Practice Management

More Accolades for "What the New Law Firm Looks Like"

Posted on January 12, 2010
From Mitt Regan, Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center: "I'm using your piece on 'What the New Law Firm Looks Like' for the Law Firms course that I will be teaching at Harvard Law School this spring...

Wishing You and Yours the Happiest of Holidays and a New Year of Prosperity and Peace

Posted on December 23, 2009
My sincere thanks to all of you who subscribe to LawPeopleBlog. I hope you have found useful information here this past year. May we prosper from the challenges that the new year brings and remember to be grateful for those opportunities...

From Generalization to Specialization and Back Again

Posted on December 22, 2009
If you stay with it long enough, a practice that goes out of fashion will often come back around again.  Those of us of a certain age remember when the first year or more at a big law firm was spent "rotating" around departments to get a good feel for the full range of legal practice...

Making it Personal

Posted on December 17, 2009
Following up on our November 1 entry "The Importance of Glue" is an article by Patricia Gillette, a partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, published December 09, 2009 in The American Lawyer , which is reproduced below in its entirety...

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Muir to Advise in Patrick McKenna's ENABLE Program

Posted on December 05, 2009
Muir has been selected by Patrick McKenna (co-author of First Among Equals and Herding Cats) as one of a select group of law firm consultants available to advise law firm leaders under McKenna's ENABLE program--Executive Network of Advisory Boards for Leadership Excellence, which McKenna describes below...

Hiring into the Future

Posted on November 27, 2009
Hiring the right people is the first and most important goal in recruitment.  And these days firms do not have the luxury of over-hiring and waiting a few years for the "keepers" to rise to the top.  A speech at the International Bar Association conference in Madrid last month reiterated the importance of an often-neglected part of recruiting:  determining the personality and other personal attributes, such as emotional intelligence, communication skills, resilience and rainmaking ability, of potential hires to make sure they "fit" a firm as well as a firm's clients...

Muir on the New Law Firm: IOMA's Thought Leader

Posted on November 24, 2009
The IOMA Law Firm Leadership Alert on November 19, 2009 calls Ronda Muir this month's Thought Leader, saying she "...presents as cogent an expression of what the future of law firms and law practice will look like as we have yet found." Her article is published in the December issue of the IOMA Partner's Report - a Monthly Brief for Law Firm Owners and will be the featured cover-page article in December's Compensation & Benefits for Law Offices newsletter.

The People Factor Critical to Reinvention

Posted on November 16, 2009
One of the important implications of Muir's article "What the New Law Firm Looks Like: The Reinvention of a Reluctant Industry" is that going forward firms will require the close involvement of sophisticated management professionals who are not necessarily or even preferably lawyers to help design and manage change...

EMail Notifications Are Again Operational

Posted on November 12, 2009
Our host's email notification server has been down for several days and is only now operational, so you have not received notices of blog entries posted during that time.  Rather than flood your inbox with notications, please browse the blog at your leisure to catch up on the latest entries--The Importance of Glue, Throwing out Consultants' Reports, and The People Factor Inherent in the Coming Reinvention.

Throw Out Those Consultants' Reports

Posted on November 06, 2009
We spend our days advising law firms and law departments about the changing landscape for their professional services.  But just as the legal industry is in a state of transition, so is the industry that consults with the legal industry.  We at Robin Rolfe Resources are retuning our services in order to offer you cost-effective updates on the fast-paced corrections and counter-corrections occurring daily in the legal world...

The Importance of Glue

Posted on November 01, 2009
Muir points out in her article What the New Law Firm Looks Like that building bigger firms does not necessarily produce better bottom lines.  Of course for many firms long-term client development or other factors beside profitability fuel growth...

What the New Law Firm Looks Like: The Necessary Reinvention of a Reluctant Industry

Posted on October 21, 2009
Yes, Virginia, there is a future for law firms, but it is a strikingly different one from the law firm of the past.  Not Your Grandfather's Firm What would have been bombshells ten years ago, and maybe even five years ago, continue to drop from the legal firmament: Double digit reductions in revenues and profits; big shops--Bingham McCutchen, Howrey, Orrick, DLA Piper, Morgan Lewis--shelve or reduce their reliance on lock-step promotions; many firms cut back or eliminate summer programs; salaries are frozen or reduced; behavioral interviewing becomes the newest buzzword in recruitment at Vinson & Elkins and elsewhere; old-line English firms Slaughters, Linklaters and Clifford Chance all acknowledge engaging outsourcers for their clients' low-level legal work, in some cases after years of deriding the practice; and English firms Addleshaws and Linklaters take steps to convert to all equity partnerships, while a number of American firms secretly consider it...

Looking at the Crystal Ball

Posted on October 07, 2009
If you haven't already seen this interview of Professor Richard Susskind, the author of The End of Lawyers?, by Barclay Bank's General Counsel Mark Harding, you should do so.  Harding puts Susskind through his paces on what the practice of law is likely to look like over the next 20 years...

Muir Leads APLF Roundtable on Leadership

Posted on September 21, 2009
Muir led an inter-active limited-attendance roundtable on Law Practice Management for Current and Prospective Law Firm Leaders at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Association of Patent Law Firms (APLF) in Chicago, Illinois on Thursday, September 17, 2009...

Convergence and Profitability, or Bigger is Only Bigger

Posted on September 21, 2009
One of the more interesting developments in the law industry over the last couple of decades is the emergence of the mega-firm.  Or what might be called the strange case of the temporary triumph of the delusion of efficiency. "Convergence," the short-hand name of the corporate model for managing outside legal fees by reducing the number of preferred firms, was developed originally in the early 1990s by DuPont and then trumpeted by interested advocates--primarily consultants--who benefited from advising both sides of the aisle...

