth beyond traditional financial services and consulting services.
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Cybersecurity Law & Strategy
Are Cybersecurity Solutions and Consulting a New Revenue Stream for Law Firms?
Ishan Girdhar
The Big 4 accounting firms have identified legal services as an area for growth beyond traditional financial services and consulting services.
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Marketing The Law Firm
The Confounding Paradox of Marketing Investment for Struggling Law Firms
Bill Josten
“You have to spend money to make money.” Or, so holds the well-worn cliché. For those firms struggling to find meaningful growth in today’s market, where do they find the funds they need to spend in order to spur growth?
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Law Firm Profitability: The Art and Science
Timothy B. Corcoran and Marcie Borgal Shunk
The Manner in Which Law Firm Leaders Measure Profitability Has the Potential to Have a Profound Impact on Behavior and Motivation, Particularly As More Firms Integrate This Metric Into Their Compensation Systems
The manner in which law firm leaders measure profitability has the potential to have a profound impact on behavior and motivation.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Big Law’s Trojan Horse: Are the Big Four Preparing an Invasion?
Dan Packel
Law Firms Partner With the Big Four to Serve Their Clients, But the Accountants Pose an Existential Threat. What Will Happen If — or When — They Turn Competitive?
For law firm leaders, rank-and-file partners and everyone else in the law firm ecosystem, the Big Four shouldn’t be a laughing matter. They are serious about selling legal services, and clients are listening.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
The Strategy of What You Don’t Invest In
Scott McFetters
Advanced technology isn’t free. Outfitting your team with equipment that will move the needle can require an impossibly large capital outlay. The solution may not be, therefore, to purchase all that gear. It may be to lease or finance it.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
New Department of Labor Regulation Expands Access to Employee Benefits
Lawrence L. Bell
The rule, overseen by the DOL’s Employee Benefits Security Administration, modifies the definition of “employer” under ERISA regarding entities that could sponsor group health and benefit coverage.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
New Partners Don't Know What to Expect After Promotion, Survey Shows
Lizzy McLellan
More Law Firms Are Paving the Path to Partner, But What Happens Once One Gets There Is Less Than Certain
In some ways, the country’s most recently promoted partners are more prepared than ever to take on their new roles. But the change still comes with its surprises.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Financial Milestones on the Path from New Associate to Retiree
Justin Peacock
A rundown of the top items lawyers should have on their financial checklists, based on their career stage.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Only 30% of Workday Is Spent on Billable Hours, Report Says
Brenda Sapino Jeffreys
U.S. lawyers are still spending too little of their workday on billable hours, a year after an eye-opening report found lawyers devoted only 29% — 2.3 hours — of each eight-hour workday to billable hours.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Valuation Implications of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017
Ronald L. Seigneur
This article focuses on the impact of tax reform on C corporations and looks at the significant and complex changes to pass through entities.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Law Firms Are More Profitable Than Ever. How are They Doing It?
Nicholas Bruch
Given the Obstacles Law Firms Are Facing, Profitability Shouldn’t Be Increasing
Rising competition from alternative service providers and the ever-forward march of technology adoption should be having a similar, negative, effect on profitability. This raises an obvious question — how are law firms doing it?
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Outsourcing the Back Office?
J. Mark Santiago
Outsourcing is supposed to be the new wave of the future that will fundamentally change the way that law firms provide services to their clients and partners. But is this so?
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Law Firm Leaderships’ Biggest Challenge: Equality of Outcome
David J. Parnell
Aggressive Poaching In the Market Is Forcing Leadership to Contend With the Delicate Balance of Equality, Culture and Compensation In their Firms
Many leaders are no longer focused just on business development but are also trying to figure out how to continue making money and structure their firms in a way that allows them to spend the requisite money to pay top talent.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Inside the New Tax Plan’s Changes to Carried Interest
Kelsi Maree Borland
Phil Jelsma, a partner and chair of the tax practice team at a San Diego-based commercial real estate law firm talks about the changes to carried interest, how this will impact commercial real estate investment and what investors should do now to comply.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Law Firms: You Can’t Buy Yourself Out of Risk
Mark Sangster
A survey of more than 160 law firm executives (from medium to large firms) found that law firms are among some of the highest spenders on security yet were susceptible to some of the most common risks. And the issue will grow over the coming years as the demands of the business drive the adoption of emerging technologies, such as cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
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Cybersecurity Law & Strategy
Law Firms: You Can’t Buy Yourself Out Of Risk
Mark Sangster
A survey of more than 160 law firm executives (from medium to large firms) found that law firms are among some of the highest spenders on security yet were susceptible to some of the most common risks. And the issue will grow over the coming years as the demands of the business drive the adoption of emerging technologies, such as cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
When Intelligent Design Is Better Than Evolution
Joel A. Rose
Strong Hands-on Leadership is Crucial in Today’s Competitive Practice Environment
A financially and professionally successful law firm does not simply evolve. It must be built in an orderly and systematic manner. The values important to a firm have to be identified, defined, organized and centrally placed. The responsibility for achieving these goals must be keyed to an organizational factor. Whether this is a committee or an individual, ultimately someone must be responsible.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Cost Recovery in 2018: Predicting Winners and Losers
Rob Mattern
Back in March of this year, we predicted changes and trends the results of the 2018 Mattern Cost Recovery Survey would reveal. At that time, we got our…
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
What Is Legal Design Thinking?
