LJN Newsletters

Personal goal setting has been popular and effective in other professions and industries for many years. Lawyers have been slow in coming around because they are afraid that the exercise will be a waste of time or will restrict how they practice. As consultants, we still hear partners say, "I'm a partner, I can do as I damn well please." This attitude is not as prevalent as it was in the past, but it still exists and must be dealt with.

Rejecting an appeal brought by three law firms that demanded portions of the $55 million in attorney fees awarded in the $3.2 billion settlement of the Cendant Corp. securities litigation, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the lawyers who were named to lead the case have the power to say who gets paid.

Changes in business strategies, rising client demands, and technology advances all have made a law firm's choice of accounting software an ever more important management decision. Five years ago the Y2K scare led many firms to upgrade or replace their accounting systems out of perceived tactical necessity. Now, however, an assessment of your accounting software should be strategic: how well does it support your overall business objectives?

For use in preparing partners' individual business models and plans, design a standard worksheet form. The goal of a standard worksheet is to promote uniformity in the process for creating personal plans, not to seek rigidly uniform results.

With thousands of mid-sized law firms ' and hundreds of thousands of lawyers - all competing for the same pool of clients and prospects, differentiation is one of the most important ways to gain recognition and build brand awareness. Communicating your firm's unique characteristics, expertise, strengths and successes to a large number of prospects can be achieved through advertising.

I think law firm marketing is in a "funk." Recently I've been doing some research on law firm Web sites and have noticed that the look, the feel and yes the content of many of these sites is virtually the same. In a couple of instances, the exact wording from another firm site was used to describe a practice area. Could this be a coincidence? I don't think so.

Law firms are increasingly looking beyond the legal industry to hire Chief Marketing Officers and other management level officers who have broad experience in the corporate sector. The problem is that no matter how talented a person, if they cannot successfully assimilate into a law firm culture it will never work. Firms must examine their hiring process more so than ever to be sure that the candidates they evaluate will actually be able to succeed in the legal industry. Personality testing is increasingly being used to screen candidates to make sure they can successfully make the transition before the job is offered to them.

Every once in a while you come across a book that is literally makes you smile ... fun, thought provoking ... but not too thought provoking. It becomes something akin to reading a light romantic comedy. I had the pleasure of reading 365 Marketing Meditations while riding on a train to Philadelphia and honestly, by the time I arrived I was smiling for a variety of reasons.