With so much news about COVID-19, many of us are becoming a little overloaded with coping with the stress and the substantial impacts on the economy, society, our friends and families and our firms. Over the next several weeks, we will share stories of individuals in our legal community who personally are making a difference. We…
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In our March 4th post, How to Enable Value With Clients: Part 1, we discussed the need for law firms to build and deliver more innovative and efficient service to clients. Part 1 addressed the first two components of innovative, value-enabled service delivery: knowledge management and process/project management. In this article we will address data…
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Please contact us at sduncan@rainmakingoasis.com if you or your practice group is interested in reviewing or recharging your personal business development or practice group plan. This is a good time to assess and modify your strategy. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a major impediment for lawyers who were actively engaged in a personal or practice…
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In early February, we published an article entitled, The Role of Trustworthiness in Client and Business Development. At that time, the COVID-19 epidemic was not fully blown. While companies, universities, associations, health care providers and law firms were all just beginning to turn their attention to potential crisis management scenarios, we are now in the…
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Firms continue to make efforts to better understand and deliver more efficient and effective services by utilizing systems, people and technology. However, many partners in firms still resist change and are not aware of or comfortable with the many ways that their firms can and should be aggressively pursuing alternative and innovative processes to both…
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For at least a decade or two, law firms that wanted to stand out in value to their most important clients have provided “added value” by giving them services for free, including CLE training and other resources they used to charge clients for. After the Great Recession of 2008 and the launch of the ACC…
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Strong relationships are built on a foundation of trust. It doesn’t matter in what context your relationships exist – personal, social, professional or civic, you will not build successful, mutually meaningful and beneficial relationships without being authentic and trustworthy. In the context of business development and client relationships, trustworthiness is essential to earning the right…
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This article was co-authored by Susan Duncan of RainMaking Oasis LLC and Simmons “Pat” Patrick of Forsyth Search Partners, LLC, a retained executive search firm focusing on senior administrative and operational leadership positions in law, accounting and other professional service firms. Human Capital as a DifferentiatorMercer HR Consulting, a global HR consulting firm, undertook…
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Happy New Year! While most reports from Q4 indicate that 2019 was a robust year for law firms, others are cautioning that we are still due for a slowdown in 2020. Now is the time to hone your growth strategies, safely secure your clients and your own talent, and proactively manage into the future. We…
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We published 24 articles in 2019 on topics geared toward law firm leaders and managers as well as those geared toward individual lawyers and professionals. This recap includes only the high-level points made in many of those posts, but we encourage you to go back to the original posts to receive the more thorough analysis…
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In our prior post, Smart Growth Part 6: Organic Growth of Talent, we discussed the need for growing your talent organically as well as through lateral hiring of associates and partners. Today, when leaders and consultants talk about organic growth, they often are referring to the revenue side of organic growth. In a highly competitive environment…
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In our first post on Smart Growth, we cited the 2019 Altman Weil Law Firms in Transition Survey, which reported that the number one growth strategy law firms intended to use was organic growth at 96%, followed by acquiring laterals at 92% and acquiring groups at 76%. We rarely focus on organic growth as a…
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Our last post, Smart Growth Part 4: Lateral Partner Hiring discussed the statistics of lateral recruiting, the level of activity, the failure rates and the cost of failures. Improving your process by aligning strategy to hiring, laying out the business case and criteria for lateral hires and comprehensively vetting candidates will go a long way…
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As we discussed in Smart Growth Part 1, hiring lateral partners or small groups of partners and associates provides law firms with short and long-term opportunities to add partners with strong client relationships and portable books of business to shore up their revenue numbers. Whether adding well-known and positioned rainmakers to a practice or industry…
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Our second post in our Growth series, Your Strategy Must be Much More Than a Plan, suggested new, more creative and aggressive ways to think about your strategy. Both Porter’s 5 Forces and the Blue Ocean strategy described in that post require a foundation in good research and intelligence that when converted into analysis and…
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