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.
Self-promotion makes many people uncomfortable and unsure. However, to really maximize your hard work as a lawyer, you need to let the world know about your successes — and nobody can do it all for you.
Continuing the discussion of matrimonial client "conflict checks" — the exercise attorneys must go through with each new potential client, to make sure that the representation will not conflict with work the attorney is doing or has done for a current or former client.
Part Two of a Three-Part Article
No one can deny that cyberattacks are the new norm. Such risks will increasingly challenge our ability to operate our businesses. In the world of cybercrime, everyone — from individuals to nation-states — is a target. However, some targets are more alluring than others.
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.
The boomer generation — 75 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 — and a tiny cadre of over-70s Silent Generation lawyers currently make up just under half of partners at Am Law 200 firms. As partners with the greatest seniority, they constitute a majority in the equity and management ranks, and control an outsize share of client relationships. The impacts of retirement are amplified because a long surge in hiring and promotion that began when boomers entered law firms has halted since the financial crisis.
Although a handful of law firms has hired non-lawyer sales teams, most still rely upon individual attorneys or practice groups to generate new client matters (i.e., to sell) even though the majority of them have never received business development skills training. This article describes some of the important characteristics and habits shared by attorneys who have built successful practices.
Law firm leadership is at a proverbial fork in the road. The people running law firms can continue to do business as usual, or they can lead their firms toward a model of business that reflects the new and still evolving client expectations and market demands.
Optimal Insights Through Inter-Departmental Initiatives
As dizzying amounts of resources and the need for the timeliest insights grow, the conduit and collaboration between business development and an organization's information management department, especially, becomes more critical than ever.
By guiding your colleagues and lawyers to focus on the business consequences of timely legal issues, you introduce them to reporters as sources whose opinions and predictions will be quoted in these look-back and look-ahead review stories that executives and prospective clients will be reading to gear up for the new year.
