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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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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Producing Breakthroughs in Client Development
Arnold Keiser
It is easy to understand why many lawyers feel that only certain special individuals are blessed with the qualities necessary to be rainmakers. But almost anyone willing to develop the qualities necessary can become a rainmaker.
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Cybersecurity Law & Strategy
When Key Employees Quit: 5 Things You Must Do to Keep Control of Critical Data
Michael Ciaramitaro and Sarah Brown
Losing a key employee is never easy — they often take with them institutional knowledge, great internal and external relationships, and critical skill sets. There is also a risk that they’ll take some information or data with them when they go, either inadvertently or on purpose.
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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
“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
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
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
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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Marketing The Law Firm
Unmasking the Impostor Syndrome
Cynthia Sharp
Many talented lawyers shortchange themselves and their law firms by failing to implement a strategic business development plan. Some claim that they don’t have time to market while others lament that marketing doesn’t work — for them. While these and a variety of other excuses are common, it may be productive to dig a little deeper to determine whether other factors are at play.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Creating a Collaborative Work Environment
Silvia Coulter
Collaborative cultures soar in profitability, talent acquisition and retention, client retention and client service.
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Marketing The Law Firm
Lessons Learned from the Business Development Coach’s Playbook
Peter A. Johnson
What does it take to be a successful attorney in today’s legal environment? For one thing, it takes a little help, which more and more often comes in the form of a business development coach.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Navigating the Fear and Promise of Artificial Intelligence
Jeff Reihl and Rick McFarland
AI solves real challenges and answers real questions that lawyers face every day. It can accomplish or facilitate these tasks more quickly, accurately and efficiently than even the most capable human experts — with the goal of augmenting their skills rather than replacing them.
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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
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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Marketing The Law Firm
Leadership: No Immunity: Sexual Harassment & the Legal Industry
John Hellerman
For members of a conservative industry that — literally — wrote the rulebook on sexual harassment, law firms need to be ready for a day of reckoning that seems inescapable (and may have already happened by the time this article is published).
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Cybersecurity Law & Strategy
The Uber Breach and the Need for an Independent Privacy Function
Paige Boshell
Uber has incurred significant legal and reputational exposure as a result of the way that the company handled the breach. In the coming months, there will be a great deal of information and regulatory and judicial action that will act as guidance, or more precisely, a checklist of what-not-to-do, for companies that suffer a data breach.
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Cybersecurity Law & Strategy
How Blockchain Technology Can Drive the Legal Industry Forward
Dmitry Dontsov
A new legal structure that bestows and monitors trust must be employed. Is decentralization of traditional, gigantic central bank repositories of data the answer? Is blockchain technology the new path that the legal industry should take to sustain in the digital age? Let us consider the most significant implications of decentralized technologies to the legal industry.
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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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Cybersecurity Law & Strategy
Legal Tech
What Microsoft’s Recent Office 365 and Security Updates Mean for Legal
Rhys Dipshan
From New Reporting Functionality to Cross-Application Tagging and Security Features, the New Updates Aim to Round Out Office 365’s Information Governance and Cybersecurity Features
In a bid to appeal to legal professionals, Microsoft has updated Office 365 with information governance, security, and e-discovery capabilities, and encouraged legal technology integration with its platform.
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The Corporate Counselor
Arizona's New Paid Sick Leave Law
Tamara Cook
As of July 1, 2017 all employers in Arizona are now required to provide employees with paid sick leave as directed by a new law, the Fair Wages and Healthy Families Act. The law dictates how employers must implement the new rules — from when the benefits begin to accrue to when they pay out, and what fines will be imposed for non-compliance.
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Cybersecurity Law & Strategy
Legal Tech
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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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
When Will Disruption Hit the Legal Industry?
Hugh A. Simons and Nicholas Bruch
Economics tells us an industry that experiences a drop in aggregate demand, adds production capacity, and increases the market overlap among competitors will suffer price erosion and profitability decline. Law firms fit this profile. Yet, in talking with law firm partners, you don't get the sense that any such "disruption" is happening. Perhaps economics has bypassed law?
