Background and Objectives :  Coan, Payton & Payne is a leading business firm in Ft. Collins, Colorado, with an expanding practice along Colorado’s Front Range.  The firm wanted to reassess sustainability, with a particular focus on partnership structure and compensation.    The task was to review and advise on the firm’s existing Strategic Plan and help the firm execute its strategy into the firm’s partner compensation system.     Approach and Implementation :  EvolveLaw work

Background and Objectives : Kneis, Helland & McPherson is a market-dominant niche Family Law firm in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  The firm reached out to EvolveLaw to help set and execute goals, manage talent, and consider succession plans.  The partners were overworked, there were some talent instabilities, and there was no clear vision and strategy to maintain the firm’s market position.    The tasks were to (1) build partner consensus around vision, strategy, and execution

Background and Objectives :   The client firm was a 75-lawyer Denver firm with a sterling market reputation and growing profits.  The firm had been approached by several potential market entrants exploring a merger, and firm management wanted to develop a logical, culture-driven, and thorough approach to its strategic options.      Approach and Implementation :    In collaboration with market leaders, we analyzed the firm’s market position from both an external and internal p

Background and Objectives :    Quarles & Brady is an approximately 600-lawyer Midwest-based firm.  The firm was at a tipping point in terms of its vision and strategy.  As it neared the end of its Chair’s term, it needed to reset, agree on strategy, and find execution paths to transition leadership successfully and continue to grow well.    The task was to (1) reset strategy in line with market demands; (2) manage governance to facilitate the reset while staging for leadershi

Background and objectives :    Sherman & Howard (S&H) was a market-dominant mid-sized firm – the oldest and third-largest firm in Denver, and one of the few remaining larger, independent and foundational firms in the city.  Today’s market demands that firms in this position compete with an ever-growing list of national or super-regional firms setting up shop in their HQ city.  S&H needed to adapt and grow to meet this challenge.    The task was to (1) evolve S&H goals and ope

William Henderson — Professor at Indiana Maurer School of Law and Chief Strategy Officer at Lawyer Metrics –  knows legal market data and technology.  Bill recently presented at Wolters Kluwer’s ELM User Conference.  His topic:  Bridging the Gap between clients and legal service providers.  Despite his expertise slicing and dicing data, Bill didn’t focus on starting with more data sets.  Instead, he encouraged creative thinking and conversation.  I couldn’t agree more.

Every month or so there is an article or BLOG about law firm culture. According to Forbes Magazine references to “culture” in leading business publications have leaped from under 500,000 in 2019 to well over two million in 2021. What I hear from my clients is that the concept of culture is too fuzzy and soft for them.  What does culture have to do with PPP, hard financial analysis, tracking successes and failures?   At the same time, they want sustained firm growth, top and b

When law firm leaders ask for recommendations on how to grow their firm we start the discussion at a high level. Most firms adopt one or more of the same growth strategies: Markets, clients, services, location, economics and/or competitors. In many cases, you can apply well-known checklists to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each strategy.

Succession planning is crucial for the stability and future success of law firms. It involves preparing for potential gaps that may arise from retiring or underperforming partners and leadership transitions. Effective succession planning can help ensure that firms maintain their competitive edge and continuity in leadership.

Clients have been overwhelmed with law firm advice on Covid-19. As early as April, clients were telling law firms to slow down — it was too much, firms were too eager, the advice was too generic. Fast forward to today, when my LinkedIn feed gave me a fantastic example of how to provide clients with immediately useful, client-centered help responding to the pandemic. In this post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/womble-bond-dickinson-uk-llp_next-wednesday-were-teaming-up-with-w

More and more of my meetings with managing partners start like this:  I’m worried about the Firm’s growth.  Our corner-stone clients are asking for write-downs, we lost out to our top competitor on a couple of summer interns and a lateral recruit, our revenue is flat over the last couple of years and our top rain maker is threatening to leave if we don’t match our market’s net partner income.  How can I get everyone pulling together in the same direction, with the same enthus

Due diligence is a critical step in finding the right match for law firm mergers or group acquisitions. Due diligence goes far beyond financial metrics, but there are a handful of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that, in my view, are fundamental to this process. As we look at expansion opportunities, the following financial indices are key to gauging the possibility of a “fit” between firms or groups.

Roxanne Jensen, Founder and Managing Director of EvolveLaw, worked as a consultant for a mid-sized Rocky Mountain regional firm to help set, refine, and execute a comprehensive strategy in the New Normal legal marketplace.  Roxanne’s work was pivotal to the firm’s eventual merger of equals with an out-of-market western firm.

EvolveLaw’s client was a market-dominant mid-sized firm — one of the few remaining larger, independent and foundational firms in its HQ city. Today’s market demands that firms in this position compete with an ever-growing list of national firms setting up shop in its market. The client wanted and needed to adapt and grow to meet this challenge.

EvolveLaw worked with a 15 lawyer Denver firm to set and execute strategy.  The client was struggling to find its value proposition in the New Normal legal market after the 2008 recession.  Its historical growth pattern was to add practices whenever there was a cultural fit and financial viability.  As a result, the client firm was a patchwork of practices and varying business models.