Muir Leading APLF Leadership Roundtable

Posted on September 14, 2009
Muir is leading an inter-active limited-attendance roundtable on Law Practice Management for Current and Prospective Law Firm Leaders at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Association of Patent Law Firms (APLF) in Chicago, Illinois on Thursday, September 17, 2009...

LSATs and Premier Law Schools as Recruiting Guides?

Posted on September 14, 2009
Here's some more data that puts into question our reliance on high scores and law school credentials in determining which lawyers we want to populate our firms with. LSAT Scores According to a chart prepared by the Tax Prof Blog, math or physics majors are likely to score the highest on their LSATs, theoretically making them the best candidates for law school and the best lawyers...

Random Acts of Generosity?

Posted on August 25, 2009
An article this summer in the New York Times Magazine describes the launch by Hyatt Hotels of a customer relations program that CEO Mark Hoplamazian describes as "random acts of generosity."  Prompted by years of behavioral science research and months of consumer research, the program charges Hyatt employees with occasionally picking up bar tabs and other obligations of customers free of charge...

The Emerging Stakeholders in the Legal Business

Posted on August 05, 2009
In David Maister's article "Are Law Firms Manageable?" on the seemingly intractable challenges to law firm management, he points out only half facetiously that firms may get away with perpetuating these inefficiencies because there is no competitive fallout:  "The greatest advantage that lawyers have is that they compete only with other lawyers...

The 7 Cs of Success

Posted on July 29, 2009
What are the critical personal attributes for achieving success?  Shalom Saar, with an M. A. and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and Administration from Harvard University, has the answer.  Saar is currently teaching leadership and management at MIT and serves as a visiting professor at the China Europe International Business School...

It's Crunch Time: Do You Know Where Your Clients Are?

Posted on July 22, 2009
Now is the time to really get to know your clients. What are their budgetary constrictions?  What are their priorities for the next two years?   What do they want more of and less of from their outside counsel?  What keeps them awake at night?  Do you not only know the answers to all of these and other questions but are also proactively doing something about each of them? In a recent article in The Legal Intelligencer entitled "Firms, GCs Starting to Talk the Talk," Gina Passarella reports on the growing awareness of law firms of the necessity to dialogue with their clients about their delivery of legal services...

Sotomayor and Predicting Who Rises to the Top of the Lawyering Heap

Posted on July 17, 2009
The recent 5-4 Supreme Court ruling on the New Haven Fire Department vocational advancement exam in Ricci v. DeStefano once again stirs the waters on the question of how to choose the best from among a crowd. (See our entry "The Outliers of Law--Embracing Heresy"...

MBTI: All Because of A Lawyer, or Those Mothers-in-Law!

Posted on July 13, 2009
Not only do lawyers score very differently from the rest of the population on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) (see Muir's article "The Unique Psychological World of Lawyers"), but it appears that a lawyer was responsible for the development of the assessment in the first place...

Who is the Best and Brightest?

Posted on July 08, 2009
The Grant Study is an extraordinary longitudinal study undertaken in the late 1930s to shed light on "the urgent question of how to live well."  As participants, a group of 268 (male) Harvard College sophomores, including John F...

Spotting and Repairing Critical Talent Breakdowns

Posted on July 01, 2009
In the current stressful marketplace, the rate of lawyers' incidence of impairment has been ratcheting up from high (see, for example, our September 5, 2008 entry "The Depression Demon Coming Out of the Legal Closet") to even higher.  Firms suffer losses in productivity, morale and recruitment because of impaired lawyers, and also risk client desertions, losses to their reputations and malpractice liability...

The Outliers of Law--Embracing Heresy

Posted on June 26, 2009
Malcolm Gladwell's latest book Outliers, the Story of Success argues that what accounts for success is often not what we expect.  High IQs or a prodigious ability in computers or exceptional musical talent is not sufficient to explain Nobel Prize winners and Bill Gates and the Beatles...

Sotomayor's Qualifications

Posted on June 19, 2009
Regardless of what you think of Sonia Sotomayor's politics, President Obama has touted his Supreme Court nominee as having two distinct qualities that he implies our judges don't always have:  practicality and empathy.  What is the likelihood that any such description of her is correct?  And on what basis can we make such judgments? A look at what we know about lawyers' personal styles as shown on various assessments indicates that, indeed, lawyers are most likely to be "high concept" thinkers, or "Intuitors" according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)...

Muir a Panelist at ALAS General Meeting

Posted on June 05, 2009
Ronda Muir will be a featured panelist at the annual general meeting of the Attorneys' Liability Assurance Society (ALAS) in Quebec City, Quebec to be held June 25-26.   ALAS is the premier provider of professional liability insurance for large law firms in the United States, currently insuring 237 firms...

Muir's Article on Lawyer Impairment Republished

Posted on June 04, 2009
Muir's September 5, 2008 entry on "The Depression Demon Coming Out of the Legal Closet" has been published in the Spring2009 newsletter of Virginia's Lawyers Helping Lawyers, a 20-year old non-stock corporation endorsed by the Virginia State Bar, The Virginia Bar Association, the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association and the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners.

What We Can Learn from the HOGS

Posted on May 21, 2009
"In times of drastic change, it is the learners who will inherit the earth.  The learned will be perfectly positioned for a world that no longer exists."  Swarthmore College's 2009 Lax Conference's keynote speaker Richard Teerlink started his presentation with this quote from Eric Hoffer...

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