Make More Rain : disaster recovery, productivity

Management ABCs: The Hawthorne Effect

Admin — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 07:00:10 GMT

A method of increasing performance is based on the Hawthorne Effect. Although several of the experiments have been downplayed by social psychologists, the effect that attention has to performance is as true today as it was when recorded at the Hawthorne Plant in the 1920's.

Basically, when attention is given to the performance of an employee, the employee's performance increases. Simply put, measurement improves performance. If you set goals for your timekeepers and don't measure them against the goals, the incentive to succeed is left to trusting individuals to meet their goals.

How well suited is your firm for a loss of a client such as Bear Stearns (or, perhaps, Lehman Brothers)? Gerry Riskin wrote in January to make your firm recession-proof. Some of the factors listed in recession-proofing the firm:

Ramp up frequency of financial reporting (monitor the firm's key finanacial metrics);
Make hard decisions humanely and fast (monitor under-performing timekeepers);
Manage internal expectations (monitor expectations to keep staff motivated and avoid "business as usual");

Each of the above requires attention. Trust alone that the individual timekeepers will respond to economic crises is a recipe for disaster. A better management model is the Hawthorne Effect. Everyone needs to be accountable for results. Let the effect of attention to performance help the firm during difficult times.

The effect of measuring performance brings other benefits. Beyond improving results, keeping attention on profit drivers has the added benefit of opening opportunities - even in bad economic times. As Riskin notes, [w]hile strategy may be more challenging during recessions, if you grasp the nettle, opportunities will arise to enhance your client mix and your talent base.

We have begun taking submissions towards the 2008 Law Firm Economic Survey. If your firm is interested in participating or if you would like more information, please contact Brian by clicking here.

Planning Helps Law Firms Weather A Bad Economy

Admin — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Although the housing market has grabbed headlines recently as the credit issues continue to unravel, the indicators have been present for several years. The businesses who planned for this are now in a better position to adjust and prosper while other businesses close their doors.

Law firms aren't insulated to market downturns. The New York firm Thacher Proffitt & Wood "informed around 50 associates that their futures at the firm were uncertain because of the collapse of the market for mortgage-backed securities, an area where the firm had had a leading practice." New York Lawyer, 11/28/2007. CitiBank and Hildebrandt released a Client Advisory predicting the "perfect storm" of indicators hurting the legal industry.

It doesn't have to be this way. The firm can retain talent even when the marketplace shifts by planning not just for economic good times but for bad times as well. How?

Retain Earnings
Rather than distribute every dollar of profit, project into the future and if indicators suggest that there may be a drop in business in a particular practice area, allocate additional funds to maintain your marketing budget and talent retention.

Prepare for the upswing
Have associates hit the road with partners to build and maintain relationships in the industry. If your client survives the poor economy it will come back stronger. Cement those relationships while mentoring associates so that when the market comes back, your firm has already done the legwork to expand the business.

Transfer Knowledge
Forms are gold, especially in document-driven industries making up transactional practices. Have associates review all firm forms against available case law and take the opportunity to build a solid foundation of accurate and up-to-date forms. Offer an incentive to create "products" representing reproducible work.

Help with the overflow
Just because one industry is hurting that doesn’t mean other areas of the firm aren’t thriving. Give associates an opportunity to absorb work from the more active areas of law. In fact, a firm recently did this when Dechert, LLP, initially layed off 13 associates, then changed its mind and re-assigned them to other practice areas.

Some associates won't have the sufficient motivation to change. That is fine. Keep the ones who do.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

When An Attorney Doesn't Fit The Firm

Admin — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:00:00 GMT

A recent article in the New York Lawyer entitled "Getting Fired" (requires free registration to view content) addresses a task that all managers would prefer not to have as part of their responsibilities: that of releasing employees.

The article is geared to the attorney as releasee, helping them not miss the subtle ways they are "shown the horizon".

