Diversity in the practice of law has been on my mind the last few days. Partly it’s thanks to a confluence of events, such as the second annual Call to Action: General Counsels’ Summit on Diversity, which starts tomorrow in Arizona and gathers 150 top GCs to find ways to increase diversity among their own… Read more »
Jordan Furlong is a strategic consultant and analyst who forecasts the impact of the changing legal market on lawyers, law firms and legal organizations.
The Brink
NALP: the future of law firms
Filed under: Big Firms, Clients, Innovation, Talent
Back from a lengthy trip, I have a lot of catch-up blogging to do. Just to get the ball rolling, here are my speaking notes from last Friday’s plenary session at the NALP Annual Education Conference in Toronto, in case they’re of interest. I was honoured to be part of a distinguished panel of speakers,… Read more »
Road trip!
Filed under: Law21
Postings will be intermittent at best over the next week or so — I’m on the road for business and family events, but I’ll try to post a couple of entries if I can. If you’re at any of these events, drop me a line or look for me on the parenthesized dates: –> Canadian… Read more »
Late-night marketing
Filed under: Innovation, Marketing
Sometimes, the best innovations are the simplest — just a matter of looking at a familiar situation differently. A dominant topic of discussion in legal practice has been the late hours many lawyers are forced to put in and the damage it does to personal life, “work-life balance,” etc. So along comes Boston lawyer James… Read more »
The seven-year law degree
Filed under: Big Firms, Law School, New Lawyers
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 »
The culture-driven law firm
Filed under: Big Firms, Leadership, Management, Talent
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
Filed under: Big Firms, Billing, Clients, Satisfaction
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
Filed under: Clients, Innovation, Marketing
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
Filed under: Clients, Collaboration, Marketing
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 »
