Who really owns your law firm?

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Posted in: Partners

It’s not clear to me what many law firm partners think they’re doing in that role.

If you have a dog, you’ve probably seen it strain at the leash to chase after cars, with no idea what it would do if it actually caught one. If you have a cat, you’ve probably seen it tear up the stairs in a frenzy, only to stop halfway up as it completely forgets what drove it there. And if you’re in a law firm, you’ve probably seen lawyers strive through tremendous effort and at great personal cost to attain partnership, only to find themselves looking around and wondering what possessed them to do that.

The purported rewards of law firm partnership are well-known: A slice of the firm’s annual profits, a higher level of status with colleagues and clients, and a badge of honour to show (or flaunt) to family and friends. I’m sure many partners enjoy some or all of these benefits to one degree or another. But it’s always seemed to me that many lawyers become partners primarily through inertia — equity partnership was simply the last stop on the law firm career train. Lawyers are task-oriented people who just want to know what the next task is. Many of them became partners because that was the next task to do, the last achievement to unlock.

There’s much to be written about the impact of unintended partnership on the emotional well-being of lawyers. But I’m currently interested in its impact on the existential well-being of their firms. Many law firms are owned by lawyers who neither understand, nor desire, nor have any intention to fulfil the ownership role they’ve taken on.

Pretty much every law firm partnership includes equity partners who do not view themselves as the owners of a business. They view their equity share not as an opportunity (and responsibility) to guide a legal services business, but as (a) a profit stake, similar to a share in a publicly traded company, and (b) a safeguard against interference with their own autonomy. They are partners because the role bestows several rewards (money, power, prestige). They have little if any interest in the role’s corresponding responsibilities.

What are the responsibilities of law firm partnership? It depends on the specific firm in question, of course, but a good short list would include the responsibility to:

  • generate sufficient business to sustain more than your own practice
  • monitor and help improve the firm’s performance and profitability
  • promote the firm and its capacities to your clients and the market
  • accept and carry out some management and leadership duties
  • manage and mentor less experienced lawyers under your supervision
  • plan your own eventual departure and prepare others to succeed you

Taken as a whole, these can be expressed more simply: They are the responsibilities of ownership. Just as you must meet certain obligations for the comfortable house you live in and the stylish car you drive, you must likewise meet certain obligations for the profitable and prestigious law firm you partly own. Some law firm partners are interested in all the rights of ownership, but none of the corresponding responsibilities. The more of these partners your firm has, the more trouble it’s in.

I’m not really speaking here of partners who exercise their ownership powers in ways that their colleagues find self-serving, irritating, or even antagonistic. These partners aren’t a lot of fun to deal with, and they can do real damage — but at least they’re actively engaged with their ownership role. I’m speaking here of the large number of partners who are largely or entirely disengaged from the ownership role itself. They’re neither good actors nor bad actors; they’re not actors, period. They’re superannuated associates, absentee owners, empty seats at the partnership table.

When too many of the people who have the power of ownership in a law firm fail to exercise it, then the firm inevitably starts to drift, leaderless and increasingly listless. Truly engaged partners are forced to take on more duties, to make the decisions and carry out the obligations for the enterprise as a whole, leaving them worn down and resentful.

Consultants routinely advise law firms to rid themselves of “under-performing partners.” This is, of course, code for “partners who aren’t generating enough money.” I’d like to see that term redefined to mean “partners who aren’t living up to their ownership obligations, to their fellow owners and to the firm as a whole.”  In my ideal world, every partner who declines to take up his or her ownership responsibilities would be considered to have forfeited his or her legitimate claim to partnership.

So this might be a good time to look around your firm and ask yourself: Who are the real owners here? Who takes equity shareholding in this firm seriously — for better or for worse — and who simply sits around reaping the benefits of shareholding while ignoring its duties? My guess is that it won’t take you long to divide the sheep from the goats on this score. I sincerely hope that the engaged outnumber the disengaged, but I’ve seen enough law firms over the years to know that won’t always be the case.

At that stage, you might want to clearly restate for your partners the responsibilities of equity ownership within your firm and re-establish their equal importance to the rights of ownership. You could make this the theme of your next partnership retreat, to signal its importance, and perhaps to lay the groundwork for establishing the annual fulfillment of that list of ownership responsibilities as a sine qua non for continuing participation in the equity circle.

