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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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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
How Law Firms Can Prepare for FinTech Wave
Keith Fall and Taylor Miller
The Innovations and Industry Disruption Should Have Law Firms Snapping to Attention
The world of financial services is being upended by new technologies — from virtual currencies and blockchain to peer-to-peer lending and enhanced mobile banking — that are capturing customers, as well as the attention of Wall Street investors and industry regulators.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Playing Both Sides: Facing the Harsh Truth of Law Firm Service Duality
Marcie Borgal Shunk
Whereas in the past clients took the lead from law firms in defining high-end practices worthy of premium rates, today’s clients have the tools and information to make smarter, wiser purchase decisions.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Commentary: America’s Modern ‘Throwaway’: 401(K) Retirement Savings
Tom Hawkins
While 401(k) cashout leakage may not stink in our streets, its economic effects are deplorable. Each year, this slow-motion train wreck robs millions of Americans of their retirement security and converts their retirement savings into wasted consumption and avoidable tax penalties.
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Marketing The Law Firm
'Professional Development:' Owning Your Business: Using Financial Metrics to Drive Business Development
Joe Maguire and Anne Marcotty
Growing the top line requires a systematic approach that maximizes your available time and focuses you on the best opportunities.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Prior Salary Can’t Justify Gender Wage Gap
Erin Mulvaney
“To Hold Otherwise — to Allow Employers to Capitalize on the Persistence of the Wage Gap and Perpetuate That Gap Ad Infinitum — Would Be Contrary to the Text and History of the Equal Pay Act,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt Wrote for the Majority
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on April 9 that salary history cannot be used to justify a wage gap between men and women, in a case that employee advocates said highlights a key issue that has institutionalized gender compensation inequities.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Online Extra: How the Supreme Court's Online Sales Tax Case Could Affect Law Firms
Marcia Coyle
A tax nightmare could face big law firms and other multistate service providers if the U.S. Supreme Court this term requires retailers to collect sales taxes in states where the business has no physical presence.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
11 Factors to Collecting Attorney Fees on a Timely Basis
Peter Oliva
Most of the time, delayed payments are a result of actions by the law firms themselves. Let’s take a look at 11 factors impacting the collection of attorney fees on a timely basis and how to avoid these mistakes.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
The Death of the Law Firm Partnership Vote?
Gina Passarella Cipriani
With an Eye on Efficiency, Firms Are Ditching Old Methods for a More Corporate Form of Governance
A growing number of firms in the United States and the United Kingdom are eschewing historical partnership norms in favor of more centralized management, and with that comes fewer and fewer partnership votes.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Adding Value with a Client Visit Initiative
Brook W. Redmond and Ali C. Ferro
The increasing competition in the legal industry highlights the importance of differentiation and adding value beyond the work product. Face-to-face interactions with clients are a critical component in differentiation because they provide the opportunity to understand better the nuances of clients’ businesses, develop deeper relationships, and drive productive collaboration.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Finally Finishing Unfinished Business?
Arthur J. Ciampi
How the Recent Heller Ehrman Case Impacts Lawyer Mobility and Clients Choice of Counsel
The law of unfinished business, as applied to cases billed on an hourly basis, has been the subject of much commentary and case law. In Heller Ehrman, the high California court, like the New York Court of Appeals, found that a dissolved law firm did not have a property interest in hourly matters for work performed after dissolution. The case is worth exploring as it impacts, among other things, lawyer mobility and clients choice of counsel.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Cost Recovery in 2018: An Evolving Internal and External Strategy
Rob Mattern
It’s now been 10 years since the economic crisis of 2008, and just under 10 years since we saw the greatest dip in demand for services experienced by the legal market. The market has stabilized since then, but growth has remained, year-over-year, flat. The Thomson Reuters 2018 Report on the State of the Legal Market shows this trend will continue as we see a market characterized by flat to sluggish growth, a continued decline in productivity, modest rate increases and the continued downward pressure on realization.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Taxing Questions for Law Firms Looking to Benefit in the New Regime
Meredith Hobbs
The new law offers two obvious potential benefits: a 20% deduction for pass-through entities such as partnerships, and a 21% tax on corporations.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on Law Firms
Marcus Dyer
This article describes the provisions of the Act most likely to impact law firms.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Tax on Excess Tax-Exempt Org. Executive Compensation
Lawrence L. Bell
Under the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, should certain employees of a tax-exempt organization receive compensation greater than $1,000,000 during the tax year from any combination of a tax-exempt organization and/or its related organizations, the organizations would be subject to an excise tax on that employee’s compensation in proportion to their payments to the employee.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
How Will Generation X Lead Big Law?
Lauren Still Rikleen
Stop Obsessing About the Millennials (for Now)
For decades, members of Generation X have been stuck between two behemoth, attention-draining generations, wondering if they would forever be relegated to back-bench leadership — mere seat-warmers for ambitious millennials waiting for baby boomers to retire. Now, as boomers slowly face their own mortality and aging bodies after a lifetime of devotion to work, there is no longer a need to question whether Gen X will have an opportunity to lead.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Some Law Firm Leaders See Rosy 2018 Ahead
Miriam Rozen
When it comes to law firm business, not everyone is depressed about the slow growth that plagued many firms in 2017, and that’s predicted to persist into the new year. Or at least they won’t admit it.
