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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In our prior post, Smart Growth Part 1: The Why and How of Growth, we reviewed the reasons for and types of growth that law firms typically follow. In this post, we will explore the role that strategy plays in growth and why firms must be much more aggressive, creative, forward-thinking and discerning than ever…
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As we enter the fourth quarter of the year, it is an important time to be thinking about your firm’s growth strategy for the future. Law firms, like any other business, must grow and adapt to stay relevant and viable. The last ten years of disruption have increased (1) competition from other law firms, clients’…
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Our prior three law firm case studies have featured a 75-lawyer firm in Chicago, a 550-lawyer US firm and a 1,100-lawyer firm all based in the United States except for 13 full-time lawyers in China. This case study is about global law firm Morgan Lewis, with more than 2,000 lawyers across 17 offices in the…
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In our two prior posts, Innovation Case Study 1 and Innovation Case Study 2, we described two different law firm approaches to innovation. This third case study describes the efforts at Perkins Coie with a focus on those being led or shepherded by Toby Brown, the firm’s Chief Practice Management Officer. Toby has been in the…
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At the recent P3 Conference (P3 stands for Pricing, Project Management and Process Improvement,) Sam Davenport, Business Innovation and Finance Director, DWT/De Novo, DWT and Brian Fanning, Director of Practice Economics at Davis Wright & Tremaine, shared their approaches to how they support and expand a culture of innovation at the 550-lawyer firm that has…
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Levenfeld Pearlstein is a 75-lawyer firm in Chicago. Its innovative CEO, Angie Hickey, recently shared her insights at the P3 Conference about how the firm has adopted a corporate style Customer Experience culture that sets it apart. Their client focus permeates everything the firm does both internally and externally. The firm was founded in 1999…
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