If that’s too much to ask in a firm of powerful veteran partners, and it might well be, then you should at least institute the expectation of “ownership responsibility fulfillment” for every new admission to partnership — in fact, make it part of their annual performance assessment. At too many firms, the only real expectation for new partners is the generation of business — the other responsibilities listed previously are often considered “nice to do” or “soft” activities. You need to harden those expectations, to make it clear that attaining partnership is not the last stop on the train. Maintaining partnership is also mandatory.

Partnership is not the promised land given to lawyers after (10) years in the desert. It’s not merely an achievement to be unlocked or a destination to be enjoyed — it’s an earned privilege with ongoing responsibilities, and nobody is permanently entitled to it. That might be a heretical statement at your law firm. But I think a lot of law firms are overdue for a little heresy at the moment.

Don’t fear the rainmaker

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Posted in: Law Firms, Management, Partners

If you’ve spent much time in a law firm, especially in any kind of managerial capacity, you’ve probably run into the steel barrier to change known as “The partners don’t want to do it.”

Sometimes, it’s as simple as “One partner doesn’t want to do it.” And the more powerful the partner, the more successful will be the resistance to any given initiative, especially one that seeks to change anything important about how the firm operates. Our standard response to this resistance tends to be a fatalistic shrug: the partners own the business, so they have the power to do what they want with it.

I’ve had a number of conversations of this type recently with law firm leaders and managers, and it’s led me to reflect on a subject we don’t talk much about: Power in law firms. Who really holds it, and who doesn’t? How is it actually used, and why? And is it time to re-examine some of our assumptions about how power is deployed within law firms? This post tries to consider these questions and suggests that we should answer the last one in the affirmative.

1. The Source Of Law Firm Power

Where does power reside in a law firm? And what is the source of that power?

Power, of course, resides within every company and organization — the power to shape the organization’s external strategic decisions and direct its internal tactical maneuvers. In most organizations, that power is explicitly defined and formally arranged in ways that make its effective exercise possible. The company CEO can do certain things; the board of directors can do certain things; the majority shareholders can do certain things. Not only can they do these things — they are expected to do these things. Part of the deal with having power is fulfilling the responsibility to use it.

In this respect, as in many others, law firms are odd beasts. Power in law firms is more diffused and informal than in other organizations. Almost all firms have a managing partner, but this person is normally considered first among equals, and nobody (including the managing partner) imagines that he or she wields actual authority over other partners. In some law firms, the managing partner, far from being chosen for his or her authority and decisiveness, seems to have been selected for his or her geniality and disinclination to interfere with the affairs of others.

Within the firm’s practice or industry groups, much the same applies. Leadership often falls to the lawyer with either the largest book of business or the strongest reputation — but the actual position of Practice Group Leader doesn’t normally confer much real power on a partner who didn’t already possess it. I wouldn’t go so far as to call formal leadership roles in law firms “ceremonial,” but I don’t think they’re that far from it.

Now as noted above, in pretty much every law firm I’ve encountered, it’s assumed that power resides with the partners based on their “ownership” of the firm, the equity stake they hold in it.

But something doesn’t quite add up here. Every equity “stake” in a law firm is, strictly speaking, equal. In a law firm of 100 partners, each partner technically has a 1% equity share in the firm. No shareholder possessing a 1% stake in a company would try to exercise veto power over the company’s strategic direction or tactical decisions. And if he or she tried to exercise such a power, the company would laugh off the effort.

Yet most law firm partnerships contain a handful of lawyers who can and do launch, or halt, any initiative they like, and everyone else acquiesces to their desires. Let’s suppose a law firm in which Partner A receives ten times as much money in compensation as Partner B in a given year, and is unquestionably more powerful than Partner B within the firm. This is not because Partner A holds 10 “shares” in the law firm to Partner B’s single share: they each “bought into” the firm with a roughly equal investment of capital when they were admitted to the partnership. So the simple fact of equity ownership itself can’t fully explain where real power is located.

Alright, so does real power reside in the ability of a partner to generate revenue? This seems to reflect conventional wisdom: the more money you bring into the firm, the more power you exercise. But here too, there are gaps in the reasoning. A senior associate or non-equity partner might bill as much revenue, if not more, than your average partner. So if the generation of cold, hard cash was the key to power, then the leveraged labourers deep inside the pyramid would be the ones running the place. As we know, they are not.

