Client Loyalty Post #15: Will you keep your client once the senior partner retires?

04.28.21 | Susan Duncan

This is the fifteenth in our weekly series of posts that provide excerpts and tips from our book Building Enduring Client Loyalty: A Guide for Lawyers and Their Firms, just published in February. Click here to save 15%. Enter code ‘AUTHBEC’ at the checkout. Transitioning or turning over clients is one of the most challenging hurdles in…

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How Talent and Culture Can Provide a Competitive Advantage

01.22.20 | Susan Duncan

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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Let Us Help You Reach Your New Year’s Goals

01.08.20 | Susan Duncan

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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Countdown to 2020: A Recap of 2019 Best Ideas and Tips

12.18.19 | Susan Duncan

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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Smart Growth Part 6: Organic Talent Growth

11.13.19 | Susan Duncan

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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Smart Growth Part 5: Lateral Partner Onboarding and Integration

10.30.19 | Susan Duncan

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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Smart Growth Part 4: Lateral Partner Hiring

10.16.19 | Susan Duncan

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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Innovation Case Study 4: Morgan Lewis & Bockius

08.21.19 | Susan Duncan

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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Innovation in Law Firm Operations: Takeaways from LMA’s P3 Conference

06.26.19 | Susan Duncan

Nearly four hundred professionals gathered for the 7th annual P3: Practice Innovation Conference focusing on project management, process improvement and pricing and hosted by the Legal Marketing Association.  It was an impressive group of experts and very instructive to see how law firms continue to expand their commitment to legal operations and innovation in their…

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Skills Gap Part 2: How Some Law Schools and Others are Filling the Void

05.29.19 | Susan Duncan

Our last blog post, Skills Gap Part 1: What Skills Will Lawyers Need to Stay Relevant? described the expanded set of competencies necessary for lawyers in law firms and legal departments today.  The types of skills needed and the level of competency in each will vary according to a firm’s practice mix, its strategic positioning…

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The Skills Gap Part 1: What Competencies will Lawyers Need to Stay Relevant in the Future?

05.15.19 | Susan Duncan

Our last three posts have addressed different aspects of innovation that are occuring in the legal profession:  Innovation Part 1: What It Is and What It Isn’t, Innovation Part 2: Insights from Expertsand Innovation Part 3:  ALSPs Are Expanding and Aren’t Alternative Anymore.  Inherent in all of this client-driven change and digital transformation is the…

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A Compendium of Insights, Trends, Tips and Best Practices

05.01.19 | Susan Duncan

To our clients and colleagues – It came to our attention that many of you were not on our distribution list until very recently and therefore not receiving our bi-weekly blog.  Knowing you are too busy to go to the web site to peruse the list of topics or may not have signed up on…

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Practice Groups Part 4: Practice Group Leader as Talent Manager and Coach

01.09.19 | Susan Duncan

Perhaps one of the most challenging responsibilities for today’s practice group leaders is the “people” side of the business. In our prior two posts, we have discussed the Practice Group Leader as Strategist and the Practice Group Leader as Financial Steward. While PGLs often get help from others managing the associates and staff in the…

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Succession Management Pillar 5 of 5: Senior Lawyer Transitions and Next Career Support

09.26.18 | Susan Duncan

In this final post in our five-part series on succession planning, we address perhaps the most challenging aspect of the topic: managing and supporting individual senior partner transitions.  In Pillar 1, Pillar 2, Pillar 3 and Pillar 4 we discussed various components of how firms can design and manage approaches to the many facets of succession…

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Succession Management Pillar 1 of 5: Transition Management and Retirement Process

07.25.18 | Susan Duncan

In our recent blog post Succession Planning: The Problem and a RoadMap, we concluded with a RoadMap for how to establish a framework for an approach to succession planning.  This post provides additional detail about five components that comprise the pillars of succession management. Pillar 1 ComponentsDone correctly, as described in our post The Succession…

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