If a conversation starts: “You seem to be distracted lately, and we are concerned that maybe this isn’t the right fit for you anymore.” - you might be getting fired.

If a conversation starts: “We think maybe you would be happier somewhere else. Let’s reassess where you are in six months. Hopefully, by then you will have found the right opportunity.” - you might be getting fired.

Suggestions when hearing words like the above? Start job hunting. In the second example, the firm is clearly giving the attorney a 6 month notice to find other employment. It isn't likely that the firm is going to reassess the attorney's performance in 6 months. More likely they will have had a replacement for 2 months and will be ready for the performance-challenged attorney to go.

Although geared to those near the door, it is also a reminder to managers of their responsibility to the firm. No one likes to fire someone, but without that part of the employment cycle, those who drag down the margin won't change. This helps neither the firm nor the employee. Not fitting into your firm culture doesn't mean the attorney is not a quality attorney. It means the attorney is not a good fit for your firm.

As the article noted, "[t]here is another . . .firm out there just waiting to snap you up! They love laterals!"

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and

services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Business-Continuity Planning for Law Firms

Admin — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 08:00:12 GMT

Planning is an oft-referenced theme on this blog. Plan for increasing wealth, plan for economic down cycles, plan for disasters. What about during interruptions such as the recent blackberry outage?

There are many things that can cause business interruptions. Planning for them will mitigate the consequences those interruptions have on your firm's operations. Not planning for them will cost you money.

What are some things you can do to prepare? There are companies that make a living selling plans to businesses, but basic guidelines include:

Business Impact Analysis: Determine the effect an outage would have on the firm's most crucial systems and processes. More or less identifying the important processes subject to interruption and how that interruption will affect business. In a law firm, this includes (but is not limited to) telephone systems, computers, staff, software systems.
Plan what you will do if business interruption takes place: This, of course, is the hard part. Planning means taking the time to think of ways around the interruption - and gain approval for the procedure. For example, if your office is unavailable, where are critical staff? They need to have a place to meet to put in effect the plan. Remote communication is easier now than it's ever been. Cell phones help but what about email? If your email servers go down, you will need a backup plan to send and receive communications. There are services such as Mimecast Unified Email Messaging that can provide a seamless transition that clients won't notice - making it appear as if there were no interruption at all - so long as you have access to high speed internet or have a data-enabled mobile device. In the case of an interruption of internet access, there needs to be a secondary plan to know where your people are.
Always have good, redundant, and off-site backups available: All the benefits of technology are in vain in a disaster situation if you have no backups. It has been reported that 25% to 30% of backups don't save properly. When was the last time your office checked to make sure the backups were working? Services such as LexisNexis Data Backup and Protection Services provide continuous automatic off-site storage of your data.
Run a drill or two to test the processes: It is paradoxical to interrupt the business day to test processes geared to mitigate interruptions in the business day. But it has to be done. Otherwise you may not find the flaws in the plan until you put the plan in action - not the time you want to find out that you left out an important facet.
Review the plan annually: Don't just dust off the Y2K disaster readiness plan and change the cover page. Times change, technologies change, and needs change. Make sure you are up to date on all your systems and their effect on your business.

A sample business continuity and disaster preparedness plan, courtesy of ready.gov, can be downloaded by clicking here.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Marketing Advice for Lawyers During Economic Down Cycles

Admin — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 08:00:00 GMT

I had a chance to catch up with John Remsen, Jr. last week and asked him about the economic outlook for law firms in 2008. Like many, he believes we are in the midst of an economic down cycle that will affect how law firms perform in 2008.

In spite of the downturn, Remsen says that certain practices like bankruptcy, litigation and employment will do quite well. Other areas won’t be so lucky. He explained that law firms that are heavily dependent on cyclical industries like real estate should be prepared to ride the waves of the economic cycle. For example, a firm that does lots of commercial real estate transaction work can position itself as “workout specialists” during the down cycle.