So maybe power really resides in the ability to bring to the firm clients with paying work. This is closest to the reality in most law firms: the people who “control” the firm’s relationships with its biggest or most important clients are the real power brokers. If a partner who controls key client relationships wants something, that partner will get it. If he or she doesn’t want something to happen, it doesn’t happen. There are only a small handful of such people inside each firm, and these are the people who possess real power.

We call these partners “rainmakers,” which is a lovely word, about as close to poetry as most lawyers get. But you know what rainmakers are called in the rest of the world? “Salespeople.” That’s really the essential nature of who they are and what they do. And law firms are the only business I can think of where the salespeople effectively run the company.

2. The Exercise of Law Firm Power

So we’ve established, as a proposition at least, that top salespeople possess and wield most of the power in law firms. If that’s the case, then here’s a follow-up question that interests me: How is that power exercised in practical terms? I mean, how is a salesperson going to wield power over you: sell less? That would be at least as harmful to the salesperson as it would be to you. Sell more? “Do what I say I or I’ll make more money for you” isn’t much of a threat.

No, the nature of a law firm salesperson’s power is entirely one-dimensional, and it is this: the power to leave. “Do what I say or I’ll take away all the client business I’ve been giving you and give it to another firm instead.” That is the threat, sometimes explicit but mostly implicit, hovering behind the law firm salesperson’s power.

At many firms, this threat is considered to be quasi-existential: a salesperson who controls a significant amount of business generation for the firm could badly damage or even kill the firm if he ever left, so we’d better let him do whatever he wants. That is the source of power in a law firm: the threat to leave the law firm and take away its lifeblood.

Now, you know what’s interesting about this power? It can only be exercised once.

A salesperson’s threat to leave a law firm is a nuclear option, and once it’s deployed, then there’s no turning back: either he goes, and the power is used up, and everyone else is left to carry on as best they can — or he stays, and the threat is forever extinguished, because it turns out he was bluffing, and his power dissipates. Everyone else in the firm fears the salesperson’s power to leave — but what they don’t fully appreciate is that this is a non-renewable power source.

If you’re a top salesperson in a law firm, the nature of your power is not “Use it or lose it.” It’s “Use it and lose it.” Once you exercise this power inside the firm, then it’s gone — because whether you stay or whether you go, everyone in the firm knows you no longer have any power over them.

What if the other members of a law firm no longer feared the rainmaker? What if, instead of folding when the salesperson raises high, they called and demanded to see what was in his hand?

One of two things is going to happen. The first is that the salesperson will leave. Or at least, he’ll try to leave: he’ll put the word out among rival firms (if he hasn’t already), see whether any landing spots are amenable to him, try to negotiate the best free-agent deal he can get, and walk out the door, along with any other personnel he can coax and as much business as he can stuff into his briefcase.

And how much business will he actually walk out with? Acritas recently surveyed a wide range of partners who had laterally moved from one firm to another. Those partners had expected that about 70% of their client business would move with them to their new firm. You know what percentage of business actually moved? Exactly 27%.

When a salesperson leaves a law firm, according to Acritas, what typically happens is that almost three-quarters of the client business that they supposedly “controlled” decides to stay with the original firm. And what I’ve seen and heard is that in firms where a major salesperson has left, the firm’s junior partners frequently move up into the departed partner’s space, and the firm no longer feels like it’s being held hostage by one of its partners. I’m not saying, to be clear, that this will be the happy result every time. But more often than not, the threat of a departing salesperson turns out not to be existential after all.

And that’s what happens if the salesperson goes. If he or she stays, then the bluff has been called, and this person won’t be able to exercise that power again to the same degree.

3. The Reality of Law Firm Power

Here’s what I think: the conventional wisdom about power in law firms is wrong. The people who everyone believes have all the power can’t afford to use it — because once they do, either they’re gone, or it’s gone — and in both cases, they no longer wield power within that firm.

This shouldn’t actually be surprising to us. Real power in a business or organization has never been the power to threaten or take away or destroy — it’s the power to act, to build, to accomplish. Rainmakers’ power, salespeople’s power, is of the first type — the power of the bully, the bluffer, the threatener.

You, right now, in your law firm, have it in you to assert power of the second type. I think that real power in a law firm is basically lying around waiting for someone to use it. Like the sword in the stone, it belongs to anyone who’s willing to grasp it and try to wield it. Real power in a law firm belongs to those individuals who assert that the interests of the firm outweigh the interest of one or two salespeople — and who are willing to stand up to these salespeople and challenge them to use their singular power, and thereby lose it.

