Alan Weiss, noted management consultant, said that "… marketing is the creation of need, and selling is the providing of an alternative to meet the need. If your marketing is strong enough in professional services—in other words, you create strong brands—selling is unnecessary because the buyer already wants you. He or she is convinced that you fill the need. That’s true brand equity." (more…)
I was really impressed with flash drives, the little pencil sticks with now up to 2 gb of memory. In fact, I was so impressed that I ordered a bunch to give away to friends and clients! But … (more…)
Failure to collect fees can sink a law firm. After billing $100, some lawyers can collect only $65. Can your firm survive with a realization rate of only 65%? What enables some lawyers to collect what they bill and other lawyers unable to do so?
Collecting Your Fees: Ethically Getting Paid from Intake to Invoice will be offered by the ABA on June 21st at 10 a.m. PT.
Law firm management lessons learned from this trip:
1. Being a member of a team has challenges, but also many rewards.
2. Clients want to know that you have a team working for their benefit. The team can be no more than a secretary or paralegal or even "outsourced" components such as expert witnesses, et al., but a team nevertheless.
3. Building a team, as with any finely tuned mechanism, takes time. But, your perseverance will pay off handsomely in both economic terms as well as personal satisfaction.
4. The right team, both as to members and as to size, will always do better than a sole practitioner or "BigLaw." Evidence of this can be observed in almost any sport, from the "team" sports of basketball and football to the "solo" sports of golf, cycling and figure skating. (more…)
Kevin O’Keefe relates a story about a student who got a job right out of law school in a 150 lawyer firm merely by blogging! A new way to show one’s smarts!
Floyd Landis won the Tour deFrance in 2006. After what was perhaps the most incredible single day performance, normal drug testing samples were taken – as they always are from the winners.
Several days later, negative results of the tests were leaked to the press … and Floyd Landis has been living under a cloud of suspicion ever since.
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With the Australian class action law firm going public, and non-lawyers being allowed to invest in law firms, one must wonder what the future of the legal profession portends. (more…)
The Association of American Law Schools has approved the creation of a new Section, Balance in Legal Education, designed to improve legal education and create a better balance between law school education and law practice.
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In the “Musings of a Dinosaur,” the doctor discusses his hospital re-credentialing application and the dilemma of a sole practitioner.
He says, among other things, “‘Solo’ means ‘alone.’ No other medical professional in the office. No one. How can anyone fill out a form like that (asking for another doctor’s confirmation of competence, a sort of peer review) meaningfully? Oh, I can probably find a buddy somewhere to sign it and send it in, but this whole episode has got me thinking about several things.
“I know I am competent; that I keep up to date; that my charts are wonderful, my patients love me, and my outcomes at least average. At least I think I know this. I believe it, at any rate. But realistically, with no one else in the office (short of an actual observer coming into the office, watching me interact with patients and auditing my charts), how can I prove this?”
How can a professional prove competence? And why is it that professional organizations appear to focus on eliminating the sole practitioner or at least making it economically far more difficult to practice in the solo setting?
Are lawyers in a different boat? See Carolyn Elefant’s recent discussions concerning the plight of the sole practitioner (lawyers) and my discussion concerning The State Bar of California’s new malpractice insurance effort that will impact sole legal practitioners more than “BigLaw” practitioners.
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The New Yorker , May 28, 2007 edition, discusses the impact of our new gadgets, our new technology.
“Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle. This spiral of complexity, often called ‘feature creep,’ costs consumers time, but it also costs businesses money.”