Some advice from Remsen during a slowing economy:

Partners need to push work down to associates so they free up time for marketing and business development. Most compensation systems tend to reward the opposite behavior.
With this time, they should go visit top clients to thank them for their business, and learn about their issues and concerns.
Invite clients into the firm to discuss industry trends and opportunities.
Resist the temptation to cut marketing expenses. Most of your competitors are cutting back so you have a chance to stand out and solidify your position as the economy improves.
Make sure that marketing and business development activities sustain themselves consistently, in both good times and bad.

At the end of the day it is about relationships, says Remsen. He advises firms to take advantage of the down cycle to invest in relationships. In so doing, you position your firm to take off as the economy improves….as it eventually will.

John Remsen, Jr. is the founder of The Remsen Group, which in partnership with LexisNexis and others host the Managing Partner Forum. John has recently co-authored a book, The Little Black Book on Law Firm Marketing that can be purchased by clicking here.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Measuring Law Firm Profitability

Admin — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 08:00:00 GMT

One way to get an idea of your firm's financial health is to report on the firm's profitability. There are many ways to calculate profitability depending on what you are looking to track. In this example, we are taking into consideration the value of fee earners against their cost. The value of an attorney, for the purposes of this post, is the billed rate per hour.

You determine attorney cost per hour by taking the salary of the attorney, the cost of their dedicated resource(s), the cost of their work space, the cost of equipment used, and other incidental costs (not billable to the client) incurred by the fee earner. This can be sticky for some firms where principals may not be agreeable to apportionment of cost. In cases like this or where the firm is more evenly apportioned in staff and office use, a less accurate but easier calculation would be to add up all the general ledger cost accounts (excluding fee earners' payroll), divide by the number of fee earners, then add salary. It is better to do the work and determine actual cost.

Once arriving at a cost per fee earner, reduce to a cost per hour (by dividing cost per fee earner by worked hours billed per year) and then you can use this to subtract from the attorney's billed rate to get the profitability rate. This is excellent indicator of the value of your billable rates and by extension the attorneys charging these rates.

With profitability reports like the one above that is part of Juris' Active Information product, you can determine how much value (in terms of dollars) you are getting for every billable hour worked by the fee earner. You can set margin per fee earner and track the profitability rate against the target margin as well. Efficiency is an important key to higher profits. A report such as this in a historical context helps you track efficiency of the fee earner.

To take it one step further: you can use, for analysis purposes, the collected rate to compare to the cost per attorney. You shouldn't make this analysis until the invoice has been zeroed out (either by payment or adjustment), so this is not really a good indicator of current profitability. But it can be helpful in a profitability analysis of a given client or fee earner. Again, tools like Juris' Active Information can track collected rate and thus make calculating all the formulas above automatic.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Management Priorities for Managing Partners

Admin — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Tom Collins sent the following comments regarding managing priorities:

Managing partners appear to have their priorities right when it comes to the importance of improving practice management for better financial performance. Across the board by size and by per-partner income performance, midsize law firms place expense management at the bottom of their priorities. The emphasis appears to be on improved business intelligence followed by efficiency improvements. This is how managing partners responding to the current Law Firm Economic Survey from LexisNexis reported their practice management priorities—listed from the most important to the least important:

Real-time information for fee earners
Reporting systems
Budgeting & forecasting
Benchmarking-competitive intelligence
Management resources & education
Case management
Paperless office
Expense management

There was little difference in the order of priorities across firm size or by financial performance except that the poorest performing law firms placed budgeting and forecasting as their top priority and ranked management resources & education next to last in importance. Could their lack of emphasis on “management” explain why that 25 percent earned only one-fifth of the per-partner income of the top performing firms? You bet!