Mark Beese
Design Thinking — a creative process for innovation — has become a staple topic in MBA programs and tech companies, it is just now showing up in law practice management circles.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Impact of the Big Four on the Legal Market
Nicholas Bruch
EY’s Announcement That It Is Acquiring Riverview Law Could Accelerate the Pace of Change in the Legal Industry
There has been much talk in the past year that the Big Four were sniffing around the alternative legal services market looking for an acquisition. That wait is now over. Here is an analysis of how the acquisition may impact different sections of the legal market.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Salary Hikes Not So Impressive After Inflation
Scott Flaherty
Law firms have bumped up starting salaries for associates at top firms over the past few years, prompting Big Law clients to raise a stink about outsized salaries for junior lawyers. But it turns out that this pay falls short of past peaks when inflation is taken into account.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Litigation Funders Face Their Hardest Sell: Big Law
Roy Strom and Ben Hancock
There Is More Money Than Ever In the Hands of Litigation Financiers, But Can They Convince Law Firms to Use It?
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
The NLJ 500: Large Firm Growth Slows Amid Consolidation and Contraction
Ryan Lovelace
Lawyer Counts Increased By 1%, But Large Firm Growth Was Slowed Due to Consolidation. Just Three of the Top Five Firms on the NLJ 500 Showed Total Lawyer Headcount Growth
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Lawyers and Accountants: Collaborators and Competitors
Mark A. Cohen
Lawyers and accountants are professional allies, but who controls integration and delivery of their services is another story.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Law Firms Need Artificial Intelligence to Stay in the Game
Erin Hichman
The Legal Department Is Savvier and Has More Options In the Form of ASPs and Legal Technology. It’s Time for Law Firms to Embrace Change. AI Is a Key Ingredient In Doing So.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Executive Benefits at Non-Profits after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
Lawrence L. Bell
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made significant changes to certain Internal Revenue Code provisions dealing with highly compensated employees. Among these are restrictions (in the form of excise taxes) on compensation of certain highly paid employees of “applicable tax-exempt organizations.”
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Will Law Firms Be Ready When the Next Recession Hits?
Dan Packel
The Bottom Is Eventually Going to Drop on the U.S. Economy, and Many Law Firms Won't Be Positioned to Handle the Fallout
No economic expansion lasts forever. That’s a hard-and-fast truth of macroeconomics, one that’s on the minds of certain law firm leaders.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Prospering in the ‘New Normal’
J. Mark Santiago
Raising Costs and Declining Demand are Sapping Profits
The “New Normal” of today is one in which raising operating costs, associate salary increases, and reduced realization rates coupled with AFAs and demands from corporate counsel for reduced rates are sapping firm profits and there is no relief on the horizon. Law firm leaders, seeing current conditions, should be asking if there is a better way.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Cash Flow Drought: How to Identify and Deal with It
Bill Sansone
Cash flow management can be particularly challenging. You need to account for the time lag between cash going out and cash coming in. This requires financial and management discipline, strong internal policies and procedures for billing and collection policies, planning and attention to detail.
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Marketing The Law Firm
How to Leverage Media Relations Throughout an Attorney’s Career
Janet Falk
A lawyer can utilize the platform of media outlets to share insights that will develop business by attracting the attention of potential clients and referral sources.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Using Financial Metrics to Drive Business Development
Joe Macguire and Anne Marcotty
Growing the top line requires a systematic approach that maximizes your available time and focuses you on the best opportunities. With greater clarity, you can be assertive in the pursuit of your financial objectives. With sustained focus on financial metrics, you stay in control of your book of business.
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