Features
Nell Gluckman
The top performing law firms continued to pull away from the rest of the Am Law 200 last year, according to a report released on January 23 by Wells Fargo Private Bank's Legal Specialty Group. Meanwhile certain regions, including the mid-Atlantic states, struggled to achieve even modest revenue growth.
Features
Tom Baldwin
Most firms are building pricing groups as the place to start addressing this pain. This is certainly a good starting point, but if your firm is pricing and not monitoring, you've actually got a problem.
Features
Sue C. Jacobs
The attorney-client relationship is not one that always ends well. The client is able to discharge the attorney at any time, but outstanding legal fees must be addressed. If the client either ignores the correspondence or refuses to pay the fees, the attorney may determine to commence an action seeking the legal fees. What follows is a long, unhappy, expensive experience for each party.
Steve Kovalan
Law departments are not being asked to do more with less? Instead, they are being asked to do more with more (though sometimes their budget increases are not keeping up with their new responsibilities).
Features
Tom Baldwin
Realization has hit an all-time low of 83%, plunging from 93% just a decade ago. Most firms are building pricing groups as the place to start addressing this pain. This is certainly a good starting point, but if your firm is pricing and not monitoring, you've actually got a problem.
Features
Christine Simmons
In an era when demand for legal services is softening, the country's largest firms are increasingly going to court and arbitration against their former clients to collect fees in what consultants say is the "new normal."
Features
Rebecca Cohen
Firms place a lot of weight on lateral hiring, but many of them aren't very good at it.
Features
Julie Triedman
The boomer generation — 75 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 — and a tiny cadre of over-70s Silent Generation lawyers currently make up just under half of partners at Am Law 200 firms. As partners with the greatest seniority, they constitute a majority in the equity and management ranks, and control an outsize share of client relationships. The impacts of retirement are amplified because a long surge in hiring and promotion that began when boomers entered law firms has halted since the financial crisis.
Features
Cynthia Sharp
Although a handful of law firms has hired non-lawyer sales teams, most still rely upon individual attorneys or practice groups to generate new client matters (i.e., to sell) even though the majority of them have never received business development skills training. This article describes some of the important characteristics and habits shared by attorneys who have built successful practices.
Features
James A. Durham
Law firm leadership is at a proverbial fork in the road. The people running law firms can continue to do business as usual, or they can lead their firms toward a model of business that reflects the new and still evolving client expectations and market demands.
