Growth / Articles
A great Leadership Conference. The MPIEs always excel.
I look forward to this Conference every year. It really helps me to be a more effective firm leader.
A very organized and well-run conference. Great food. Great hospitality.
Thank you for allowing me to participate. Your team is masterful at making all feel valued at your event and I dare say helping attendees see the value in attending.
Thank you for the invite to speak on the Managing Partner panel. Even though I have now attended 7 MPFs, I always bring back substantive and helpful information for my partners.
Hands down the best leadership conference for managing partners I've ever attended.
I highly recommend the MPF Leadership Conference. I've participated many times, as have several of my partners. We leave with new ideas and fresh perspectives every time.
I thoroughly enjoyed participating in this year's Conference. Thank you for your enthusiasm and leadership.
Thank you for what you do for our industry. I go to a lot of conferences, and your event is the one I look forward to and gain the most from each year.
Thank you for putting on another outstanding MPF Conference. I came away, once again, feeling reassured and encouraged.
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AttachmentAttracting and retaining young lawyers is a vexing issue for leaders of smaller and mid-size law firms. Let’s face it. Today’s young lawyers are quite different than their counterparts from 30 and 40 years ago. We hear it all the time. They want work/life balance, lots of attention and feedback, and state-of-the-art technology. Many will bounce around from job to job, and only half say they want to be an equity partner of a law firm.
Larry suggests that law firms implement several institutional and individual practices to engage your young legal talent. Engagement leads to longer tenure, improved productivity and increased job satisfaction. These practices center around the concepts of:
- Autonomy/Self-Determination
- Meaning and Purpose
- Social Connection
- Competence, Mastery and Achievement
- Respect and Gratitude
This is a solid (and short) article with great ideas that your firm should take seriously.
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We’ve all read about the disappointing results many firms have had with lateral hiring, with failure rates as high as 60-70% according to some reports. The cost and distraction associated with a bad deal can be devastating, especially for smaller and mid-size law firms. This article looks at what BigLaw is doing to improve its batting average in this area:
- Sixty percent (60%) say they prepare formal business plans for lateral hires before they join. Another twenty percent (20%) say they prepare such a plan within 30 days.
- Seventy-five percent (75%) have a formal performance review at least quarterly.
- Ninety percent (90%) cite “business development issues,” while two-thirds encounter issues around “cultural fit.”
- Thirty-five percent (35%) of firms report a malpractice issue of some kind within five years.
- Many firms admit to routinely by-passing credit, criminal and backgrounds checks on lateral hires.
Our advice to leaders of smaller and mid-size firms? Conduct adequate due diligence on prospective lateral hires. In addition, develop an agreed upon written integration plan and check-in monthly to make sure it is being implemented.
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BigLaw, with their highly paid recruiting and professional development staffs, is doing a pretty fair job articulating and enforcing the criteria to become an equity partner. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many smaller and mid-sized firms. In this brief article, David does a nice job outlining some of the best practices in this critically important area. Here are four of them:
- Clearly Articulate the Criteria for Partnership in Writing,
- Develop an Effective Annual Evaluation Process,
- Start Leadership and Business Development Training Early, and
- Have a Plan for Those Who Won’t Make It.
How is your firm doing at grooming its future owners?
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13 Things Your Firm Must Do Today to Attract and Retain Tomorrow’s Lawyers
Read MoreThis short article (about 1,200 words) sets out what I’ve learned over the years about what law firms must do to attract and retain younger lawyers. Like it or not, today’s younger lawyers tend to want different things from their legal careers than their senior counterparts. Here are four of the things we recommend that law firms do:
- Establish and Communicate Clear Expectations
- Set Forth a Clear Path to Partnership
- Reward Performance, not Seniority
- Be Selective in Hiring – Use Psychological Assessments
Check out the article to read all 13 of them.
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After months of meetings and due diligence, your firm has just landed a five-star recruit – a young hot-shot lateral hire with an oh-so-attracive book of business. Now what? Too often, we find that firms don’t do a particularly good job of fully integrating their new super-stars into the firm. With proper planning, you can make sure your firm’s laterals hit the ground running and get off to a great start.
In this four-page article Mary Kate provides some terrific ideas from a young lawyer’s perspective. Here are five of her suggestions:
- Host an Orientation Session
- Develop an Individual Marketing Plan
- Establish Clear Expectations
- Determine and Monitor Key Metrics
- Be Ready to Integrate New Clients
These ideas may seem like common sense (and they are), but it’s surprising how many law firms do not have an effective and consistent onboarding process in place.
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According to research by Cushman & Wakefield and published in its annual report called Bright Insight, these are the top six factors today’s young lawyers look for in a law firm:
- Work/Life Balance
- Collegial Workplace
- Mentoring/Training by Senior Lawyers
- Compensation
- Exposure to Clients
- Business Development Opportunities
Yet, according to MPF surveys, many firms are doing little, if anything, to adapt to the next generation of lawyers. For example, less than a third of mid-size firms provide leadership and/or business development training for their associate attorneys.
As the administrator of a mid-size firm, Jennifer finds herself in the trenches and offers solid advice if your firm wants to attract and retain young talent.
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Despite BigLaw’s obsession with growth and firm size over the past ten years, many of the largest US firms are taking more measured and strategic approaches to growth, according to the 2016 NLJ 500 Survey of the Nation’s Largest Law Firms. Others are intentionally down-sizing to improve their competitive positions.
