Better Law Practice Through Better People Management
Speaking of the flood of mergers consolidating the legal marketplace, another new wave is also just now hitting that promises to further dilute the piece of the action that law firms have traditionally enjoyed.
At the beginning of this month, the UK’s Solicitors Regulation Authority officially opened its doors to at least a dozen applicants, including…
The reports are in for 2011 on mergers and acquisitions in the law firm biz– the pace is picking up— and the prospects for 2012 look to be the same.
US Mergers
Hildebrandt reports that 45 mergers that involved U.S. firms were completed last year, a 67% increase over 2010, with the Midwest being a locus of activity, With 11 U.S.
So here is the typical routine: clients that demand not overnight but one-hour turnaround, associates that don’t hand in assignments on time, working into the night to deliver a reasonable product (see the first two), phone conferences scheduled for 6 am, which turn out to be at 3 am in California, where you are that…
Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the industry pacemaker in this matter, announced that it will keep associate year-end bonuses for 2011 the same as last year–$7,500 for a first year associate up to $37,500 for the most senior associates. Not only are these bonuses far below 2007, when first years received a total of $45,000 and seventh-years…
Lawyers suffer from a high rate of depression–the highest of all professions–and the peak time for depression to hit is around the holidays. Add to that the stress that many are feeling now over the economy and whether they will have a job come the first of the year, and you have a recipe for poor…
This past August a court dismissed an EEOC discrimination suit against Bloomberg contending that the company had systematically discriminated against pregnant women or those who recently returned to work from maternity leave. The judge, New York district court judge Loretta Preska, saw the EEOC’s essential charge to be that Bloomberg, as a company policy, did not provide work/life balance for its employees…
The following entry won the BlawgWorld Pick of the Week. BlawgWorld is a free weekly email newsletter that links to the best articles on the Web for lawyers and law firm administrators.
House Speaker John Boehner teared up when introducing two newly elected Republican congressmen during a closed party meeting on September 15th…
One of the more challenging skills lawyers need to master is the ability to delegate–to younger partners, associates, and non-lawyer staff, and in this marketplace, to third party providers, like document reviewers and e-discovery firms. And even to clients.
But there is a lot of internal resistance in many lawyers to mastering that skill. Perfectionism, wanting to stay in control and…
One of the more interesting client assignments we have had involved a small practice group in a middle-sized firm on the West Coast. The firm charged us to find out what was "wrong" with the group and "fix"it or, if it couldn’t be fixed, the firm was going to dump the whole group.
When we arrived…
In a new CareerBuilder survey of more than 2600 hiring managers and human resource professionals nationwide, 71% said they value emotional intelligence in an employee more than IQ and 34% said they are placing even greater emphasis on emotional intelligence when hiring and promoting employees post-recession. And 59% said they would not hire someone who has a high IQ…