Category: Management
One pundit commented today that our 401 K‘s have now become 101 K‘s!
With close to 400,000 lawyers (Baby Boomers) slated to retire in the next 10 years, the legal profession will be rocked! How, however, no one is yet commenting.
With the current financial collapse, and investment values plummeting by 50% in many cases, we may not see so many retirees, after all. Even lawyers may have to work longer years than they anticipated. We may have one more generation than contemplated in the work place. Will we see even more challenges in an effort to understand why each generation reacts differently to the same stimuli? How will we reconcile the differing values between, and now among, generations? As Rodney King once said, "Can we all get along?"
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Wall Street isn’t the only institution falling down around us. A law firm, not the first, that was first opened 118 years ago in 1890, collapsed in a heap of depressed lawyers, staff and clients, not to mention vendors. Many people were significantly impacted by the dissolution of this 600+ lawyer firm.
How could a banking institution, built over decades, collapse in hours? How could a law firm of such magnitude collapse in a matter of weeks? For the law firm, there are a number of reasons provided in the public airwaves, each of which carries a significant lesson about The Business of Law®.
Here are a few of the lessons that popped out for me:
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During an economic crisis, yes, some call it a depression, Heather Milligan has some cogent ideas to market your practice:
- What are your clients’ key industry pubs reporting on today? Understand how the financial markets impact their companies.
- If your clients/referral sources are at risk, call and see how you can be of service to THEM. Not just their companies, but THEM. If their company is on the brink of collapse or bankruptcy, their first concerns will be about putting food on their table, not who is handling the filings.
- Face time. Face time. Face time. You need to be, and stay, top-of-mind with your key contacts.
- For we marketers, time to start thinking about clearing our budgets of “unnecessary” items. Now might not be the best time to kick-off a rebranding campaign or overhaul the website. I’m not going to ask for a high-capacity color laser printer right now. End-of-year charitable contributions/tables-of-ten will soon be reaching your desks. How are you going to evaluate them?
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The days of multi-million dollar profits per partner and rapidly rising triple-digit associate salaries were never real for most law firms, especially when considered in light of the demographic of law – more than 70% are in small law firms. But, now firms big and small, conservative and highly leveraged, all feel the business pressure from the economic downturn.
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On September 26th, ACC is planning a live webcast seminar to introduce its "value revolution," designed to teach about lowering large law firm fees to corporate clients.
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I had the pleasure of talking with Paul Williams of Major, Lindsey & Africa. Paul focuses his energies on placing lawyers as General Counsel of major corporations. From his perspective, he suggests that General Counsel today receive more respect. Of course, GCs today have a much larger budget for legal fees than ever before. And many GCs come from the ranks of major law firms. Coming from the elite law firms and handling such large sums of money, one would expect private lawyers to give the corporate lawyers more respect. Also, in many cases, GCs are increasing the size of their legal departments as one way to control legal costs … they can “purchase” the legal talent at wholesale (as an employee of the legal department) rather than retail (law firm associate or partner).
Following are some of my thoughts and conclusions drawn from my conversation with Paul. Not wanting to attribute words or ideas to Paul that he may not have intended, I will accept responsibility for the following conclusions that I reached from our conversation:
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In many states, the practical skills concerning “The Business of Law”® that lawyers most need to keep their practices profitable and problem free – training in effective client service and law practice management techniques – either are not covered or actively eliminated as legitimate MCLE credits. They also happen to be skills that no law school faculty offers either. In fact, in conversations I’ve had with educators, their view of law as a profession means that any such programs about effective client communication are trade-oriented and therefore inappropriate for law schools. The result was described several years ago in The Wall Street Journal by the publisher of the New York Law School Law Review, who observed that law school students are “reading about the law rather than engaging in it,” with the result that “when they graduate, young lawyers rarely know how to interview clients, advocate for their positions, negotiate a settlement or perform any number of other tasks that lawyers do every day.”
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Managing and accounting for client funds held in trust is a personal responsibility of the lawyer. Although there are a number of good computer software programs to assist with trust accounting, including QuickBooks by Intuit, the lawyer who receives clients’ trust funds bears all the responsibility of accounting for every penny. In an accounting sense, these funds are a liability of the law practice to the client, must be kept in an entirely separate account, and cannot be commingled with any other law firm funds. Recent challenges to the country’s banking system raise the specter of bank failures, with wide impact on the American public. Lawyers, for example are the subject of recent inquiries because of their IOLTA trust accounts.
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A thought from Alan Weiss, consultant: “If Hollywood’s collective genius can create a $100 million film which flops at the box office, I don’t see reason to exactly beat yourself up if you choose a lousy vacation spot, cook a poor meal, or scratch the side of the car. Stuff happens. Get on with your life, and don’t let a momentary poor judgment create a lifelong depression.”
And in your law practice, the fact that you haven’t paid sufficient attention to “The Business of Law”® doesn’t’ mean you shouldn’t/can’t start now. Today is Labor Day, hopefully a day of rest for you … start tomorrow to work “on your business,” not just “in your business.” And build something of value (otherwise known as goodwill) that can be passed on to your family, your estate, when you’re ready to retire. You don’t have to just close the doors and walk away.
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In response to my last post, the following comment was forwarded to me:
Q: Isn’t gaming what they teach in law school, essentially? Probing for weaknesses and exploiting them ruthlessly when found? It seems that with the adversarial legal system, gaming is built right into the DNA of the experience. I agree they are being poor ethical exemplars by gaming the rankings but I’m not sure it’s entirely inconsistent with the legal system.
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