I’ve taken advantage of the relative quiet of the end of summer to take the free University of Alberta Indigenous Canada course. The course provides a summary of life and history in Canada according to those where were here first. I’m about halfway through as I write this blog post, and I’m finding it both [...]
I recently received an email from an organization in which I used to be quite active. The purpose was an announcement of an amalgamation of segments of the organization. The message was well-written in a technical sense. It included a summary of the change, some of the activities leading up to the decision for the [...]
Great marketing isn’t a single action; rather it’s a series of connected actions, each one building from the other for the purpose of creating a mutually beneficial and ideally ongoing relationship. This is a difficult lesson for lawyers to get, for three main reasons. Most lawyers don’t like marketing. It isn’t why they joined the [...]
(This article first appeared in SLAW) The line between bad strategy and a law firm collapse is as thin as a noose. Yet law firms practice bad strategy on a regular basis. Take heed from the lessons of a very public breakdown. A client recently gave me a copy of Norman Bacal’s book “Breakdown, the Inside [...]
Like so many of us, I’ve been glued to news programs observing (and where I can, participating in) the world’s response to the police murder of George Floyd. This is on the heels of earlier protests by individuals wanting the Covid 19 crises to be over and business to get back to normal. I’m not [...]
This pandemic has highlighted what many of us already suspected: that we aren’t very good at fully utilizing the down-times at work. While we can’t make work fall out of thin air, we can certainly make this time more productive…perhaps even leading to more work in future. Here’s how… No career will be going 110 [...]
(This article first appeared in SLAW). Most law firms intuitively understand the value of mentoring. Unfortunately, that rarely translates into a successful mentoring program. Here’s what’s wrong with them, and how to fix them. There are so many skills a young lawyer needs to develop in their formational years, and so little time in which [...]
It’s official: we are headed into a recession and possibly a depression. And we’re headed into this abyss while still in quarantine, which may last until there’s a vaccine and the time needed to inoculate everyone. Government assistance – for those who qualify – helps, but can’t last forever. How do we get out of [...]
In my last post I provided a few tips to help firms prepare for the pandemic. Well, it’s here now, and while we figure out how to live through it we’re all getting bombarded by Covid 19 email messages ad nauseum. Most of the emails I’ve received have told me absolutely nothing except that the [...]
Like most businesses, small to medium-sized law firms depend on business as usual to meet their revenue targets and cover expenses. Most can withstand an economic downturn, the loss of an important client, the sudden need for new technology hardware, etc. Preparing for a longer-term threat is a different. We are facing a pandemic. While [...]