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Cybersecurity Law & Strategy
Cybersecurity Spending at Law Firms, Legal Departments Is Predicted to Increase in 2018
Ed Silverstein
As law firms and legal departments finalize their 2018 budgets, many lawyers in both the United States and Canada plan to increase cybersecurity spending.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Controlling Costs in Worker’s Comp
Ann Hawkins
The Rolling Stones Were Wrong — Time Isn’t on Your Side
Almost every business owner loathes worker’s compensation insurance — costs are high and can go up significantly in the event of a claim or multiple claims. Also, worker’s comp can be a cost center that is heavily impacted by fraud and abuse. If employers can control the number and severity of claims and lower worker’s comp costs, they can put the money to better use.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Examine KPIs on a Micro-Level to Boost Law Firm Profitability
Steven A. Davis and Tyler Quinn
You say your law firm is profitable. How do you know? To fully understand your law firm’s results of operations and financial condition, you should measure and examine key performance indicators (KPIs) on a granular level. Looking beyond high-level KPIs can provide actionable information to make operational and strategic decisions.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
2017 Roundup: Equity vs. Non-Equity Membership
Arthur J. Ciampi
Last Year Saw a Number of Interesting Decisions Concerning the Identity, Rights and Obligations of Non-Equity Owners, Including Partners and Shareholders
2017 saw a number of interesting decisions concerning the identity, rights and obligations of non-equity owners, including partners and shareholders. As more firms utilize non-equity members to play vital roles within their firms, it will become more important for them to take note of these decisions and the guidance they provide.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Do Mergers Increase Profitability?
Hugh A. Simons and Nicholas Bruch
The Numbers Say Yes, But Not for the Reasons Many May Think
Conventional wisdom has it that mergers enhance profitability through increased revenues and reduced costs. However, the numbers contradict this view: post-merger revenues are lower relative to competitor firms than are the sum of the predecessor firms’ revenues, and costs per lawyer increase markedly.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Litigation Funding Changes Legal Landscape for Boutique and Small Firms
Monika Gonzalez Mesa
The Growth of Third-Party Litigation Funding Has Been a Boon to Small Firms, But Boutique Firms Are Taking a Hit
The growth of litigation funding has widened the pool of law firms that can take on big cases, but their increasing popularity means boutique firms that have traditionally landed multimillion-dollar lawsuits by taking them on contingency or offering alternative fee arrangements are now taking a hit.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: Business Process Management and Law Firms
Zachary Beauchemin and Alisha DiGiandomenico
Though traditionally considered laggards when adopting new technology, law firms have recently started to explore new tricks to fortify performance across their organizations. While this evolution is critical to a firm's survival, it's important that firm administrators understand that substantive improvements are only possible through multi-directional change.
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Law Firm Partnership & Benefits Report
Read This Before You Set Your 2018 Billing Rates
Hugh A. Simons
Failure to increase senior billing rates differentially, and thus to rebalance the source of margin from junior to senior lawyer time, will result in a calamitous decline in profitability. It can be avoided if firms start now to gradually change their billing rate structures.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Showing Better 2017 Financial Results Just Got A Little Tougher
John Wilmouth and Gretta Rusanow
Will law firms' financial results for 2017 fall short of 2016? Legal industry results through the first nine months of 2017 suggest that's a real possibility.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Can Millennials Save Your Law Firm?
Lizzy McLellan
After Years of Complacency About Their Business Model and the Pipeline for Talent, There’s a Reason Law Firms Are So Worried About Managing the Millennial Generation
For law firms wringing their hands about how to manage the millennial generation — or asking why they should adapt to this crop of young lawyers in the first place — here's the bad news: If you're still clinging to traditional models for training associates and running the partnership, you've already fallen behind. The millennials are here, they're climbing the ranks, and they've already begun to transform the industry.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
How Many Excess Partners Does Your Firm Have?
Hugh A. Simons
It is widely recognized that Big Law has surplus partner capacity. What is less well recognized is just how massive this surplus has become, how unevenly it is spread across firms in different profitability cohorts, and what it portends for when the next downturn hits.
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Marketing The Law Firm
Voice of the Client: What Does 'Different' Mean?
Bruce Alltop
As firms turn their focus to revenue generation, some of the more progressive firms look to their clients to help them create their strategic priorities. In some cases, they even ask their clients to be involved in the planning process.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
AIM 1-2-3
Lawrence Bell
There is a patented methodology that follows the same path that the introduction of depreciation followed, with the impact being similar in its influence, power and effect: The AIM (Actuarially Initiated Measurements) Program. An employer using this methodology realizes the ability to uncover and maximize missed opportunities to control fluctuations and variations in earnings per share (EPS).
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Read This Before You Set Your 2018 Billing Rates
Hugh A. Simons
Setting the next year's billing rates follows a simple formula at most firms: last year's rate plus a common percentage increase across all lawyer cohorts. A more disaggregated approach is needed -- firms should set higher percentage increases for senior lawyers and lower increases for junior lawyers.
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