The primary objective of a business meal is to make a connection, to demonstrate that you are a likeable and trustworthy business partner. Do this right and you'll get additional opportunities for face time.
With the tanking economy and subsequent contraction in the legal profession, the only way for firms to increase revenue is to gain market share. This means everyone is expected to contribute to the business development game.
Video and audio/podcast files are quickly becoming the most preferred method of content sharing, and it doesn't look as if anything can stop the juggernaut.
The notion of client teams has been around for two decades. Now we are becoming more intentional about the diversity of teams for both business development and service delivery.
There's an old saw, in the public relations business, about what you say to a new client for whom you haven't delivered what he or she expected in the first month of the contract. 'It's in the pipeline,' we used to say. It meant that we'd spent that first month understanding the firm and its story, developing the press material, planning the strategy and making presentations to the media. The groundwork. And in the second month, presumably, it would all come to fruition.
LEGAL SALES TRAINING - Last year's Closers Group survey of law firm attorneys and marketing professionals found that "closing skills" was most often cited as missing from attorney sales training. If you are going to "get 'em out there," closing must be taught and practiced. Throughout the business development continuum, law firms often find a key component missing -- the lawyers themselves, whose expertise ought to be (but isn't always) driving the sales process. In the…
At a time of great debate on traditional versus social media and the best means of contacting prospective clients, it is worth examining the essentials of successfully pitching a reporter on your law firm's news.
Over the years, the author has observed many common mistakes that law firm management makes, and he now identifies the five most common ones so that they may be recognized and avoided.
“Baseball arbitration” refers to the process used in Major League Baseball in which if an eligible player's representative and the club ownership cannot reach a compensation agreement through negotiation, each party enters a final submission and during a formal hearing each side — player and management — presents its case and then the designated panel of arbitrators chooses one of the salary bids with no other result being allowed. This method has become increasingly popular even beyond the sport of baseball.
Insiders (and others) in the private equity business are accustomed to seeing a good deal of discussion ' academic and trade ' on the question of the appropriate methods of valuing private equity positions and securities which are otherwise illiquid. An interesting recent decision in the Southern District has been brought to our attention. The case is <i>In Re Allied Capital Corp.</i>, CCH Fed. SEC L. Rep. 92411 (US DC, S.D.N.Y., Apr. 25, 2003). Judge Lynch's decision is well written, the Judge reviewing a motion to dismiss by a business development company, Allied Capital, against a strike suit claiming that Allied's method of valuing its portfolio failed adequately to account for i) conditions at the companies themselves and ii) market conditions. The complaint appears to be, as is often the case, slap dash, content to point out that Allied revalued some of its positions, marking them down for a variety of reasons, and the stock price went down - all this, in the view of plaintiff's counsel, amounting to violations of Rule 10b-5.
The DOJ's Criminal Division issued three declinations since the issuance of the revised CEP a year ago. Review of these cases gives insight into DOJ's implementation of the new policy in practice.
There is no efficient market for the sale of bankruptcy assets. Inefficient markets yield a transactional drag, potentially dampening the ability of debtors and trustees to maximize value for creditors. This article identifies ways in which investors may more easily discover bankruptcy asset sales.
With trillions of dollars to keep watch over, the last thing we need is the distraction of costly litigation brought on by patent assertion entities (PAEs or "patent trolls"), companies that don't make any products but instead seek royalties by asserting their patents against those who do make products.
