The rapid growth of law firms in the past decade has created some new and unique management difficulties. With firms’ size, and the complexity of global legal practices, coordinating the availability of partners to perform any management function beyond routine meeting attendance is increasingly difficult. The problem of finding partners to assume leadership roles is compounded by the feeling of many partners in large firms that they are functionally employees rather than owners. The values of the partnership model to which many law firms aspire are becoming difficult to achieve in a modern professional service organization. The problem is further compounded in large multi-office firms where partners not only don’t know their fellow partners from other offices well, they may not have even met each other...

Expanded Annual Meeting
Many firm’s partnership agreements require an annual meeting for the election of member of management, selection of new partners, approval of compensation and other similar issues. These are important issues, not only because they concern day-to-day operating concerns but because they go to the fabric of what it means to be a partnership and the concept of being the owner of a business.

End the cycle of making big plans for nonbillable project...and accomplishing nothing. Here we offer practical suggestions for breaking that cycle...

Don Boyd is the Executive Chairman of the Australian-based group of worldwide Deacons offices. Don instituted four days of summit meetings that he conceived of to kick off the practice management and firm leaders of their newly-integrated firm. We'll let him tell you about the successful impact those meetings had on the new firm structure...