Law Firm Management

Part One of this series set forth tips for handling a crisis that will resolve in a timely manner and will not be the downfall of a firm. This month's installment addresses clients in crisis.

In the summer of 2006, Major, Lindsey & Africa, the international legal search/recruiting firm where I am a partner, sent a survey to 5622 lateral partners in 647 law firms to assess their overall satisfaction and to identify the key factors affecting satisfaction; the firm received more than 1000 responses. Women comprised approximately 17% of the original pool of targeted candidates and 15% of the respondents who identified themselves by gender. This percentage is low primarily due to the lack of women partners.

Engagement letters in the big law firm are like death, taxes, and timesheets. You can't live with them. You can't live without them. On the one hand, while many practitioners may not realize it, engagement letters are part of the attorney-client contract that defines the relationship between the parties. This article identifies the general ground rules regarding engagement letters, the bells and whistles that such letters can contain for the good of the law firm, and the problems that can arise when lawyers don't pay attention to or fail to follow to the letters.

No company, bricks-and-mortar or e-based, is immune to crisis ' so no company should be without some kind of plan to communicate in the midst of that crisis. Organizations with good plans in place will weather crises far better than those that have none ' or those whose principles believe that not communicating will insulate them in some way from the effects of the crisis.

Our last column explored the disconnect between how in-house and outside counsel view the work of the latter. The reader will recall that in a recent survey, 62% of law firms gave themselves an "A" for overall performance during the past 3 years. Only 19% of in-house counsel scored them that high. There are a few possible explanations. 1. The in-house sector radically changed its value proposition in the year or so separating the surveys. 2. Radically different…

Recent surveys telescope shifting client priorities. For example, INSIDE COUNSEL'S "18th Annual Survey of General Counsel," published in July, 2007, shows a multi-level disconnect. On the one hand, there is the predicatble synapse between in-house and outside perceptions of 68% of outside counsel believe the level of service they provide has improved over the past five years, while only 29% of in-house counsel agree. Law firms are self-delusional, according to these data, as 62% gave…

There was a time when electronic services were supposed to replace books and lower costs. They've done neither. Instead, fees continue to rise each year — well beyond the rate of inflation, say law firm librarians (licensing fees are typically covered by confidentiality agreements). Surveyed librarians expressed dissatisfaction on pricing issues especially with the big-two online providers, Reed Elsevier Plc's LexisNexis and Thomson Corp.'s Westlaw.

Just as corruption saps the entire GDP of many countries, it can destroy the profitability of a firm's overseas (or, for that matter, overall) business. My 'Confronting Corrupt Practices' article in A&FP's June 2007 edition surveyed some aspects of anticorruption training that law firms should consider.