Law Firm Management

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.

Before beginning any new venture, family and friends frequently caution that 'starting something new is never easy.' This phrase is particularly true for law school graduates seeking to embark on the next phase of their careers. While some are transitioning out of one industry and into the legal field, others are entering the work force for the very first time. Understanding this phenomenon, many firms have developed Orientation/Integration programs to ease the transition from law student to practicing attorney.

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…