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photo-1444703686981-a3abbc4d4fe3Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the Legal Marketing Association’s Leadership Conference, as part of my role as Technology Committee Co-Chair for 2016. In preparation for the conference, we were tasked with reading John P. Kotter’s Leading Change. I’ll admit, I was not a huge fan of the book, though it did offer some good advice – I felt that Kotter could have said more with less, and that his Harvard degree gave him too much license for arrogance.

What WAS helpful were the chapter book reports that were presented by members of the LMA’s International Board for 2015/2016, which took us through the salient points of the book. I’ll share my notes with you here and invite you to read the book for further examples and depth. …
Continue Reading Leading Change – An LMA Book Report

Last week, we had the first part of our recap from Tim Corcoran’s excellent webinar on Legal Project Management. Today, I bring you the second half, which covers: 

  • Legal Project Management (LPM): Concepts – should they be embraced or avoided? Is LPM a friend, an enemy or a frenemy?
  • Process improvement versus LPM: Two different disciplines, though they are related.
  • LPM 2.0: The advanced level of LPM. 

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Continue Reading ILN Webinar Series – An Introduction to Legal Project Management Part II

I’ve been debating whether or not I wanted to jump on the bandwagon and address yesterday’s social media debacle with Kenneth Cole.  If you’re not familiar with what happened, both Nancy Myrland and Gini Dietrich wrote great posts that also recap it here and here.

I decided that I did want to add my two cents – I was certainly dismayed by Cole’s tweet yesterday, though not surprised.  If you’ve driven down the FDR in Manhattan over the last ten years, you’ve seen his snarky political billboards on the side of the road.  Why I think non-politicians shouldn’t use their power and money to push their political philosophies on the rest of us is a whole other post, but I thought Cole really stuck his foot in his mouth yesterday.

As Nancy mentioned in her post, he needs some serious crisis communications work – we had a speaker on this very topic back in 2007, so I thought I’d dig through my conference report archives and share some of his wisdom with you.  Although I’m particularly disgusted by what Cole said yesterday, social media and other gaffes can happen to the best of us, and we need to know what to do if we’re in the same situation.…

Continue Reading Communication Crisis – My Two Cents on the Kenneth Cole Scandal

One of our sessions during the ILN’s 2010 Regional Meeting of the Americas in Houston focused on the always popular topic of law firm management.  The panel was moderated by our Chairman, Peter Altieri of Epstein Becker & Green in New York.  On the panel were Steve Arthur of Harrison & Moberly in Indianapolis, Indiana, Carlos Rodriguez-Vidal of Goldman Antonetti & Cordova in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Doug Winthrop of Howard Rice in San Francisco, California, Bill O’Neill from McDonald Hopkins in Cleveland, Ohio and Anders Lundberg from Hellstrom in Stockholm, Sweden.

Creating Demand

Altieri began by saying that one of the challenges in the current economy for firms is creating demand. In the past, they had much more pipeline work than there is now, in part because clients are trying to do more in-house. He added that even the big firms are coming in and being price-competitive, and asked the panelists to comment on this.

Winthrop said that his firm has been seeing a tremendous rebound in the litigation sector of the firm, which has them quite busy.  Now, they’re facing the issue of whether to hire more attorneys on the litigation side, or ask the business lawyers to chip in.  He said they’re concerned that they’ll find themselves with overcapacity, so they’ve addressed the issue by doing both.…

Continue Reading ILN Conference Re-Cap: Law Firm Management Panel