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Selling the Value of Litigation Support
Stephen Cole
When it comes to practicing litigation, the use of technology is no longer optional. What is optional, however, is under which business model firms deliver this service to their clients, and how to determine which model balances the most value — to the client and the firm.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Securing Your Information-Rich Employee Benefit Plans
Robert M. Projansky and Miriam S. Dubin
This article examines the cyber threat facing benefit plans, explores the applicable legal landscape, and recommends steps to better equip plans to prepare for and manage data breaches.
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The Corporate Counselor
Automatic Legal Holds Becoming the Norm
While they are a prime responsibility for attorneys facing litigation or regulatory investigations, legal holds are not always executed as effectively as they should be. For many, it is a problem of managing data in multiple locations; for others, it's the challenge of having unreliable data custodians.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
The New DOL Fiduciary Rule
Charles B. Blanton, Jr.
While there are many items and complexities to the new rule, this article focuses on the basic premise of why the rule was developed and adopted and the effect on the retirement landscape and the players involved.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
3 Tips for Handling the Difficult Decision to Downsize
Randy Evans and Shari L. Klevens
By handling all involuntary terminations with professionalism and formality, law firms can limit the potential for conflict and give proper attention to the potential ethical and legal issues. Here are three tips for handling the transition of attorneys and staff from the firm.
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Law Firm Partnership & Benefits Report
Alternative Legal Services Providers: Changing Buyer Perceptions
David Curle
No longer are law firms the only option for clients with legal work; they now have a wider menu of providers from which to choose. But what are the contours of that Alternative Legal Services (ALS) market? How are these new providers being used by corporate clients and law firms? What's driving that usage? And what does it mean for traditional law firms?
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Law Firm Partnership & Benefits Report
How Analytics Is Shaping the Current and Future Practice of Law
Jeff Pfeifer
The nature of legal work today and the need to consume vast amounts of unstructured text make our profession a ripe target for the promise of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
How Analytics Is Shaping the Current and Future Practice of Law
Jeff Pfeifer
Anyone following the news headlines of late is aware that artificial intelligence (AI) is being heralded as the technology that will transform industries far and wide — including the legal profession. The evolution of technology in the practice of law today has already led to significant advances in data analytics and data visualization, each of which are having a significant impact on legal work.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Financing and Leasing Technology Is a Strategic Advantage
Scott McFetters
Advances in technology and software are being made at an increasingly rapid pace. As a result, IT hardware obsolescence cycles are shrinking too. This period of exponential improvement with which we are all now familiar has shown time and again that there will continue to be breakthroughs in technology that deliver better, less expensive, and/or more robust products. How are you equipping your firm to succeed both in the present day and into the future?
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
SEC Takes Aim at Political Contributions By Investment Advisers
Joseph F. Savage, Jr. and Stephanie M. Aronzon
While it remains unclear both when the regulators will invoke their authority to enforce the nearly limitless strict liability provision of the "pay-to-play" rules and how they will determine the appropriate remedy, the recent settlements and the SEC's handling of exemptive relief petitions may provide some clues.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Second Circuit Upholds Ban on Private Investment In Law Firms
Andrew Denney and Ben Hancock
A federal appeals court rejected an attempt to loosen restrictions on private investment in the legal industry, dismissing arguments that ethics rules on so-called "fee splitting" impinge on lawyers' First Amendment rights.
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Law Firm Partnership & Benefits Report
What Law Firms Can Learn from The Ninth Annual Law Department Operations Survey
Robin Snasdell
Over the last few years, the legal operation manager's role has flourished, growing from a profession in its infancy into an unruly teenager, far more mature but with substantial areas poised for development. The results of the survey showed that more than ever, law departments are focused on implementing programs and structures to improve their financial management and deliver value.
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Marketing The Law Firm
The Science and Magic of Content Marketing
Adam Kosloff
The ins and outs of content marketing.
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Marketing The Law Firm
Using Gamification to Drive Business Development Performance
David Freeman
How to use gamification for business development.
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Law Firm Partnership & Benefits Report
The Evolution of the 'Virtual Law Firm'
Gabrielle Orum Hernández
Though ‘Virtual Firms’ Are on the Decline, Cloud Technology May Be Shifting the Model to Refocus on Lawyer Mobility
The rise of cloud computing in particular has made it possible for attorneys to keep all the technology tools they need to practice on hand at all times, and eschew direct client contact and office space if so desired.
