Law firm succession planning is notoriously tricky. Many Partners excel at client advocacy but struggle to plan their own exit strategies. Worse, many law firms lack the institutional backbone to push back against retiring Partner demands (such as refusal to declare a date, or to have a client transition plan) and stand up for what [...]
To encourage business development, many law firms track and bonus for origination credits. These credits can last anywhere from a single year to the entire lifetime of that client relationship. There is no doubt that the carrot of compensation helps to encourage the transfer of new work to other members of a firm. But this [...]
When law firm partners think about operational strategy, they usually focus on external threats. They worry about competing firms stealing their clients, technological disruption eroding their billable hours, or a sudden dip in the local economy. But there can also be internal threats to the firm: Associate churn, Partner under-productivity, a lack of operational efficiency. [...]
My regular readers know I listen to a lot of podcasts, and that one of my favorites is Freakonomics. A recent episode was titled “Has America Lost the Plot?”. It is a great episode, but the title itself gave me the inspiration for this post. Frankly, I think most of the law firm leaders I [...]
In an interview with Dr. Michael Gervais (mastery expert and podcaster), Missy Testerman, the 2024 USA Teacher of the Year advised that “great teachers don’t raise kids; they raise adults”. It’s a subtle but important distinction, speaking to a series of actions geared towards a specific future intent. It’s what author Stephen Covey called, “Beginning [...]
Gary Klein can tell law firms a lot about working under pressure and uncertainty. He is a research psychologist and pioneer of the field of naturalistic decision making, as well as author of (among others) the book “Seeing What Others Don’t”. People pay attention to this guy: his work is used by the US armed [...]
When I meet new people, it’s hard to explain what I do for a living so I just say “I’m a business strategist for law firms”. At that point, they either really want to know what that means, or they really don't. For the curious, I’ve recently started to explain the story of Steve Ballmer [...]
Through a recent podcast featuring 24-year-old Harvard-educated author Adam Aleksic on the influence of internet language, I was reminded of the incredible speed of change we are all now facing. Take, for example, use of the phrase “unalive” as a way of saying “dead” which might result in algorithmic censorship. Similarly, a watermelon now represents [...]
I’ve noticed an interesting trend in current law firm activity. It’s slowed down, almost to a crawl. But it’s not the results of a change in markets for law firms. It seems to be a reaction to the tumultuous world around us. Trump’s on again, off again tariffs and uncertainty about their ramifications. The Canadian [...]
I’m a fan of CBC. I think the national communications platform plays an important role in our country. I see them as informative, insightful and strong in exploring information of importance to Canadians. And I love my podcasts, especially CBC’s weekday Front Burner. But today’s episode threw me. It speculated on how easy it might [...]