Law Firm Management

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."

This article discusses the importance of accounting for digital assets in an estate plan, provides practical considerations for handling their disposition after death, and describes the current state of the law for the handling of digital assets after death.

Firms place a lot of weight on lateral hiring, but many of them aren't very good at it.

No one can deny that cyberattacks are the new norm. Such risks will increasingly challenge our ability to operate our businesses. In the world of cybercrime, everyone — from individuals to nation-states — is a target. However, some targets are more alluring than others.

In the first public data security class action complaint against a U.S. law firm, Chicago-based Johnson & Bell was named in a lawsuit that says the firm failed to protect confidential client information.

The issues that I confronted a dozen years ago when I became a CMO for the first time are very much the same issues that my CMO brothers and sisters face today. Irrespective of whether you've had decades of experience or not, the job is tough. Well, the job is relatively easy, but ensuring that your team members get all the credit and your firm hits its success metrics, while maintaining your visibility and growing your perceived value, remains very much a challenge to even the most seasoned professionals.

Lawyers who exhibit "executive presence" are more likely to make partner, to gain clients' trust and loyalty, and to receive referrals from others. Executive presence is easy to spot, but difficult to define. A lucky few are born with it, but, in most cases, it is learned. This article discusses what executive presence is and how you can learn it.

For firms or teams with historically non-collaborative cultures (and that describes 99.9% of them), this "whole collaboration thing" has become a huge annoyance, an attempted interference with "how we've always practiced law." For these folks, the challenge is thorny: Convince everyone that their culture is changing with the times while continuing to conduct business as usual. When they fail, there is often a huge — and demoralizing — gap between the cup and the lip.