Again, I’m not saying there are no risks to challenging a top salesperson and daring them to leave; it would be foolhardy to make this your standard management practice. But the fear of losing a top salesperson keeps most firm leaders and managers from even trying to assert institutional power. You can’t run a business in fear of your own salespeople.

I think power in the average law firm resides with its top salespeople only because everyone else in the firm believes that it does. Once you stop believing that — once you decide that positive power is greater than negative power, and that you can exercise power of the second type through the courageous assertion of the best interests of the firm — then everything about your firm can change.

We’re here for a good time, not a long time

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Posted in: Generations, Leadership, Partners

In the spirit of Casey Flaherty’s recent excellent post “Me Being Wrong,” I’m starting off the year with an admission of (at least) one thing about law firms I’ve totally swung and missed on. In some article or other within the last year or two, I wrote that “law firms are supposed to be multi-generational entities.” I’m now reluctantly set to admit that they are not.

I’ve had growing doubts about my multi-generational thesis for awhile, but the decisive blow against it was struck by this post at Adam Smith Esq. wherein Bruce MacEwen and Janet Stanton tick off all the reasons why the average law firm apparently stays in business only 40 years:

  • The desire of the firm’s leaders to avoid awkward “succession” conversations with longstanding friends and colleagues,
  • The immovability of senior rainmakers who will not be managed and will certainly not be “transitioned” anywhere they don’t want to go,
  • The confluence, in smaller law firms, of the rainmaker, founder, and senior management roles in the same people, and most of all,
  • The sorry fact that many senior lawyers really don’t care what happens to the firm the day after they retire.

What all these factors share in common is that the law firm hasn’t managed to become something more than the sum of its parts. As Dorothy Parker once said of Oakland, there’s no there there. The concept of the firm as a thriving legal services enterprise independent of the lawyers who supply its services never really caught on, at least not with the most important lawyers therein. 

A few years ago, I was contacted by some people at a boutique firm who were facing an existential problem: the name founders were all coming up on retirement, but were showing little interest in devolving authority, transitioning clients, or planning for the future. It was probably dawning on everyone else in the firm — junior partners, senior associates, staff — that the reason the firm existed was to be the commercial vehicle for the name partners’ legal careers, and that when those careers ended, the vehicle would have served its purpose.

I once wrote that many law firms seem to be run these days as if they intended to close their doors in five years’ time. I was half-joking at the time, but I now think there was more truth in it than I realized. Five years is probably the anticipated remaining career length of a typical law firm’s most powerful partners. If your law firm’s engine seems to be pushed into overdrive, such that it’s going to be immensely profitable in the short term but is imperilling itself in the long term, maybe there’s a reason for that.

Bruce and Janet are sanguine about whether one-generation firms are necessarily a bad thing, and they make some good points. I still think it’s kind of a sad turn of events, though, because although the firm’s founders and rainmakers might be perfectly happy to drain the contents of the firm and recycle the empty afterwards, most of the other people in the firm, especially associates and staff, put their backs and their hearts into the enterprise and believed that there was, in fact, a “there” there. Most will probably find employment elsewhere, that’s true; but they’ll also have lost something more personal that they’ll find harder to replace.

There’s no shortage of helpful information about law firm succession planning and partner exit strategies out there, and I plan to contribute something along those lines here soon enough. But I think there’s a critically important preliminary step that you need to take before your firm commits to any of these courses of action.

I think your firm’s leaders need to sit down and have a private and very honest discussion about whether your firm is one-generational or multi-generational. It doesn’t matter that much, from my perspective, which answer you come up with. What matters is that you arrive at a clear-eyed agreement about what the firm’s leaders really, genuinely want and expect from their firm.

Beware of being too aspirational, of saying, “Yes, we’re building for the future, we want to leave a legacy, etc,” if you don’t really mean it. Because if what the firm’s powerhouse people really want is to mainline cash from this machine for the next few years and then close up shop, then it’s wasteful and counterproductive to spend time, money, and effort on succession plans and generational handovers that will never take place. Everyone will be left poorer and more embittered. You’ve got to be honest with yourselves about what sort of firm you have here.  

