Thought Leadership

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.