Law Firm Management

An interview with Sharon Meit Abrahams, Director of Professional Development, McDermott Will & Emery LLP (Miami).

The deadline for submissions to the coveted MLF 50 ' The Top 50 Law Firms in Marketing and Communications ' has been extended to Monday, Sept. 29, 2008. Click here to see the submission criteria.

Last month, the author said that heightened awareness is necessary after the Supreme Court ruling in CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries increased the stakes. The discussion concludes herein with a look at the mechanics of an investigation.

When a firm finds itself in the midst of a management crisis, the place to begin to search for the source of the problem is at the top of the management hierarchy. This may not be a popular notion or an easy task. The purpose is not to find fault. The point is that an organization does not simply evolve. It must be built in an orderly manner. The values that are important to a firm have to be defined and centrally organized. The responsibility for these goals must be keyed to an organizational factor, whether this is a committee or an individual.

Who's doing what; who's going where.

DIVERSITY DOES NOT MEAN "PREFERENCES": In my last post, I described a very surprising reaction from a well respected AGC about diversity meaning preference. Again, I do not believe he is racially or gendered biased. But he appears not to be receptive to the message that diversity and business development consultants deliver about the need to foster a nurturing environment that will increase female and minority retention rates. He believed that diversity initiatives involve preferences.…

A SURPRISE EXAMPLE - Recently, I was genuinely surprised by a most well respected Associate General Counsel of a global corporation. This lawyer was huffing and puffing because his colleague at a competitor company had received an accolade from the local newspaper praising her as one of the tope in-house counsel in the region. The award itself as well as the press coverage focused in large measure on her outstanding record in recruiting women and…

It's been suggested by several readers that our orientation toward professional services marketing, as opposed to product marketing, is a prejudice. Admittedly, it's at least a bias against a pervasive academic view that the techniques of marketing a product apply equally to marketing a professional service. And indeed, the most successful professional services marketers tend to look to other professional services firms for answers and the best ideas, as well as for validation of their own ideas and processes. Still, it would be foolish to automatically preclude any idea that's been forged in a marketplace of ideas. In a rational world, we take ideas from any reasonable place, accept the good ones, and eliminate the ones that are bad or not applicable. That means that are things to be learned by professional services marketers from the Toyotas and Microsofts and Dells of the world.