Categories
Legal Fees

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid

I once proposed raising our hourly rates and was met with furious resistance by the head of our litigation department who assured me that no assessment officer would ever permit lawyers to charge the amounts that I had proposed. He was a brilliant litigator and he was completely correct. However, he was not much of a businessperson and had not considered how rarely our accounts were assessed. I was more than willing to lose all of the assessments and rake in the extra dollars on more than 99% of our files.

Categories
Murray The Wannabe Feminist

Men Talking About Moms at the Partnership Table

Those of you who do not attend partners meetings may not know that a common agenda item is why the associates are not working hard enough.

And those of you who follow the statistics are aware that only 25% of partners in Canadian law firms are female. This means that the problem is primarily defined by men, who identify the mothers of young children as part of the problem.  Which indeed they are since they often undertake a disproportionate share of the childcare responsibilities and have less time to bill hours.

Categories
Law Firm Management

Loose Lips and Sinking Ships

Law firm partnerships like to project the image of a cohesive unit.  One strategy that they employ is to insist that although Partners may disagree with each other in a Partners’ meeting, once they leave the room, they all must support the group’s decision.

Another is to require that Partners act as though they like each other, especially when they don’t.

Categories
Law Students and Young Lawyers

Some Stuff Matters. Some Not So Much.

This is for the young folks looking for jobs in private practice early in their careers. Here is what matters and what does not matter so much. Ignore this at your own peril (and I am sure that a great many of you will both ignore it and eventually be in peril.)

Categories
Legal Fees

In Defense of the Billable Hour

The other day I heard a story about a furniture store in Toronto that was known to cater to the wealthy. The owner purchased an unusual item in Vietnam for twenty dollars. He brought it back to his store and promoted it as a one-of-a-kind item from an exotic destination. He sold it to someone with more money than brains for $10,000. The person who told me the story swears that she has fifth-hand knowledge of the incident and that it is absolutely true. Having shopped in that store once, I do not doubt it.

Welcome to the concept of value billing. Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them.

Categories
Law Firm Management

Yoga, Mental Health, and Law Firms

If any among you have not yet happened upon the writings of H.L. Mencken, you should correct that. Among his many pithy quotes are the following gems:

  1. Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
  2. Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
  3. Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

One of H.L. Mencken’s quotes that seems particularly apt for law firm management is this one: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Categories
Law Firm Management

A Retirement Primer for Slow Partners

I recently wrote an article titled, “You are Old. We are Greedy.  Get the Hell Out!”  In that article, I lamented the fact that law firms often nudge (or push, or shove) lawyers out of their firms when they hit their sixties. If you did not like that one, you probably will not like this one either, so just keep scrolling.

Categories
Law Firm Management

You are Old. We are Greedy. Get the Hell Out!

Since professional firms are usually partnerships, the well-compensated people at the top of the pyramid are partners, not employees. As a result, all of that stuff that protects employees from discrimination on the basis of age in the Human Rights Code does not apply to them, at least where I live in Ontario, Canada.

With that over-simplified but pithy summary of the law, I have explained how partners in accounting firms and law firms can be squeezed out in their early sixties.

Categories
Law Firm Management

Keep it Stupid, Simple

Back in 1996 my sister became a doctor. No, not the type that the cabin crew calls for desperately at 35,000 feet when some overworked lawyer has a heart attack. One of the other kinds. In my sister’s case, she holds a Doctorate in Psychology, which is often quite useful given the level of crazy in my family.

For her doctoral thesis, my sister designed an experiment which examined, among other things, the effect of gender on the diagnostic process. She sent a questionnaire to medical doctors and psychologists describing the symptoms of a patient and asking them to suggest a diagnosis. The description of the symptoms received by each clinician was the same, except for one tiny discrepancy. In some cases the patient was described as a woman with certain symptoms typically associated with premenstrual syndrome and which she reported experiencing over several days before the commencement of menstruation. In the others, the patient was described as a man who experienced the same symptoms every four or five weeks.

Categories
The Mentality and Attitudes of Lawyers

Look Over Here!

There is an old story about a fellow who was searching for his lost keys under a streetlight. Various people came over to him, asked what he was looking for, and joined in the search. Eventually a lawyer came by and asked the same question but then followed up and asked him where he had lost his keys. The fellow pointed to a dark corner. When the lawyer asked why he was looking for his keys over here if he had lost them over there, the fellow explained that it was too dark to find anything where he lost them.