Succession Doesn’t Just Happen
“We need a succession plan. My partners and I formed this firm thirty years ago. We started with clients aplenty, and spent the early and middle years – in fact, up until a few years ago – tasking younger partners to service the business we already had through the impressive rainmaking skills of the founding […]
Bigger vs Better: Should your firm merge?
First, see if it can answer “yes” to one essential question. So law firm mergers are back in the news again, to the continued fascination of the legal press. For every combination that’s completed and announced, you can count on several others bubbling under in conversations within executive committees and at luncheon gatherings of senior […]
5 Pressing Priorities for Professional Providers (This is more than just another PR exercise)
If you like lists and you love alliteration, then you’re probably a legal management consultant. It seems that practically every article these days by people in my line of work features a numbered list of entries that all begin with the same letter. I admit that I often do the same thing in my presentations. […]
Is It Time to Abandon Your Firm’s Business Model?
“Big Law is dying” That’s the theme of thousands of articles and blog posts that show up on our desktops every week. Mainly the writers are wringing their hands about the disruption that is occurring to the traditional business models of large law firms. But if we can divert our attention from the pity party […]
Stop Making Partners
Four questions to ask yourself before conferring equity partner status on anyone else. My colleague Ed Wesemann recently published a must-read article titled “A Five Year Survival Plan for Mid-sized Firms.” Ed’s first piece of advice to the leaders of these firms is: “Stop making partners.” I think that’s absolutely correct, and I’d like to […]
Avoiding Pitfalls in the Practice Group Structure
The popularity of the practice group — an entity within the firm dedicated to practicing a specific kind of law, or serving a specific industry — seems well grounded, in that it offers a number of advantages to managing a practice and its services. But with all its advantages, there exists an easy propensity to […]
Retirement Equity – Succession and Ownership In Law Firms
In the last thirty years, many firms have substantially grown or developed on the back of the efforts of one or more highly driven entrepreneurial partners, some of whom are now approaching retirement. These partners have enjoyed income rewards but it is understandably hard for them to contemplate having to hand over their firm as […]
Partner Roles and Responsibilities
This posting sets out to introduce some suggested methodologies for a firm to follow in order first to clarify what the firm expects of its partners and then to define what roles and responsibilities it needs them to perform. Partners equally need to be clear how they are to discharge their various roles as owners, […]