But if you decide, during these conversations, that yes, you truly do want the firm to last beyond the current generation of rainmakers, then everyone needs to be clear about the hard choices and time-consuming mechanics that choice requires. This might, in fact, be the best way to go about the whole “succession” issue: start by establishing beyond any doubt whether this is a firm that wishes to have succession at all. 

Challenge the default assumption that your law firm will continue on in perpetuity. That’s a hard conversation to have, it’s true; but holding it will make every subsequent conversation about your firm’s future easier.

The endangered partner

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Posted in: Finance, Partners

Last time out, I wrote at some length about the coming obsolescence of law firm associates. So it now seems only fair to turn the spotlight onto the other category of lawyers within law firms: partners. (Equity partners, that is — I’m not bothering with the transparently profiteering holding pen of the “non-equity partner,” a term that still makes about as much sense as “non-lawyer attorney.”)

A good place to start this inquiry is with a simple question: why do law firms even have “partners,” anyway? What’s the value proposition that the role of partner offers, both to the firms that create this position and to the lawyers who fill it? All law firms believe they ought to have partners, and many lawyers believe they ought to become partners. Why is that?

Well, there’s only one reason why law firms have ever sought out partners, and I’ll get to that reason later on in this post. But equally, there’s really only one reason why lawyers have ever wanted equity partnership in law firms. Lawyers seek law firm partnership, if you’ll allow me to be blunt about it, because they want power. And partnership has long promised lawyers power, in several dimensions:

  • The power of control over your own work, to be the assignor rather than the assignee of files — which usually means pushing down the dull stuff and keeping the best and most lucrative, high-client-contact work for yourself.
  • The power of influence over the firm’s direction and strategy — theoretically so that you could guide the firm’s development, but certainly to create an environment more conductive to your own satisfaction and career advancement.
  • The power of prestige — being able to hand out that little white business card with the raised-type gold-leaf “Partner” to your family, your friends, and especially that one law school classmate who was always such a tool. And of course,
  • The power of money — because let’s face it, the profitability of many law firms throughout the last few decades has reached levels so astonishing that an entire generation of associates has expended extraordinary effort just for a chance to access it.

Lawyers love control, influence, status, and money. Partnership has always offered the keys to each of those kingdoms, and it has always delivered on that offer — or at least, it used to. The actual nature of law firm partnership today, however, has become something else entirely.

One of the legal profession’s most cherished myths is the autonomy of the law firm partner: you’re an owner now! You’re an independent shareholder who can dictate the terms of your relationship with the firm! But the reality that greets most lawyers upon accession to partnership is a little different. You still have all the billable-hour requirements of associateship, but now you’re also responsible for bringing in new business, getting more hours out of your subordinates, and taking on myriad unpaid management roles. And unless you’re part of the firm’s tight inner circles of leadership, you have little practical input into strategy or direction: you’re informed of the firm’s changes, not consulted on them. You might as well still be an associate, a mere employee.

What’s worse, however, is that increasingly, partnership in a law firm actually reduces your autonomy, binding you tighter to your firm and narrowing your options. The capital contribution you made to secure your admission to partnership immediately disappeared into the firm’s operating account, and the odds are good that you’ll never see it again. The same applies to lateral partner arrivals who fall for what Edwin Reeser calls one of the “honey traps” that capture and financially strap the partner to the firm. At firms with large spreads in partner compensation levels (that is to say, virtually all of them), junior partners are effectively being leveraged like associates. And if you try to leave the partnership, your signing bonuses could be clawed back and any return of your capital could be strung out over several years to discourage your departure. For many law firm partners, the brass ring has transformed into a pair of handcuffs.

I don’t think this is all down to avarice on the part of senior law firm lawyers (although avarice seems to occupy the co-pilot’s seat in quite a number of firms). What this really suggests to me is that the partnership model for law firms — or at least, for any firm whose equity shareholders can’t fit around a standard boardroom table — has run its course. “Have we reached the end of the partnership model?” asked the ABA Journal last year, and as the article illustrates in vivid detail, I think the answer is yes. The operational, cultural, and ethical contortions through which many law firms have put themselves in order to maintain the benefits of the partnership system tells me that that system simply doesn’t work well anymore.

