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Category Archives: Management
Trust and the marketing department
Timothy Corcoran’s excellent and essential new blog tracks and expands upon a provocative article at the AmLaw Daily called “How essential is a CMO?” As many large firms scale back their marketing spending or lose their Chief Marketing Officers, Tim finds both lawyers and marketers can share some blame. I was especially drawn to this [...]
Also posted in Marketing 3 Comments
Get ready for the process era
You know the old expression, “Life’s not a destination, it’s a journey”? I have to say, it’s never worked for me. I’m all about the destination — the journey is the time-consuming necessity between Point A and Point B that I’d dispense with if I could. I don’t have much interest in the scenic route [...]
Posted in Management 4 Comments
Rightsizing
The massive grocery superstore in my neighbourhood has something like 17 checkouts. Great, you might think — 17 lines, no waiting. But I do wait, often, behind two or three people usually, and it’s not because the store is bulging with shoppers at any given time. It’s because at least some of those checkouts are [...]
Posted in Management 6 Comments
Staff cuts and short-term thinking
That sound you hear is the rapidly accelerating crash of dominoes. The mainstream legal media is tracking, body blow by body blow, the shocking personnel reductions taking place at law firms throughout the US and UK. One after another, firms are laying off employees, and it seems each firm’s announcement gives three others the confidence [...]
Also posted in Recession, Research 9 Comments
The perils of squandering talent
Malcolm Gladwell has written a new book about the factors that most influence the likelihood that you’ll achieve (traditionally defined) career success. Outliers: The Story of Success posits that much of what affects our success is out of our control, and that arbitrary or even trivial factors play a disproportionate role in what we end up [...]
Also posted in Law School, Talent 2 Comments
Law firm capital and the financial crisis
I don’t normally link to articles in National, the magazine I edit — this blog is my personal project and doesn’t necessarily represent my employer’s views, and so I try to keep Law21 and CBA in watertight compartments. But I’m making an exception for our September 2008 cover story “Who owns the firm?“, which looks [...]
Posted in Management 5 Comments
An overlooked recruitment opportunity
At a certain point, a market’s inability to correct an imbalance becomes a competitive advantage for others within that market. In that spirit, allow me to illustrate an imbalance that innovative law practitioners can exploit right now.
We’ve all heard and said a great deal about how law firms need to better address the treatment of [...]
The questionable future of partners and associates
The evidence is growing that neither “partner” nor “associate” is going to be a meaningful term in law firms of the future. Both of these hallowed pillars of law firms’ talent structure are starting to be used more as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves.
In terms of partners, consider this article [...]
Also posted in Talent 2 Comments
Associates and the bad table
The opening words to a sporty 60-second video montage at Cadwalader’s US student recruitment site are: “Make no mistake about it. A career at Cadwalader is not for the faint of heart.” So it would seem, following news that the firm cut 96 lawyers on Thursday, an astounding purge that surpasses Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal’s [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, Talent 3 Comments
Measuring lawyer productivity