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.
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.
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?
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.
"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?
Finally, it has happened. You have reached the stage in your career that others want to hear from you and learn what you know in your area of expertise. You have been invited to speak at a conference. What now?
While we can't always create the need; we can work to identfy a need. Clients buy because they have a need or want, and successful salespeople do their homework to uncover this intelligence.
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.
In the past year, the devastation caused by natural disasters has been immense. Law firms, like every other business, are left to deal with the aftermath of these catastrophic events. Firms that have established business continuity plans to put into effect when these instances occur will find themselves a step ahead in the disaster recovery process. And the ones leveraging cloud technology are at an even greater advantage.
At the Oscars in March, Best Actress winner Frances McDormand made “inclusion rider” go viral. But Kalpana Kotagal, a partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll had already worked for months to write the language for such provisions. Kotagal was developing legal language for contract provisions that Hollywood's elite could use to require studios and other partners to employ diverse workers on set.
The law firm office cannot remain unchanged, as if frozen in time set to some date prior to the onset of pandemic, when the terms and meaning have all changed. In fact, the office must now provide benefits or an experience the lawyers and staff cannot get at home.
The legal implications of branding generally arise initially for companies during the process of selecting a company name and any initial product or service names. For drug development companies, however, careful consideration should also be paid to the implications of branding a clinical trial.
'Disconnect Between In-House and Outside Counsel is a continuation of the discussion of client expectations and the disconnect that often occurs. And although the outside attorneys should be pursuing how inside-counsel actually think, inside counsel should make an effort to impart this information without waiting to be asked.
![Competitive Intelligence: The Wolf of Law Firms — Sell Me This [Insert Legal Service Here] Image](https://images.law.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,fit=contain/https://images.lawjournalnewsletters.com/contrib/content/uploads/sites/382/2018/12/wolf_wall_st.jpg "Competitive Intelligence: The Wolf of Law Firms — Sell Me This [Insert Legal Service Here] Image")