The 80+ -page latest edition of The Law Firm Economic Survey identifies ten important findings that every law firm leader needs to consider in their planning. The Law Firm Economic Survey has been provided to participating firms without charge and is available to others for $495.00. Additional copies for the same firm are available for $50.00 each. To order, contact the Juris National Sales Center at 877/377-3740.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Going Concern Value of a Law Firm

Admin — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 08:10:00 GMT

The previous host for morepartnerincome, Tom Collins, has strong feelings about the importance of recognizing the monetary value of law firm ownership. He believes that incoming partners should purchase their share of ownership and that retiring partners or their estate should be fairly compensated for the value of the partner’s shares. I asked him for a post on the subject and here it is:

For the purpose of this post, I put aside consideration for any regulations, laws or rules of professional conduct that restrict the sale or purchase of a law firm. The issue addressed here is the value of the law firm as a going concern.

This is a different number than the value of the business in the eyes of a purchaser with a strategic objective. For example, another law firm that wants to establish a presence in your geographic area may be willing to pay a greater price than the going concern value. At a minimum, they would be willing to add to the going concern value the investment and lost opportunity cost of starting their own branch.

The going concern value is the worth of the business operated in its current fashion following its current business strategy. In academic terms, it is the present value of its future cash flows. From a practical standpoint, a common approach is to value the business at five times its estimated pretax profit less any interest bearing debt. There are some things that would turn most buyers off without an appropriate discount. One of those things is any unfunded obligation such as that many firms have in place for retiring partners. Where they exist, a prudent buyer would deduct the cost of funding those obligations.

The problem in applying any of this to a law firm is that law firm partners do not separate salaries (earned income) from investment income related to their role as owners. Those two components must be separated to compute the going concern value. The portion of compensation that represents a competitive salary is a business operating cost. The value of the law firm as a going concern is derived from the law firm’s ability to pay its partners a return on their risk and investment as owners of the business. If a law firm is not expected to produce more than a competitive salary for its partners, then it has no value as a going concern.

Why is any of this important? Law firms are sustainable as an institution only if they are adequately funded. Yet, the pressure in most midrange law firms is to distribute all available funds to partners. That reluctance to leave anything on the table runs counter to the need for the law firm to be adequately funded for growth and to safely navigate the normal ups and downs of any business. Their reluctance to reinvest earnings in the business is unlikely to change until law firms provide a way for those partners to extract their share of the value of the law firm upon leaving the firm. They deserve not only a return of their investment capital but their share of the increase in the value of the firm during their tenure as an owner. Most midrange law firms also do not require incoming partners to invest adequately for their share of ownership. Law firms typically have no sense of what incoming partners should be required to invest for their share based on the value of ownership. The firm has no way to demonstrate to that new partner that making that investment is a sound one. At the other end of the career timetable, firms struggle with the treatment of departing or retiring partners. These types of problems are routinely solved in other closely held businesses. Owners agree to a valuation method and that method is used to admit new owners and to buy out selling owners.

There are several approaches a law firm could take to separate the salary and investment component. One method is to arbitrarily set the salary component of partners at some multiple of associate salaries and treat everything else as investment income. Another is to actually set salary levels individually. For example, use a variation of the lockstep method to set the salary level of the firm’s partners. Earnings in excess of that or short falls in earnings would be treated as investment income and losses to be distributed in proportion to ownership. All of the above still results in inaccuracies. Perhaps the simplest and most workable approach is to make the assumption that the law firm is being operated soundly and that 80 percent of fee revenues goes toward paying all operating cost and salaries including the salary component of the partners or owners. The remaining 20 percent of revenues represents investment income, income earned on the risk and investment of the owners. Thus, for the purpose of entering or exiting partners, the going concern value of the business will be considered one times the annual fee revenue (5 times 20%) less any interest bearing debt and less the computed present value of any unfunded liability.

For an incoming new partner, I would suggest that the firm use the current estimated annualized fee revenue for the firm when making the partnership offer. For a retiring or exiting partner, the number should be based on an average. The value might be based on the fee revenue of the immediate prior fiscal year not to exceed 120 percent or be less than 80 percent of the average fee revenue for the immediate prior three years. The 120 percent and 80 percent rule would provide some protection against a one-time fee revenue spike or dip.

