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A lot of people I know were happy to see the backside of 2017. But even with the enthusiasm for a new year in our pockets, it can be hard to find the motivation to kickstart our plans and projects as we head back to work this week and find ourselves facing the same day to day grind as before the holidays, as well as a backlog of vacation work and emails to catch up on.

Even though I know it’s coming every year, it still feels as if the new year sneaks up on me, and I’m never prepared with either resolutions or a “word of the year,” like it seems that so many other people are. I have my professional plan in place by mid-December, but finding a way to dive in with gusto can be challenging. So today, I’m bringing you three tips to kick off January with some grace. 
Continue Reading 3 Tips to Kick off Your January with Gusto

Last week, we delved into some methods for leveraging your law firm or referral networks to provide additional value. Building on that theme this week, we’re going to look at three opportunities to develop fertile ground for further relationship and business development within your networks, among your clients, and within your jurisdiction.

Content

As a recommendation for building relationships within your networks, we suggested co-authoring articles on areas of mutual interest. Of course, content doesn’t end here – law firms are already fairly expert at producing a fair amount of content, whether it’s articles, blog posts, podcasts, video, client alerts, etc. You can start to leverage content from your fellow network members in a strategic way that will benefit both of you.
Continue Reading 3 Tactics to Squeeze More Value Out of Your Law Firm Network

Around this time last year, HighQ posed this question to a number of legal industry leaders:

What do you believe lawyers and law firms need to do to prepare for the future of legal services?”

This resulted in an interesting and in-depth e-book that delved into a variety of answers, many of which overlapped and all of which challenged us to be and do better. Although the pace of the legal industry tends towards the glacial, I am curious, a year later, to learn how everyone believes we’re progressing, and whether with an increasing focus on AI, a shift in the way we believe legal services themselves will be practiced and transmitted to the next generations of lawyers, and even the entities that are delivering those services, what we now believe lawyers and law firms should be doing to prepare. I suspect that the majority of us (and data reflects this) will say that change is not some far off idea in the future – it is NOW. But that means both that there are things that lawyers and law firm should be doing at present to accommodate the shifting legal landscape in order to remain competitive, and preparations that they will be making in the future – and it’s both of those things I’m interested in hearing about from all of you. 
Continue Reading Back to the Future…Law Firm

Like with any relationship, the relationship you have with your law firm network will give back what you put into it. (This is true for any informal referral networks too, by the way)

While we wholeheartedly advocate that you join a network with the goal of being able to better serve your clients by offering them a broader level of expertise, and a vetted source of trusted partners around the world at a moment’s notice, we recognize the reality that many firms, of course, are also interested in receiving referrals, and working together with their fellow members to develop new business. While it’s a nice idea to think that you can join a network, tick a box, and sit back and watch the work roll in, the truth is that unless you’re in a jurisdiction where business is naturally incoming, this is unlikely to happen unless you put in some work. The network can and will help you facilitate your relationships with other members and will supercharge your networking and business development efforts, but there are some key strategic steps you can and should undertake to leverage your network membership. These ideas can also be applied to any informal referral networks that you may have. 
Continue Reading Leverage Your Law Firm Network for More Value

I’m excited to bring you a guest post today from Wendy Merrill, who classifies herself as the Chief Rainmaker, Dot-Connector, and Growth Engineer at StrategyHorse Consulting Group. Wendy reached out to me a couple of months ago on LinkedIn, and when we talked on the phone, we connected right away, so I’m sure you will all find her to be as smart and forward-thinking as I do. In her post, she’s jumping into a sensitive topic that many of us tiptoe around in legal, but should be tackling head-on, that of succession planning.

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Succession planning is a frequent subject in partner meetings, as well as a bit of a hot potato.
Continue Reading Modern Succession Planning: Sustainability is in the “Heir”

The legal industry is in the midst of challenging and exciting times. To many firms, so much change and uncertainty may feel like a bit of a crisis, while others see it as more of an opportunity. Regardless of how you see it, it’s certainly a time of upheaval.

I have finally gotten around to reading Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” which has been lounging on my bookshelf for the better part of several years. While there are many lessons in the book that firms looking to become “great” should take to heart, there was one observation that the authors made that really struck me as relevant for firms in today’s marketplace – the Stockdale Paradox.

Collins observes that every “good to great” company they examined in the course of the book’s research had faced “significant adversity.” The difference between those companies who became great, and those companies who didn’t is what Collins refers to as the “Stockdale Paradox.”
Continue Reading Great Law Firms Will Embrace the Stockdale Paradox

Four years ago, we were talking about the “new normal” for law firms. It’s almost comical to believe that we’re still talking about it as if it’s new. It’s not.

Even at that time, Above the Law was telling us that the new normal was really more of the “old normal,” though if we’re honest, there is a lot to show that it really is more new than anything else. But that being said, Above the Law’s advice from four years ago still manages to hold true today. Many firms move at a glacial pace, so we can still be learning and adjusting based on their suggestions (which is a bit scary, but let’s just go with it). 
Continue Reading Three Essential Lessons for the New “New” Normal at Law Firms

“Change or die.”

How many times have you heard that over the last eight years?

A friend of mine in the legal industry pointed that out to me recently, along with commenting that it always sounds so dire. And it does sound dire.

But after the statistics that we covered in a recent post (1/3 of clients are openly dissatisfied with their outside counsel, chief legal officers rank firms at a 3 on a 1 to 10 scale for commitment to change, and clients are moving their legal work to other firms or to non-firm vendors), it would seem that we should be properly incentivized to speed up the pace of change. From the Peer Monitor/Georgetown 2016 Report on the State of the Legal Market, which cautioned BigLaw against a “Kodak moment”
Continue Reading What’s Holding us Back from Real Change in Legal?

Change - Speedometer Races to RevolutionAt the recent CLOC Institute, Connie Brenton, CLOC President & CEO, along with Chief of Staff/Director of Legal Operations for NetApp gave us a challenge:

Stop thinking about how we can fit into the world around us. Start thinking about how we can change the world around us.”

For many of us, that change has started with sharing what we heard at CLOC with our own corners of the legal ecosystem, and keeping that drumbeat for change sounding. While I plan to recap some of the key sessions I attended, I first wanted to share with you some of the excellent articles that have come out following the conference, which should be further galvanizing the legal industry.
Continue Reading Change is Not Just a Six Letter Word: CLOC Urges Lawyers to Put Ideas in Action

clem-onojeghuo-122041Any time you pick your head up from the daily work you’re doing in the legal industry, “change” is the drumbeat that you hear.

Nowhere was that more apparent to me than at last week’s CLOC Institute – for those of you who aren’t familiar with CLOC, it’s the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium. They’re a relatively new group in the industry, bringing together legal operations professionals for networking, education, to share best practices, and really, to drive change. But they’re more than just legal ops – in fact, their mission states quite clearly that this drive for change involves working with “other core corporate legal industry players” in addition to legal operations professionals. Their goal is to “optimize the legal service delivery models needed by small, medium and large legal departments to support their clients,” and they recognize that this can only be done together. 
Continue Reading CLOC: Change is a Drumbeat