Practice Management

New Service for Law Firm Managing Partners

Disclosure point one:Patrick McKenna was my coauthor on the book FIRST AMONG EQUALS. 

He and his firm, Edge International, have just launched, in concert with Managing Partner Magazine, a service through which new law firm managing partners will have access to advice through a newly formed Leadership Advisory Board (the "LAB.")

Disclosure point two: the following description is adapted from their press release.

The LAB will be comprised of experienced and knowledgeable managing partners, and will offer new law firm leaders a forum in which to pose questions about issues of greatest importance to them and to receive from the LAB advice and guidance based on its members' many years' experience as law firm leaders.

The LAB is the brain child of both Patrick and Baker & Daniels' Chair Emeritus Brian Burke. Burke says, "While teaching a Managing Partner Magazine-sponsored program that Patrick and I conduct for new managing partners, it became evident that these leaders of law firms have very limited resources from which to draw guidance. While their firms might belong to a network of law firms or they might get together with other managing partners in their local markets, it can be awkward for managing partners to ask questions in such settings about the more sensitive strategic, interpersonal, or operational issues that they find themselves confronting."

Any managing partner can now seek advice (anonymously, if preferred) by logging on to the Managing Partner Magazine web site. Once there, managing partners may pose questions, challenges, or issues. McKenna and Burke will circulate the inquiry to all members of the LAB, asking for individual guidance, views, and examples; gather and synthesize the group's feedback; and draft a cogent response to the individual presenting the inquiry.

Explained one of the LAB members, “I believe that there is a dearth of good advice and mentoring available to new managing partners.  It is staggering to think that corporate CEO's and other C-level people in the corporate world train their entire careers in order to be prepared when it is their turns to take the helm, but law firms put people at the helm of an enterprise whose revenue numbers have two commas in them with little or no formal training and almost no mentoring.”

For further information contact Patrick McKenna at  (780) 428-1052 / (800) 921-3343

Full post as published by Passion, People and Principles on March 03, 2008 (boomark / email).