The kicker, of course, is that if the law firm isn’t being operated soundly, incoming partners will be unwilling to make the investment and exiting partners will surely leave to go elsewhere.

There is no perfect approach, but that has not stopped the rest of the business world from solving the same sticky issues.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Managing Partners' Little Black Book on Marketing

Admin — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Paula Black knows graphic design. John Remsen, Jr. knows marketing. The author of The Little Black Book on Law Firm Branding and Positioning has teamed up with Remsen to create The Little Black Book on Law Firm Marketing and Business Development.

The layout of the book has the trademark of a graphic artist - plenty of variation of font, paper type and thickness. This is no dry business book!

The content is, of course, what matters. The book takes a mixture of survey findings, anecdotes from several managing partners representing mid-sized firms, and a simple formula for marketing success:

Build a plan;
invest in the plan;
implement the plan;
measure the results.

John Remsen founded The Remsen Group in 1997 to help bring effective and cost-efficient marketing and business development programs to commercial law firms of all types and sizes. The Remsen Group provides services ranging from developing firm-wide marketing plans to helping firms plan firm retreats. The Remsen Group also organizes and presents the managing partner forum.

For more information or to purchase the book, click here.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Whatever Happen to the Paperless Law Office?

Admin — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 17:41:00 GMT

I would be remiss if I didn’t add my drum beat to Dennis Kennedy's post Lawyers Continue to Move Toward the “Papermore” office. Dennis notes the following comment from the ABA: “According to the 2006 Legal Technology Survey Report, 61% of attorneys save email related to a case or client matter by printing out a hard copy."

When you start digging into it, you will find law firms keep paper copies of bills even when their accounting system automatically archives those bills electronically. States mandate the retention of paper copies of trust ledgers. Not only do most law firms keep documents in their original paper form, some actually take the time to convert electronic documents into paper for “retention” purposes.

This fetish for paper runs against technology and business trends. It places law firms and clients at an unnecessary risk. Paper was yesterday’s precedent, but that is changing. It is not the most efficient mode of communication, and it is no longer the most secure method of retaining information. As I noted in a prior post discussing the lessons learned by law firms in Katrina’s eye and in the post about the fire that destroyed 170,000 files, you cannot protect paper! You can replace office space, equipment, phones, etc., but without your “client and case stuff,” you are out of business.

The only way to protect the contents of paper is to convert it to electronic digits and images. Once you have done that, you have the ability to apply the same safeguards available to you to secure your computer records.

In his post, Dennis credited Ross Kodner for championing the cause of the "Paper LESS" for years. There has been progress. Unfortunately, rather than becoming less dependent on insecure paper, many appear to be going in the opposite direction, converting electronic content into paper document.

Old ways die hard!

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income, go to www.Juris.com.

Fire Destroys 170,000 Law Firm Files

Admin — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 17:31:44 GMT

On July 26, 2006, the Grapevine section of the United Kingdom-based online publication The Lawyer.com reported on UK firms desperately trying to come to terms with the loss of 170,000 files destroyed in a massive east London warehouse fire. The publication noted that in the aftermath of the fire, one firm has new plans to convert all paper documents to electronic records.

The warehouse fire is another reminder. It could happen to you!

As morepartnerincome has previously noted, electronic scanning is the only way to realistically protect the contents of paper documents from destruction in a disaster. As a bonus, you gain all the other advantages of digitized information and images.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income, go to www.Juris.com.

Law Firm Business Interruption

Admin — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 15:17:17 GMT

Dennis Kennedy wants his electricity back. It went missing a week ago in St. Louis after freak thunderstorms. The Greatest American Lawyer loses data when lighting strikes and Evan Schaeffer’s natural gas generator kicks on. The Juris team helps St. Louis clients recover from the extended St. Louis power loss.

All this is another reminder that it can happen to you. Are your prepared? Business interruptions and disasters can happen at any time. Think you are safe? What if a water pipe breaks over the weekend? What about a fire? The water, heat, and smoke damage from even a small fire can shut down an office and put data and paper files at risk.

