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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Succession Planning: The Problem and a RoadMap

07.11.18 | Susan Duncan

Eight adults per minute turn sixty-five and by 2020, 20% of the workforce will be 65 or older.  In law firms, the problem is exacerbated as senior rainmakers aged 60 or older often control 50% or more of the client base and key relationships, and often serve in key leadership positions.  According to studies conducted…

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Lawyers Should be Great at Consultative and Insight Selling

06.27.18 | Susan Duncan

When lawyers first started exploring the uncomfortable process of “selling” as early as the 1980s not long after the 1977 Bates decision allowing lawyers to advertise, it was uncomfortable and seen as unseemly even sleazy. Over the decades, consultants have adapted sales approaches shifting from the traditional model into consultative selling. This approach has proven effective…

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A Race to the Bottom for the AmLaw 200 and Below? Doesn’t Have to Be.

06.14.18 | Susan Duncan

A month ago, at a conference on change management, a managing partner of an AmLaw 200 firm asked a question that likely weighs on the minds of most AmLaw 200 managing partners, some of the AmLaw 100 firms and many of those below the top 200. His question was: We hear all the time that…

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Law Firm MDPs and New Delivery Models Part 2 – Subsidiaries

10.18.17 | Susan Duncan

In an effort to offer existing and new clients fuller capabilities and solutions, many law firms have developed wholly-owned subsidiaries often comprised of experts in an industry or service specialty who are not lawyers. As we reviewed in our last post, Law Firm MDPs and New Delivery Models Part 1 – A Primer, clients today…

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Law Firm MDPs and New Delivery Models Part 1 – A Primer

10.04.17 | Susan Duncan

In our post Who Do Law Firms Compete with and Why? we described the fierce competition that law firms face today, noting that much of that competition is increasingly  coming from non-law firm legal services providers, consulting firms and the Big 4, which have some of the largest law firms in the world outside the…

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Industry Group Strategy Part 2: How to Execute IGs Effectively

09.06.17 | Susan Duncan

In our prior post, Industry Group Strategy Part 1 – What are They and Why Have IGs? we clarified the difference between sectors and industries and discussed the benefits and goals of having them.  In law firms, Industry Groups, like client teams, straddle multiple practice groups and lawyers may be members of several practice groups…

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Customer Experience (CX) Part 2 – Mapping the Client Journey

04.26.17 | Susan Duncan

[Note: This post is co-authored by RainMaking Oasis and Jonathan Hollenberg of HawkPartners, a marketing strategy and research firm for Fortune 500 companies.] As discussed in our first post Customer Experience (CX) Part 1 – Is It Different than Customer Service, customer satisfaction often focuses on narrow and discrete touch points that clients are exposed…

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Customer Experience (CX) Part 1 – Is It Different from Customer Service?

04.12.17 | Susan Duncan

Providing exceptional and consistent client service is critical to your firm’s success, but to be a real winner, you will have to deliver an exceptional client experience (CX).  With clients now in the driver’s seat and law firms aggressively competing to hold on to clients or take work away from others, we know that excellent…

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Healthy Client Road Map: 25 Tips to Keep Clients Happy, Satisfied and Loyal

03.01.17 | Susan Duncan

Despite all the talk about clients not being loyal anymore and only being interested in pushing matters to the least expensive “bidder,”  many things about relationships still matter to most clients.  In our last blog post Sales and Service: The Loyal Client Lifecycle, we touched upon some of the ways to nurture and advance client relationships….

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Sales and Service: The Loyal Client Life Cycle

02.15.17 | Susan Duncan

Law firms continue to compete aggressively for new clients and new work from existing clients.  We know from recent surveys by Citi and Altman Weil that client demand for outside lawyers remained flat in 2016 and is expected to do so again in 2017.  With the same or less work to go around, this means…

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Are Your Clients Turning into Customers?

02.19.14 | Susan Duncan

What’s the difference between a client and a customer? Lawyers, like other professional service providers, consider the term client to be more prestigious and most eschew any reference to clients as customers. But it may just be time to reconsider. First, clients are beginning to act more like custmers and second, law firms could benefit…

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The Future is Here: 10 Trends and What Your Firm Should be Asking Itself

07.11.13 | Susan Duncan

Two things are clear right now. First, dramatic changes have already occurred and will continue to occur in the legal profession (actually, most are affecting all sectors of the economy.) Second, these and other new changes will be permanent, i.e., this is not a pendulum swing that will swing back. The marketplace is driving these…

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Value Post 4: How Law Firms and In-House Counsel Can Co-Create Value

05.06.13 | Susan Duncan

As we proposed in our previous post Value Post 3: Like Law Firms, GCs Must Deliver More Value to Their Clients, general counsel face many of the same pressures that their outside lawyers do when it comes to demonstrating their value to their clients – the business side of their companies. Much of the legal press…

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Value Post 2: Your Value Proposition Should be a Differentiator

04.15.13 | Susan Duncan

Our last post Value Post 1: What Does Value Mean in Law Firms? discussed the meaning of value in the law firm/client context including the ways that clients define and measure the value they receive from their lawyers. This second post explores how firms can articulate value to help them differentiate and excel in attracting, satisfying and…

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