Law Firms

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iStock_000016006182SmallEarly on in my legal career, I learned something about law firms that has stuck with me.

Law firms don’t want to be first. But they want to be first to be second.

Bearing that in mind, the importance of keeping an eye on what your competitors are up to cannot be undervalued. Whenever I speak to a lawyer or legal marketing professional, I get the sense that we’re all doing this on an informal, if not formal, basis fairly regularly. We know who our competitors are and what they’re good at, in much the same way that we know the ins and outs of our own organizations or firms.

This afternoon, I read a great post on “6 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About Your Business,” which I highly recommend – there are some concrete suggestions in here for ways you can look critically at what your competitors are up to in the context of your own firm’s activities, and use those to improve your own goals and focus. It got me thinking about some additional ways that firms can be looking at their competitors for answers, and below are four key questions you want to ask yourself about your competitors to drive your own firm. 
Continue Reading Four Key Questions Your Competitors Can Answer for Your Firm

Grunge cracked zombie virus concept background with some soft smooth lines

In keeping with our theme of zombies (this is the last post on this for a while, I swear), when last we saw our intrepid band of beloved Walking Dead characters, they were coming up with a plan to fight Negan and the Survivors. Without a plan, they spent much of the previous season just reacting to a bad situation – they thought they had all the information they needed on Negan, and took out one of his outposts, only to learn it was a small segment of his followers, and **spoiler alert** people died.

While no one is going to die without a content marketing plan, a rigorous, strategic plan can turn what is haphazard actions taken with fingers crossed into an efficient formula for building your online reputation into something that works for you. A plan combats the two issues we addressed with hit-or-miss content marketing last week,

  1. You’re a busy person who needs efficient marketing that works for you.
  2. Your audience is comprised of busy people who won’t hunt through tons of content to find the gems.

Continue Reading Combatting the Zombiefication of Legal Content Marketing with a Plan

FirmoftheMonth1

December 2016/January 2017

The ILN is proud to announce our latest firm of the month, Martinez, Algaba, de Haro y Curiel, S.C.!
The firm was established in 1969 and has broad experience in civil, commercial and administrative litigation, commercial arbitration, and bankruptcy and restructuring. Specialized publications such as Chambers & Partners, Legal 500, and Who’s Who Legal recognize the firm as a leading firm within said areas of practice. Additionally, the firm provides corporate and banking advisory legal services.
Clients counseled consist of both domestic and foreign entities, many of which are publicly traded and are key players in areas of business and industries as diverse as banking, insurance, investment and pension funds, education, oil and gas, retail, real estate, technology, aeronautics, and telecommunications.
With offices in Mexico City and Monterrey, the firm has nine partners and twenty-five associates with sound academic and professional backgrounds, licensed to practice law all across the country, supported by over sixty people, including paralegals and administrative staff.

Continue Reading ILN Firm of the Month – Martinez, Algaba, de Haro y Curiel, S.C.

2016We’re excited to announce today the release of the first edition of our real estate guide, “Buying & Selling Real Estate: An International Guide.” The collaborative electronic guide provides an overview of the legal aspects of buying and selling real estate in eleven jurisdictions internationally. It is designed to serve as a quick and practical…

Speedometer with needle racing through the words Revolution, Change, Shake it Up, Status Quo and Stagnation

“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 yesterday, along with commenting that it always sounds so dire. And it does sound dire.

But after the statistics that we covered in last week’s 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 nonfirm 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”

[A]s in the case of Kodak, the challenge is that firms are choosing not to act in response to the threat, even though they are fully aware of its ramifications.”

So what’s holding us back? 
Continue Reading Change: What’s Holding Us Back?

iStock_000011353685_LargeThe “law firm of the future.”

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about this in recent months, not because I find it to be interesting (which I do), but because other than my “Instagram for Lawyers” post, this has been the hottest topic on Zen this year. I had a conversation with a senior partner at a law firm last week, who asked me “How do we communicate to people that the future is NOW?” His firm has been embracing these “futuristic” policies for a number of years, and recognizes that change in the industry is not happening fast enough.

In May, Altman Weil published the 8th edition of their “Law Firms in Transition” survey, which polls the managing partners and chairs at 800 US law firms with 50 or more lawyers (this year’s survey received 356 respondents from 49% of the 350 largest US law firms). If you haven’t already read at least the executive summary for this survey, I highly encourage you to take a look through it. In the midst of the second quarter of this year, Altman Weil said:

Are law firms still in transition in 2016? We think so, although the pace of change can seem modest. Despite pockets of true innovation, most firms are choosing to proceed with lawyerly caution in the midst of a market that is being reinvented around them.”