In Katelyn’s short article, she observes some interesting trends in today’s evolving legal market. Here are a few findings:
- Big Law is Getting Bigger. 163,700 lawyers (about 21% of the total number of lawyers) work in the 500 largest US law firms, up 2% from last year.
- Baker McKenzie’s lawyer headcount grew 6% in 2016, and it remains the largest US-based law firm with 4,600 lawyers. DLA Piper, which saw headcount decline by 4%, is number #2 with 4,200.
- Firms with biggest increases in lawyer headcount in 2016: Fox Rothschild, Husch Blackwell, Buchatler Nemer.
- Firm with biggest decreases in lawyer headcount: Jackson Kelly, Lindquist & Vennum and ROIG Lawyers.
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Millennials have now surpassed GenXers as the largest generation in the US workforce and will soon constitute the highest percentage of lawyers in private practice. Yet, many law firm leaders and their firms remain vexed by the challenges associated with attracting and retaining tomorrow’s legal talent.
This great article was brought to our attention by Dr. Sharon Meit Abrahams, and it says that Millennials seek the following attributes in their work environments:
- Development
- Meaning
- Autonomy
- Efficiency
- Transparency
According to Cushman & Wakefield’s 2015 National Legal Sector Benchmark Survey Results, mentoring, collaboration, diversity of work and partnership opportunities are key factors in keeping young lawyers from leaving your firm.
What’s your firm doing to build and maintain an environment that attracts and retains your top young lawyers?
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We met Bob Denney almost 30 years ago at a conference in Minneapolis, and we've been good friends ever since. He is a pioneer in law firm management and marketing. In his July 2015 Legal Communiqué, Bob lists 15 "red flags" that often arise as law firms consider a combination. Among them:
- The New Firm Name
- Unproductive Partners
- Unfunded Pension Liabilities
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We've worked with numerous firms over the past several years on this question, and our advice is often the same:
- Bigger is not always better.
- The combination should be thoughtful and strategic.
- The sum of the parts should be greater than before.
- Cultural compatibility is paramount.
- Think long and hard before you act, because undoing a bad deal is expensive and can get very ugly.
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While the vast majority of managing partners of smaller and mid-size firms say their firms want to maintain independent, it’s interesting to note that merger activity among US law firms is at all-time high according to The American Lawyer. Citing Altman Weil’s latest merger report, Houston and Chicago are the hottest markets for law firm expansion, and most mergers involve larger firms acquiring smaller boutique firms to establish a new area of expertise.
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Be very strategic and deliberate if your firm plans to grow through lateral hiring at the partner level, because you can’t afford to make mistakes! Consider these findings:
- 75% of managing partners expect lateral hiring at the partner level to increase over the next five years, according to a recent LexisNexis/American Lawyer Media survey.
- 28% of them say that lateral hiring has not been a very effective growth strategy for their firms, according to the same survey.
- 40% of lateral hires don’t work out says another study conducted by the Citi Private Bank Firm Group. Smock Consultants says that 75% of laterals don’t work out.
- $600,000 is the estimated direct and indirect expense associated with hiring a lateral partner.
Our advice? Conduct thorough due diligence on the front end to make sure you’re bringing in the right people and, as you do, make sure they’re fully integrated into your firm and its culture. This article dispenses some great guidance.
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No doubt, the legal profession has experienced tumultuous change over the past 20 years. Accelerated by the Great Recession, many of these developments are permanent and will forever change the business of law, the experts seem to agree.
In her well-researched article, Susan discusses ten trends to which successful law firms must adapt. They include:
- The growing oversupply of lawyers,
- More savvy and demanding clients,
- Exponential growth in legal process outsourcing, and
- The disappearance of the traditional law firm model.
At the end of the article she sets forth numerous questions that you, as managing partner, should be asking other leaders of your firm.
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The Model Partner:Balancing a Mix of Positive Contributions
Read MoreIn July 2012, Sterling Strategies conducted some interesting research attempting to identify the characteristics of the “model partner” in a law firm. According to John’s research, the characteristics, in order of importance, are:
- Book of Business,
- Working Attorney Collections, and
- Teamwork / Sharing / Firm Citizenship.
As we’ve written many times, owners of law firms should act and contribute like owners, not long-time employees. And that means, among other things, good citizenship, sharing, teamwork, and a book of business!
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In far too many law firms, the path to partnership is unclear and unspoken. For many, it’s a matter of time served, coupled with the fact that the would-be partner has done a reasonably good job meeting minimum billable hour and/or collections requirements (most of the time anyway) and hasn’t pissed off too many partners along the way.
We think there’s much more to it than that. We also think that the path to partnership and the criteria to achieve (and maintain) status as an equity partner should be clear and in writing.
Owners of law firms should act and contribute like owners, not loyal employees. And that means, among other things, mentoring younger lawyers, active participation in governance, and a book of business.
These articles discuss the issue.
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We like two-tiered partnership structures and, for most law firms, they make a lot of sense for a lot of reasons.
Simply stated, owners of law firms should act and contribute like owners, not employees. And that means, among other things, mentoring younger lawyers, active participation in governance, and a book of business. There’s more to it than time served.
The two-tiered structure enables the firm to keep competent legal technicians who’ve been around awhile and have much to contribute – but don’t bring what it takes to be an owner – on the payroll.
