Law Firm Management

Given the protections from liability available in many jurisdictions, most legal employers have a good deal more flexibility than they currently exercise in handling requests for references. Yet, many cautious employers have been slow to liberalize their reference practices.

New York's Sullivan & Cromwell LLP plans to pay counsels and senior associates (fifth-year level and up) bonuses tied to the firm's financial performance.

This article examines the two main objections to outside ownership of law firms. The first is that it would permit nonlawyers to interfere with lawyers' exercise of professional judgment. The second is that the firm's duty to its shareholders would lead it to focus blindly on maximizing profits.

This commentary provides some preliminary thoughts on how equity investments in non-U.S. law firms may change how U.S. law firms do business.

WHAT DID NOT WORK - 1. Offering to handle and manage what inside counsel already have the skills to manage. 2. Relying on good results but not working on the relationship. 3. Offensive humorous comments. Conducting comprehensive research on your clients and prospects, both as individuals and on their companies is one of the single most important components to successfully closing a new engagement. Yet it is one of the major reasons in-house counsel do not retain firms. Sure,…

Today's bills are as thick as case files, and at least as detailed. Concerned over what lawyers are doing with their time and who's working on a matter ' whether to track diversity or to keep expensive but inexperienced first-year associates off the case ' clients demand exhaustive accounting from their outside counsel.

Most law firm managers understand the importance that business analysis plays in steering a firm toward success. However, as with so many things in life, a little bit of analysis can be a dangerous thing. Management reporting processes typically collect, organize, and ultimately combine data sets from different practice areas, offices, industries, etc. Superficial reports compare aggregate characteristics (e.g., top-line results) without identifying the varying components contained within the data sets and normalizing for these variables. This can lead those who examine such reports to draw misleading or even totally wrong conclusions.

Aside from a few sensational disbarments and criminal prosecutions for overbilling, most evidence of billing irregularities is anecdotal. In order to provide a more precise assessment of the scope of the abuse of time-based billing by attorneys, I conducted nationwide surveys of outside counsel in 1991, 1995, and 2007. The large majority of respondents to all three surveys ' 82% in the most recent survey ' indicated that time-based billing was their dominant method of billing.