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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Outsourcing: How to Do Better Than Flipping a Coin
Rob Mattern
The legal industry is on the cusp of transformational change making the “siren song” of a successful outsourcing engagement ever more alluring: increase expertise and flexibility while lowering costs, and significantly mitigating risk.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
How Law Firms Are Overcoming New Business Development Challenges
Julie Savarino
With the intense competition for new legal work, demands on lawyers’ available time and the increasing discounts clients demand, it’s getting harder for law firms operating under a billable-hour business model to support the consistent development of new legal work by investing in and maintaining a marketing department alone.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Linking Partner Pay to Strategic Firm Objectives
J. Mark Santiago
Pay for performance is not a new concept in this country. The ideas and concepts underlying a graduated pay scale based on contribution and merit are deeply ingrained in our society. However, in general law firms have been slower to adopt pay for performance systems. What law firms need now, and this article describes, is an approach to partner compensation that closely links a partners pay to their ability to contribute to the achievement of the firm’s strategic objectives.
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Marketing The Law Firm
Sales Speak: Strategies to Avoid or Reduce Billing Rate Discounts
Eric Dewey
Requests for discounts have become a routine step in the legal services purchasing process. Lawyers face the uncomfortable task of defending their billing rates in both RFPs and client pitches. But too often, lawyers don’t make an effort to resist giving a discount when asked. Mostly because they haven’t been trained in how to do it.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Driving Law Firm Profits Through Data Analytics
John Schrumpf
“Data Analytics” have become more than just buzzwords and are an integral part of well informed decision making. The following best practices have the ability to bring your firm’s data management up to speed with competitors in the law industry, while turning what might be an underutilized resource into a working asset that drives revenue.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Strategies to Avoid or Reduce Billing Rate Discounts
Eric Dewey
For a large portion of engagements, discounts are not necessary to win the work. In fact, discounts come at a price. Both parties assume a degree of risk when margins are thinned. This article presents several techniques that you can use to re-direct discussions away from discounts and help to minimize their financial impact.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Lateral Partner Survey Casts Doubt on Compensation as King
Dylan Jackson
In a survey conducted by Major, Lindsey & Africa, lateral partners put firm culture and practice support ahead of anticipated compensation when considering a new firm.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Law Firms Enter the Golden Age of Data Mining
Doug Stansfield
Data mining is a relatively new practice in the legal space and the data profiles of firms are highly variable from one organization to another, so identifying the right tools and prioritizing initiatives can be challenging.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Bursting the Bubble of Associate Compensation
Timothy B. Corcoran
Smart business leaders compete by constantly seeking cost advantages. Yet law firm leaders compete by perpetually increasing associate compensation. As always, this will not end well.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
New Partners Are Worried About Mental Health and a Looming Recession, Annual Survey Finds
Dylan Jackson
Newly minted partners offered up some usual complaints on this year’s New Partners Survey, lamenting unexpectedly low compensation, opaque performance metrics and copious administrative work. But new anxieties have arisen among Big Law’s latest partner class, including the threat of a recession and growing concerns about mental health.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Increasing Client Requirements: Securing Law Firms for the 21st Century
Debra Gray
Clients expect sophisticated and secure systems to keep their information safe. This obviously makes your IT professional’s job much harder. Additionally, attorneys expect instant performance and near 100% up time. Achieving the delicate balance between accessibility and security is a challenge.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Law Firm Debt Levels Shrink as Partners Put More Skin in the Game
Lizzy McLellan
What Does Widespread ‘Deleveraging’ Mean for Law Firm Health?
Industry watchers say law firms have become less reliant on bank debt over the past decade, as they explore other funding options. Often, that means raising capital from partners, or turning to other, less common sources.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Law Firm Revenues Rise as Demand Accelerates, Citi Reports
Gretta Rusanow
There is a lot of good news in the nine-month 2019 industry results. While we might not end the year with the strong growth levels seen in 2018, we anticipate that 2019 will be a decent year. For the first time this year, revenue growth exceeded expense growth.
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Marketing The Law Firm
Determining Who Should Serve As the Billing Partner
Joel A. Rose
Due to a law firm’s team-oriented approach to business development and client service efforts, it is not always clear who should logically and most efficiently serve as the billing partner for a client or a particular client matter. A person should only be a billing partner if he or she is or will be performing the functions outline herein.
