Categories
Law Firm Management

Is it the Lazy Junior Lawyer’s Fault?

Tali Green recently (sarcastically)asked the following question on LinkedIn: “Are lazy and sub-par juniors contributing to the mental health crisis in the legal profession?”

Categories
Client Development

Being Brilliant is Over-Rated

Way back before the cell phone, we had a telephone in our reception area for clients to use. At the same time, my doctor had a sign in his reception area advising patients that the doctor’s phone was for his staff’s use and clients could use a payphone in the lobby. The difference? We lawyers had to market ourselves to find clients and then convince them to pay our bills. My doctor worked under a government health care system and did not have to worry about either of those things.

Categories
Law Firm Management

Aren’t Non-Equity Partners Really Just Glorified Associates?

With a nod to the danger of generalizing, I would have to say that as a group, I like non-equity partners (“NEPs”) just as much, if not better, than I like equity partners. They are often people who are primarily interested in practicing law and doing well by their clients, as opposed to promoting themselves and reaching the top of the earnings heap.

On the other hand, I don’t think much of the whole concept of non-equity partnership.

Categories
Fluff

Could Someone Please Pay Me Off Already?

I have been railing against the establishment in the legal profession for going on four years already. You would think that by now I would have annoyed at least a few well-established lawyers with deep pockets.

It seems to me that by this time someone would have offered to pay me at least six figures to abandon my principles, put down my metaphorical pen, and shut up.

Categories
Law Students and Young Lawyers

I’ll Tell You What He Didn’t Do

Those of you who read my stuff from time to time know that when I retired, I moved to the country, bought a pick-up truck, and started listening to country music. One song I like is by Carly Pearce, and it has the following lyrics:

Categories
Legal Tech

What is the Left Hand Doing?

Ogilvy, Cope, Porteous, Montgomery, Renault, Clarke & Kirkpatrick was the first law firm that I worked for. It is now known as Norton Rose Fulbright.  The law firm where I spent most of my career was once called Pallett, Valo, Barsky, Kuzmarov & Keel. It is now Pallett Valo LLP.

What is with all of the name shortening? It has something to do with branding. The idea is to project to clients that the firm is a single entity, and that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

To a large extent it just ain’t so. Law firms are comprised of individual lawyers, often tenuously held together for the moment because their self-interests happen to align. One of the corollaries of this truth is that communication within a law firm is not always stellar. And when internal communication suffers, mistakes happen and opportunities are missed.

For example, the real estate department handles the sale of a house but does not communicate the new address to the corporate department. The house was the residence address of a director and the registered office address of a corporation. Nobody updates the filings. The director whose house was sold does not receive important correspondence. Bad things happen. The client is unamused.

The client wants to know why the law firm did not update its records when it handled the damn real estate transaction. Cue unhappy clients, negligence claims and other bad stuff.

Or perhaps poor communication results in lost opportunities to impress clients.  Let’s take the example of a firm which drafts wills. It starts each new client engagement by sending an information questionnaire. If the request is made of a long-standing client, the client might be impressed if the questionnaire is pre-populated with information from the real estate department about which properties the client owns and from the corporate department about the companies in which the client own shares.  Perhaps the client has invested in mortgages and that information can also be pre-populated. Or maybe the client is recently divorced (the firm having handled the domestic reorganization) and the questionnaire asks the appropriate questions for that situation.

But in many law firms this type of communication is not going to happen, and the client will be left with the impression that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing at their lawyer’s office.

What if the law firm’s information technology systems talked to each other? How many problems would that solve, and what types of opportunities for better client service would that present? Doesn’t it seem kind of obvious that this is the direction in which legal tech should be headed?

Appara thinks so.  Check out information about their new platform here:  https://bit.ly/3RZSs0j

Categories
Work/Life Balance

To All the Law Students Who I have Loved (or Just Liked a Bit)

I write a lot about work/life balance, mental health, and the pursuit of things other than money in the legal profession.

My wife (and lawyer) Maureen McKay has laughed at me about this (among other things.) She has said, “Murray, if any of the young people who you counsel to pursue a balanced lifestyle were to have applied to your firm back when you were hiring Associates and talked about working reasonable hours and reserving evenings and weekends for their families, you would not have hired them.”

She’s right. But, in my defense, it’s complicated.

Categories
People I Met Practicing Law

Law Firm Primer For Articling Students and New Associates – Part Eight: The Chief Marketing Officer

Those of you who have been following this series know that I said that Part Seven was the final article in the series. It turns out that I lied.

The purpose of the series is to set out the questions which Articling Students and new Associates should figure out about their firms when deciding whether to stay there over the long-term.

This time it is about the Chief Marketing Officer (“CMO”).

Categories
Law Firm Management

Reap What You Sow

Hey law firms!  Have you given much thought to your partners approaching retirement, and calculated what their retirement may cost you? 

Categories
Law Firm Management

Reading Between The Lines

At my law firm, we had great human resources management. It was so good that information was hard to come by. In fact, it was just about impossible to get any really good gossip out of management until it had made its way down to the partners, after which it became more readily available.

Since we had some really smart people at our firm (as well as a few who were not so smart), it should not be surprising that we had to compensate for the lack of information flow by learning to read between the lines.