Yikes.

A bunch of a hoopla about nothing? We’ll get to that in a minute. 
Continue Reading Law Firms: The Future is NOW

cqatth9oyuw-liz-bridgesThe end of this week marks the beginning of December, and we all know what that means…

Holiday party invitations are coming. 

For introverts like me, holiday parties are probably not high on your list of exciting December “to dos” – it’s not that we don’t love them; it’s just that they’re rather exhausting. Extroverts may see them as a chance to enjoy a bit of relaxation with friends and meet new people. But no matter how you view holiday parties, they are definitely a key opportunity to network.

Whether you’re a networking pro or feel like there’s room for improvement, every networking experience is a chance to hone your skills. Recently, we held our Regional Conference of the Americas, and invited David Ackert, President of The Ackert Advisory, to facilitate a type of speed-dating session that we refer to as our “referral rendezvous.” We matched our lawyers in groups of 3-4 people, and they had 25 minutes to talk and connect with each other – some of them have known each other for many years, while others were meeting each other for the first time.

David’s networking tools offered a road map to maximize the time invested in each conversation. These tips are valuable not just for speed dating purposes, but across all networking opportunities, so I am sharing them with you today as we head into a whirlwind season of relationship-building possibilities. 
Continue Reading Holiday Networking is Coming.

photo-1468645547353-56d325bb57ffWe’ve spent several weeks addressing the potential characteristics that the lawyers and law firms of the future will require in order to be successful. Today, we look at the last two contributors to High Q’s book on Smart Law and the Law Firm of the Future, but I invite all of you to continue to consider these issues and discuss them – particularly give some thought to whether the contributors missed anything you see as essential to law firms in the future and where you see our profession headed.

And what’s next? We’ve been looking at sort of where we’ll be in five or ten years, but not what the incremental steps will be to get there. So what is the first thing that firms and lawyers need to be doing in order to prepare themselves to be an effective law firm of the future? Is it embracing new technologies? Is it a shift in mindset at the leadership levels of the firm (or is that already happening)? Is it bringing in strong teams of professionals, not just lawyers? Are all of those things already taking place to some extent at many firms, and we just need to accelerate them?

What’s next?
Continue Reading Law Firm of the Future: Are You Ready?

photo-1470093309323-be5043d91fa6 (1)Last week, we considered the idea that maybe the law firm of the future was going to have to start from scratch in order to really generate change that matters. On LinkedIn, one commenter saw this as an opportunity for smaller firms to grab marketshare from BigLaw, as they are able to be more nimble and agile in a changing market, while one of the ILN’s members wondered how mid-sized firms, particularly in emerging markets, are able to properly prioritize the changes that clients want and need.

I tend to agree that where some may see change as a challenge, it does present a huge opportunity, especially for some smaller and mid-sized firms, but it not only requires us to ask some tough questions and take a critical internal look, it also means that we need to work collaboratively. When we work together – not just within our firms and organizations, but within the industry – we’re able to better identify both the questions and challenges AND the answers and solutions to these issues. We’ve talked before about how the law firm of the future will embrace a more collaborative approach, but I see the industry overall as taking on a more collaborative tone – without giving away any trade secrets, we can all work together to make the industry stronger and more client-centric. 
Continue Reading Law Firm of the Future: Deeper Discussions Sought Here

photo-1477414348463-c0eb7f1359b6Up until this point, as we’ve looked at the “law firm of the future,” we’ve mostly focused on the idea that we can take what we’ve been doing and adapt or tweak it in some way, so that we can continue on our paths and just improve ourselves. We’ve talked about embracing technology, making things better, using all of our people instead of just lawyers to be innovative and remain curious. And of course, none of these things are wrong. But are they too comfortable?

Are we just putting duct tape over a hole in our tire, instead of taking the tire off and putting on a new one?

What if truly being a law firm of the future means throwing out everything we know, and starting at the beginning?

  • Looking at the client’s point of view, and finding out what really works for them and never considering how we’ve always done things – in terms of processes, billing, staffing, etc.
  • Running our firms as businesses and not as partnerships.
  • Fully embracing technology as an integral part of our team, and how it can drive that business, instead of a necessary evil?

These are the challenges given to us by the two contributing authors that we’re examining from HighQ’s book on Smart Law and the future of the law firm today.

I’m as guilty as the next person of wanting to change the least amount possible to achieve the maximum gains – that way, I can stay pretty comfortable while still pleasing the people that matter.

But what if we didn’t do that? What if we were brave and effected real change? 
Continue Reading Law Firm of the Future: Get Ready to Change