I recently had the opportunity to speak with John Kain, managing partner of Kain C + C Lawyers in Adelaide, Australia. John’s company (it’s an incorporated legal practice, not a firm), which specializes in high-end corporate, commercial and M&A work, is one of the more progressive and innovative legal service providers that I’ve come across in… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Leadership
So you designed a law firm: Your survey results
Previously on Law21 … after discussing the apparent disconnect between what lawyers seem to believe they can accomplish within law firms and what they’re actually empowered to do, I set up a brief survey inviting lawyers to distribute 100 points among 10 features of a hypothetical law firm to create an ideal working environment. First,… Read more »
Design your own law firm: A Law21 lawyer survey
Not for the first time, and probably not the last, I find myself reading reports from the legal marketplace and wondering why lawyers are asleep at the switch. The latest head-scratcher comes courtesy of Altman Weil and its fifth annual Law Firms in Transition Survey of 238 US law firms. Importantly, only one-third of the respondents… Read more »
The stewardship crisis
Over the legal news wire this week came a report of the closure of a US law firm. The full report of the firm’s demise was restricted to those with a premium account that I have no interest in acquiring, and in any event, the details of what happened weren’t relevant to what caught my… Read more »
Credit crisis: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet
We’re already seeing some dominoes start to wobble in the legal community, as the short- and medium-term impact of the financial crisis becomes clearer. If you’re a law firm CFO or a law student nearing graduation, you probably won’t like what’s coming. But it looks to me like there are much bigger pieces likely to… Read more »
The culture-driven law firm
The era of the free-agent lawyer, and the law firm lateral hiring frenzy that it spawned, is drawing to a close. The rise of the culture-driven law firm is at hand. It’s going to take me a while to explain how I got here. I’ll try to do this in two parts. 1. Followership in… Read more »
Preparing for the storm
The “About” entry in the column over on the right there states my belief that the practice of law is heading into “uncharted territory.” If you’re skeptical about that, or if you’re unconvinced of the reality of imminent upheaval in this profession, here are two items you might want to look at. The first is… Read more »
Leading by asking
“There go my people,” said 19th-century radical French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, supposedly on seeing a mob pass by the café where he was seated. “I must find out where they are going, so I can lead them.” You won’t find a more succinct summary of the paradoxical nature of leadership than that: how can… Read more »
Something’s actually happening
There’s a lot of buzz building about an article in today’s New York Times with the rather odd title “Who’s Cuddly Now? Law Firms.” It summarizes a recent rash of new business models in American law firms, from flextime for lawyers to flat-fee bills for clients to alternative billable-hour schemes and more. It’s the second… Read more »
Is stewardship dead?
Maybe not quite, but in the context of most professional law firms with more than just a handful of partners, it’s on life support and the priest has been called in. I honestly don’t know of any midsize or larger law firms, at least, that operate other than “to maximize the wealth of the current… Read more »