I noted in a prior post that one of the reasons so few firms have a disaster plan is that we tend to make them too complicated. A simple plan is workable and far better than none.

1. The first priority is personal safety—always protect lives first. Establish evacuation and reassemble procedures. Make sure everyone understands that no one is to risk or endanger their lives or the lives of others for paper, media, or any other material or firm property.
2. Second, maintain current employee contact information (including an alternate contact outside of the area for use as an intermediary) and get the contact information in the right hands and in various forms, including a printed document. Establish calling "trees" so that by contacting a few people, information can be disseminated quickly to everyone.
3. The next priority is to protect the survivability of the firm by making sure that critical information is safe before the occurrence of a disaster. Online backup services are now economically available. They are always current, always secure, and are available even if you are operating from a different location.

The above three steps are the essentials and, if implemented, will materially increase the ability of the firm to survive in a crisis. For more information on business interruption planning, use the morepartnerincome search feature and search for “disaster” or select the “Disaster Recovery” folder.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income, go to www.Juris.com.

Partner Income Will Depend on Women Lawyers

Admin — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 18:37:00 GMT

Following my post The Work/Life Balance Issue Continues to Damage the Legal Profession, Denise Howell of Bag and Baggage reminded me that accommodations extended to those with child care responsibilities should not be limited to just mothers:

“I know plenty of two-income families who have decided to have the father assume primary child care responsibilities due to pure economics -- mom makes more. There could be a host of other reasons (dad gets primary custody in divorce proceedings, etc.) why this discussion cuts across the genders. I think it would be shortsighted (and possibly actionable) for a firm to treat the issue otherwise.”

I agree with Denise that any solution should include fathers who assume the primary child care responsibilities. However, from the perspective of a business enterprise, the main issue is how to provide an environment that makes a legal career friendlier for women attorneys who now represent at least 50 percent of legal graduates entering the workforce.

With women accounting for 50% of the new lawyers, the primary child care issue is clearly important and getting more important so it is time to invest in exploring new ideas and investigating best practices. Yesterday I ordered the book by Lauren Stiller Rikleen that addresses the issues of Women legal professionals. Her book is titled Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women’s Success in the Law.

Partner incomes will increasingly depend on the talent of women in your firm. Thus for more partner income it is time to figure out not only how to attract women associates but how to hold on to those women as career members of the firm.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income, go to www.Juris.com.

Test the Effectiveness of Your Law Firm Brand

Admin — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 17:26:21 GMT

I mentioned in a prior post that “branding” seemed to be on everyone’s lips at the June Los Angeles Law Firm Business Forum organized by ALM. One of the stronger educational segments was titled “Know Thyself: Marketing and Brand Strategies.”

Each of the four faculty members responsible for the session emphasized the necessity of a consensus among law firm partners as the starting point for developing a branding strategy.

Branding is about communicating a clear image of who you are. The typical, unbranded law firm has multiple personalities. Different partners have a different image of where the firm is and where it should go. It is this dysfunction that branding programs attempt to cure. Branding has become increasingly important as firms turned to institutional marketing as a replacement for ineffective and inconsistent attorney rainmaking.

Faculty member Merry Neithlich is a partner with Extreme Marketing. She provided attendees with a simple test to assess a firm’s brand distinction. To grade yourself, score 3 points for ‘yes’, 2 points for ‘I don’t know’ and 1 point for ‘no’.

1. My firm has discovered what differentiates us from others in our field of practice.
2. My firm’s distinction is recognized by all of our clients.
3. My firm’s distinction has value to our clients and prospects.
4. All partners, associates, and staff at the firm are aware of our distinction.
5. My firm’s distinction is clearly communicated to prospects in conversations, new business proposals, etc.
6. My firm’s distinction is clearly communicated in our marketing materials.
7. My firm’s distinction is scripted and used consistently.
8. We routinely survey client service delivery preferences to gauge and maintain our brand’s relevance.
9. My firm’s pricing strategy is based on our clients’ perception of our value.
10.My firm’s brand of lawyering receives adequate marketing support.