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Law Firm Partnership & Benefits Report
Step into Power: Lead with Aplomb
Anne Collier
For a firm to be successful, its leaders must create the circumstances for "1,000 flowers to bloom." As corny as this may sound, that is what great law-firm leaders do.
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Law Firm Partnership & Benefits Report
Lawyers Can Innovate with Design Thinking
Robert Cullen
In a legal setting, Design Thinking can be used by the lawyer to match his or her client's needs to what is legally and practically achievable in order to create a successful business or problem-solving strategy.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
What Law Firms Can Learn from The Ninth Annual Law Department Operations Survey
Robin Snasdell
Over the last few years, the legal operation managers' role has flourished, growing from a profession in its infancy into an unruly teenager, far more mature but with substantial areas poised for development. Now, more than ever, law departments are focused on implementing programs and structures to improve their financial management and deliver value.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
The Results Don't Lie: Mattern & Associates Cost Recovery Survey 2016
Rob Mattern
2017 has arrived with a bang: expenses are back on the rise and demand growth is trending negative. Last year in the March issue of this publication, we hypothesized what the results of the 2016 Mattern & Associates Cost Recovery Survey would reveal. With the results tabulated, let's see how accurate our predictions were as well as analyze the results.
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Law Firm Partnership & Benefits Report
Is Your Data Breach Response Plan Good Enough? Stress Test It!
Rich Blumberg and Eric Hodge
As the chances of a data breach incident increase, savvy firms and businesses have invested time and thought in a response plan. But plans never survive first contact with the enemy. Stress test your incident response plan to find and resolve its weaknesses while time is on your side.
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Law Firm Partnership & Benefits Report
At the Intersection
Lawyers Are Ignoring A Vital Business Development Tool
Pamela Woldow
When we teach and discuss Legal Project Management (LPM), we stress that the last of LPM's five basic steps, Post Project Review, not only is every bit as essential as the first four steps, it can be an extraordinarily powerful business development lever, as well.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
The Evolution of the 'Virtual Law Firm'
Gabrielle Orum Hernández
Though “Virtual Firms” Are on the Decline, Cloud Technology May Be Shifting the Model to Refocus on Lawyer Mobility
While the "virtual lawyer" may be on the decline, the technology making law practices more portable and potentially more efficient has seen a surge. The rise of cloud computing in particular has made it possible for attorneys to keep all the technology tools they need to practice on hand at all times and eschew direct client contact and office space if so desired.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Law Departments and Clients Face Budgetary Concerns in 2017
Steve Kovalan
Law departments are not being asked to do more with less? Instead, they are being asked to do more with more (though sometimes their budget increases are not keeping up with their new responsibilities).
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Mastering the Art of Self-Promotion
Carol Morganstern
Hard work alone will not propel your career forward to its highest possible level; you are going to need to be savvy at the art of self-promotion. This includes going outside of your firm to get new clients and letting those inside your firm know about your accomplishments to propel you up the corporate ladder.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
True Partnerships Reward Partner-Like Behavior
Steven J. Harper
A true partnership requires a compensation structure that rewards partner-like behavior — collegiality, mentoring, expansion and transition of client relationships to fellow partners, and a consensus to pursue long-term strategies promoting institutional stability rather than maximizing short-term profit metrics.
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Cybersecurity Law & Strategy
What Lawyers Can Learn from Uber, Redux
Dan Lear
Lawyers need to know what the client wants and how to get them there before the process starts. Just like a driver who doesn’t know exactly where he’s taking his riders, a lawyer who isn’t totally sure what a client wants — let alone how to get them there efficiently and effectively — is likely to end up with a client who is disgruntled.
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Accounting And Financial Planning For Law Firms
Law Firms Struggle With Lateral Partner Due Diligence
Rebecca Cohen
Firms place a lot of weight on lateral hiring, but many of them aren't very good at it.
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Marketing The Law Firm
CMO Best Practices: Some Tips to Make a Really Tough Job a Little Easier
Bruce Alltop
The issues that I confronted a dozen years ago when I became a CMO for the first time are very much the same issues that my CMO brothers and sisters face today. Irrespective of whether you've had decades of experience or not, the job is tough. Well, the job is relatively easy, but ensuring that your team members get all the credit and your firm hits its success metrics, while maintaining your visibility and growing your perceived value, remains very much a challenge to even the most seasoned professionals.
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