Seven Great Ideas for a Partner Conference or Retreat
It is now a number of decades (don’t ask how many!) since I first attended a law firm partner retreat as a newly minted partner. Since that time, I have facilitated, led or spoken at many professional service firm retreats and conferences all over the world. They seem to divide into seven basic areas of focus, although of course there may be more areas to consider or variations on the same theme.
Remote Work and Firm Culture: More Than Just Foosball Tables and Kegs!
The biggest chokepoint in firms these days is the inability to align most lawyers- particularly younger lawyers- around behaviors that keep their firm most healthy.
Recruitment & Retention: Deliver a “Signature” Career Experience!
Delivering a signature career experience is not about slogans and breezy conclusions. Rather, it is expressed through the plumbing or inputs the firm deploys to help firm lawyers experience extraordinary career long success.
Diffusing Conflict: Taming the Insensitive Partner
In this article I am focusing on a different aspect of conflict among senior lawyers – and one that I am sure will be familiar to many. This is the case of the insensitive lawyer, or the lawyer who is somewhat lacking in emotional intelligence, and who ruffles feathers or, worse, causes more serious distress to his or her colleagues.
The Challenge Of Collaboration
Clients are facing increasingly complex demands posed by the rapid advance of technologies, the economic and regulatory environment, the geographic spread and dynamic change within their markets and disruptive events, such as the current pandemic. Worse, many firms are less collaborative than they think they are.
Global Legal Remote Working Survey
COVID-19 forced law firms almost overnight to adjust to their personnel working from home, regardless of how senior management felt about flexible working pre-pandemic. This survey explores a range of psychosocial and other factors relevant to prolonged working from home.
Reducing Law Firm Real Estate Spend While Retaining Culture
Reducing your firm’s commitment to expensive shared office space is a generational opportunity to increase dramatically the pool of firm distributable profits.
Slicing and Dicing Survey Results with Demographics
In the course of our work with law firms, we have occasion to do many kinds of surveys. Here are two simple examples: In the context of strategy assignments, we may survey partners as to their aspirations and their views about their marketplace(s). In the context of conducting a cultural assessment, we may survey all […]
The Cultural Lenses through which We Examine Law Firms
Cultural differences define and influence every aspect of law firms’ operations, reputations and financial success. Describing a law firm’s culture is difficult, even for people who know the organization intimately. When asked to describe a culture, people typically resort to words like “collegial” or “democratic.” While terms like this may convey a general sense of […]
The Four Cardinal Virtues of Law Firm Culture
Law firm “culture” isn’t that hard to define. Culture is what people at the law firm actually do every day — or, less sunnily, what people get away with doing. I’ve worked in organizations that struck committees to study and define the organizational culture, but that failed to appreciate that the most accurate definition of […]