According to Neithlich, your branding grade based on this test is as follows:

A: 24-30 points—You are on the right track.

B: 15-23 points—Your distinction is still a little blurry.

C: 9-15 points—You are average, but that translates to “commodity”.

Other members of the faculty for this Branding session included Allan Anderson with Ropers Majeski, Alison Larson with Schopf & Weiss and Taedra Kogan with Thompson FindLaw.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income, go to www.Juris.com.

The Work/Life Balance Issue Continues to Damage the Legal Profession

Admin — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 17:39:04 GMT

Denise Howell’s firing by Reed Smith was a shot heard around the legal blog world. See Dennis Kennedy’s post or read Howell’s post breaking the firing news. As Dennis points out, none of us knows why Reed Smith made what appears to be such a dumb decision. The reaction to the firing illustrates that much of the balanced life controversy in law firms is really “code” for the new mother issue as illustrated by Carolyn Elefant’s comments: “If you're a talented woman planning on having kids, why in the world would you EVER choose to work there?”

We need to discuss the new mother issues as the “new mother issues” and not under the politically correct cover of “the balanced life issue.” By cloaking the discussion under the wider net of the work/life balance moniker, we are being asked to condemn law firm work practices in total. If we would deal with child raising issues in an up-front way, more progress toward a woman-friendlier profession would occur. For the future of the profession, progress dealing with those issues must be made!

According to a study done by the American Bar Association in 2001, some 44 women held general counsel or chief counsel positions at Fortune 500 companies, 71 percent of women lawyers are in private practice, a majority of students entering law schools are female, about 18 percent of U.S. federal district and appellate judges are women, and two women have sat on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Women now equal or outnumber male law students. The profession can ill afford to make the pursuit of a private practice career unusually difficult for half of the lawyer population.

What is the answer? I do not have it, but history may hold a clue. Lawyers have gone to war and returned to become prominent members of their pre-war law firms. What law firms did and are doing for returning soldiers, they can and should do for returning mothers. Likewise, law firms provide flexibility to guard members to discharge their obligations; they can and should do the same for new mothers. The absences and special flexibility required for both extend over only a limited number of years. Those few years are insignificant in terms of one’s potential lifetime career contributions to a law firm. Another vexing issue to be resolved is health insurance. I will leave that to the experts.

But there is another side to this. Fair or unfair, there is a price to be paid by anyone returning after an extended absence or period of required special consideration and flexibility. While they may have the individual talent and will to catch up, they can’t initially return at the same place in line as their prior peers. That applies regardless of gender.

As it is at present, the “in” thing to do in media and among consultants, conference faculty, etc., is to portray the life of the attorney as an abandonment of family, friends, fun, and civic and religious obligations. At the same time, we note and report the importance that all those facets of life have played for the successful professional in relationship building and rainmaking.

The success of any “service” business or profession is measured by its service to others. Client interest comes before self-interest. That is why we call it a “service”. The legal profession recognizes the service aspect in spades, charging you with the professional obligation to honor, at your own expense if necessary, the paramount interest of the client.

Successful service professionals, business executives, doctors, and investment bankers all find a way to have family, friends, and fun while also participating in civic and religious affairs. Lawyering is no different from any of the above—lawyers do not carry a greater burden. Let’s stop pretending that they do.

Let’s turn this conversation around. On the one hand, let’s deal with the child raising years of lawyer-mothers; and on the other hand, let’s start celebrating the benefits of lawyering, including the satisfaction of service to others—of upholding “truth, justice and the American Way!”

PS: My above comments by no means excuse law firms of bad management, dumb decisions, poor internal communication, or a failure to value and develop its human capital. There are bad businesses as well as great businesses in every category. The business of law is no different.

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