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Accounting and Financial Planning for Law FirmsFeaturesLaw Firm AssociatesLaw Firm ManagementLaw Firm Profitability

Law Firm Profitability and Learning from the Past

By J. Mark Santiago
March 01, 2023

I learned a lot from my grandfather's Farmer's Almanac (my grandfather was a farmer in the Ohio River valley in the 1930s): wisdom, colorful language, and the proper way to prepare corn meal mush (an acquired taste but worth the effort!). One thing he taught me was a basic rule of farming: "You never eat your seed corn."

What he and farmers everywhere understood was that no matter how severe the drought, how poor the harvest or bad the winter, you always saved enough to plant in the spring. This bit of folk wisdom served him and generations of farmers everywhere well and enabled them to survive and prosper.

What, you may be asking, does a homey bit of folk wisdom have to do with law firm profitability and what can we possibly learn from it in the 21st century?

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