This is becoming clearer to potential law firm partners every day, and there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that fewer associates are interested in becoming partners at law firms than in the past. That may be just as well for them. As partner cohorts get older and thinner, and as the eventual day of reckoning draws closer, the payload of risk that partner status represents grows ever larger. Many law firms today seem to be run as if they expect to wind down operations and cash out their equity shareholders in about five years’ time, leaving leadership voids, unfunded retirement plans, and unmet mentorship needs behind them. If your name is on an equity partnership agreement at one of these firms, you do not want to be the last one left to turn out the lights.

Partner status, in short, is becoming more of a burden than a blessing for a lot of lawyers. Many firms will accordingly find that when older partners do eventually retire, their positions won’t always be replaced and the partnership ranks won’t be fully replenished. That is a serious problem for law firms, for one reason — and that reason is the answer to the other question I raised at the start, where I asked why law firms even seek out partners. Law firms seek out partners because they need capital.

The defining characteristic of equity partnership in a law firm is “equity.” Regulations in every common-law jurisdiction (except Australia, England & Wales, and the District of Columbia) are adamant that equity in law firms may be held only by lawyers. If your firm needs capital, it needs lawyers to pony it up. I sometimes suspect that at least a few law firms have made and continue to make partners of some lawyers not because of the lawyers’ intrinsic merit, but because the firms need the money. Law firms need lawyers to invest their own money simply so that the firm can carry on business.

So what happens when you start running short on equity partners? You start running short on equity, and that’s a problem. Law firms can incur debt from banks to help maintain operations, sure, but no bank will lend to a firm without sufficient capital of its own. Borrow from future accounts receivable? That’s a very dangerous game. Dip into the trust fund? Enjoy your disbarment hearing. Nothing can really replace cold, hard capital, and firms are slowly losing access to their sole source of it.

And by an ironic confluence of events, law firms are going to start hurting for capital right around the time when they’ll need capital more than ever — when their market positions are under threat from staggeringly well-financed competitors.

The growing army of alternative platforms and rival providers, emerging and competing with law firms in the legal market over the next several years, will bring with them financial resources an order of magnitude beyond what lawyer-only equity can provide. The gross revenue of the entire AmLaw 100 in 2015 was $83.1 billion. The Big 4 accounting firms’ revenue alone in 2015 was $123.5 billion. Throw in legal technology providers financed by colossal Silicon Valley venture funds, and the still-distant but inevitable entry into law of corporate giants like Google and Amazon. Law firms, as currently structured and financed, are going to be massively outgunned in the coming market, just as their sole source of capital with which to fund competitive efforts starts dwindling.

And that, among other effects, is what’s going to finally change the legal profession’s rules around non-lawyer ownership of law firms. Today, lawyers and bar groups are doing everything they can to oppose the legalization of non-lawyer law firm ownership. Within ten years’ time, they’ll be the ones leading the effort to authorize it, simply in order to level the playing field and keep lawyers and law firms alive in a marketplace full of richly financed providers. The days when lawyer capital constitutes the sole permissible type of law firm equity are drawing to a close.

In the not-distant future, therefore, law firms will have alternative sources for capital other than lawyers. And by that time, an entire generation of lawyers will have been raised to view the position of equity partner with a certain skepticism and even suspicion. In that kind of environment, the role of “law firm partner” inevitably is going to be very different than it is today.

No longer the firm’s sole provider of equity, no longer the automatic ambition of young practitioners, no longer the promised land of power and profits — what will partnership represent? Will firms even maintain the category of “partner” anymore, or will they find some other title — “director,” “principal,” “stakeholder,” whatever — to identify the firm’s most important members, regardless of their seniority or their connections or whether they own a law degree? Will law firms finally get around to doing what they should have done years ago and separate the roles of owner, worker, and director into discrete positions, rather than forcing lawyers to wear all three hats at once? Will they finally accord their “non-lawyer” professionals the respect, power, and equity status they deserve for their contributions to the firm? These are just some of the possible routes forward, and at least a few of them will come to pass.

“Partner” and “associate” were perfectly adequate categories to describe the two classes of lawyers in 20th-century law firms, back when these were the only classes of people that mattered. Neither of these categories fits easily or functions well in 21st-century law firms and the new market in which those firms will compete. More categories of key personnel — in management, marketing, professional development, technology, knowledge, pricing, process, procurement, customer service and more — will be needed. Neither these personnel, nor the firm’s financiers, will require a law degree.

That’s going to be a whole new ballgame. And it’s the structural and organizational reality for which today’s law firms, if they would like to also be tomorrow’s law firms, need to start preparing now.