There are a couple of well-known phenomena about legal careers that, when juxtaposed, might give us better insight into how lawyers enter the profession. The first is the common assumption that a law degree is far easier postgraduate degree to obtain than, say, a medical degree or Ph.D. Would-be doctors spend four years in medical… Read more »
Posts By:
The culture-driven law firm
The era of the free-agent lawyer, and the law firm lateral hiring frenzy that it spawned, is drawing to a close. The rise of the culture-driven law firm is at hand. It’s going to take me a while to explain how I got here. I’ll try to do this in two parts. 1. Followership in… Read more »
Major-league recruitment
My new column at SLAW is up. It’s titled “A Major-League Approach to New Lawyer Recruitment.” You should go read the article there, because I guarantee you’ll find tons of other great stuff at SLAW, which you already know if you’re a regular reader, and if you’re not already a regular SLAW reader, why aren’t… Read more »
There’s no such thing as work/life balance
There are a lot of reasons to dislike the term “work/life balance.” It’s grammatically absurd, for one thing, implying that work and life are two equal sides of a coin, which is a far more disturbing concept than any 2,500-hour billable target: work is part of life, not its opposite number. “Work/life balance” has also… Read more »
The perils of client interviews
Via Larry Bodine comes this Legal Intelligencer article about law firm Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, which has hired a 30-year veteran journalist to be a full-time client interviewer, asking clients about their needs, perspectives and complaints about the firm’s services. It’s a good, innovative idea, not least because it involves a tactic that too… Read more »
Client-based lawyer ratings
I haven’t written before now about Avvo, the online lawyer rating system that generated so much controversy when it was first launched last year. Most of what you need to know about the site can be found in this collection of articles at Legal Blog Watch, but in a nutshell: Avvo provides a numerical rating… Read more »
Professionalism revived
If you’re interested, here’s a version of the remarks I delivered this morning at the Chief Justice’s Colloquium on Professionalism here in Ottawa. Many thanks again to the organizers for inviting me to speak! ========= When we talk about professionalism, we can start getting bogged down, because it’s a word that means a lot of… Read more »
Law firm success metrics
How successful is your law firm? A question that broad is bound to invite myriad answers, depending on when and to whom you pose it. The traditional terms by which lawyers have described their firms’ success have been financial, most recently through Profits Per Partner (PPP) and then, after non-equity partners were introduced into the… Read more »
Must-see CLE
If you’re a resident of or visiting the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor over the next few weeks, you should seriously think about attending any or all of three really interesting and important legal conferences taking place in that time. The only real downside for potential delegates is that you’ll have to sit through me speaking at all… Read more »
Preparing for the storm
The “About” entry in the column over on the right there states my belief that the practice of law is heading into “uncharted territory.” If you’re skeptical about that, or if you’re unconvinced of the reality of imminent upheaval in this profession, here are two items you might want to look at. The first is… Read more »