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Entertainment Law & Finance
A Primer for Forming Loan-Out Corporations
Maxwell Briskman Stanfield
In the entertainment industry, it can take years for actors, musicians and others to reach a point where their efforts begin bringing in a notable return. If and when these types of clients begin to make a consistently significant income, one method that deserves consideration for protecting the hard-earned pay is to organize a loan-out corporation.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Determining Who Should Serve As the Billing Partner
Joel A. Rose
Due to a law firm’s team-oriented approach to business development and client service efforts, it is not always clear who should logically and most efficiently serve as the billing partner for a client or a particular client matter. A person should only be a billing partner if he or she is or will be performing the functions outline herein.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
How to Become a Rainmaker
Arnold Keiser
Almost anyone willing to develop the qualities necessary can become a rainmaker.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
The Global 100 Are in the Midst of a Growth Spurt
Dan Packel
The World’s Largest Firms Turned In a Second Straight Year of Robust Revenue Gains Amid Near-Universal Progress
Mergers, rapid growth among Chinese law firms, and a healthy American market coalesced to turn 2018 into a spectacular year for the world’s largest law firms.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Resolving Fee Disputes: It’s in Your Best Interest, Too
Patricia King
Lawyers should know that they ignore clients with questions at their peril. The first thing to remember is the client is entitled to an accounting of the fee and costs. No matter how exasperating the client, or how stupid the question appears to be, client questions need to be resolved.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
The ‘Silly Season’
J. Mark Santiago
That term refers to the months of October through December. It's a way of pointing out to partners that the necessary activities of practice management that so many of them had avoided for the first nine or 10 months of the year now had to be addressed. Clients that had not been billed now had to be invoiced. Outstanding invoices, many issued in the cold days of early March and April, now had to be collected and current work would not only have to be billed but collected as well.
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Marketing The Law Firm
When Being a Star Rainmaker is Not Enough: Why EQ Leads to Even Better Business Results
Marla Grant and Yuliya LaRoe
Why EQ Leads to Even Better Business Results
It is not uncommon for law firms to face negative business outcomes caused by the behavior of a star rainmaker who is unaware of the impact that they have on others. And that’s what emotional intelligence (EQ) is about and why it’s so important to lead to better business results. What can law firms do to help their star partners increase their emotional intelligence to avoid potentially disastrous business outcomes for themselves and their firms?
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Litigation Support, E-discovery and the Recovery of Costs
Nathan Curtis
The Data Explosion vs. Recovery Model Stagnation
Firms are struggling with a legacy practice of writing off litigation support/e-discovery and related costs but have been challenged to identify and implement recovery models or managed services models that are both acceptable to the firm and to their clients. On top of all of this, many firms simply fail to dispose of the data at the matter closing and costs continue to accumulate year over year. Mattern has launched the first ever e-Discovery and Litigation Support Cost Recovery Survey to gather that needed data to help drive firms’ better business decisions.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
When Being a Star Rainmaker Is Not Enough
Marla Grant and Yuliya LaRoe
Why EQ Leads to Even Better Business Results
It is not uncommon for law firms to face negative business outcomes caused by the behavior of a star rainmaker who is unaware of the impact that they have on others. And that’s what emotional intelligence (EQ) is about and why it’s so important to lead to better business results. What can law firms do to help their star partners increase their emotional intelligence to avoid potentially disastrous business outcomes for themselves and their firms?
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Marketing The Law Firm
Voice of the Client: 9 Ways You Could Be Hindering New Business Efforts
Mike Mellor
Nine ways you may be hindering your efforts to win new legal business, and a few ideas on how subtle improvements can maximize both success and overall win rates for firms and attorneys.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
9 Ways You Could Be Hindering New Business Efforts
Mike Mellor
Nine ways you may be hindering your efforts to win new legal business, and a few ideas on how subtle improvements can maximize both success and overall win rates for firms and attorneys.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Continual Assessment: Preparation for the Next Recession
Phillip Bantz
Assess your legal departments regularly to find and fix inefficient spending and work habits while also implementing new tech solutions now — before it’s too late.
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Marketing The Law Firm
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. It identifies 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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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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