Walker Clark
Worldview Archives
Law Firms Without Borders: Challenging Trends in Cross-Border Legal Services
Although law firms today face a seemingly vast array of strategic, operational, and management challenges arising from the globalization of the legal services industry, there are at least five emerging trends that characterize law firms that are successfully building profitable cross-border and multinational practices, even when based in only one office or country.
This paper, presented at the 2022 Annual Conference of the American Bar Association International Law Section, on 29 April 2022, describes these five trends, based on observations and research by the author and other Walker Clark consultants in law firms over the past twenty years.
The Law Firm of the Future: A Culture of Resilience
This is the final installment of a series of posts that have described and explored characteristics that will determine which law firms remain successful in the legal services industry of the future, and what law firms can do now to build them into their operations and professional cultures.
The bottom line for all of this can be described in a single word: resilience.
Will 2022 be the year when everything changed?
For most law firms, internal operations and client service processes will not be the same in 2022 as before the COVID-19 pandemic. Many law firms have already announced how what began as temporary adjustments have already become, or soon will become, permanent components of their practice.
These changes will have substantial effects of law firm finances, lawyer performance, profitability, and in many cases, partner compensation structures and formulas.
There will be many responses by law firms around the world, but one response that will almost always be fatal eventually will be to throw up one's hands and say, "We'll figure it out as we go along — one problem at a time."
COVID-19 Update: Resilient Leadership in a Time of Crisis
Resilience has become a big buzz-word in the business world during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the legal services industry is not immune from it.
But what does resilient leadership look like in a law firm? How do the leaders of a law firm — both the titular ones and the de facto ones — successfully guide their organizations through bad times?
This article, first published in Walker Clark Worldview in 2015 and updated for the current crisis management context, offers six actions to build resilient leadership in a law firm. Remember, the goal is not just to get through the current storms, but to emerge from them stronger than before. To do this, everyone in a legal services organization — but especially in law firms — needs to deal with some very disquieting questions.
What will law firms look like in 2049?
Herbert Smith Freehills CEO Mark Rigotti has published a thought-provoking article in today's on-line edition of LegalWeek.
As we start 2019, his comments should be "required thinking” for lawyers everywhere.
Three Things to Think About Now as You Think About the Future
Law firm leaders and planners — indeed, all lawyers — are right to be concerned about the future of the legal profession. We can expect significant changes, powered by increasingly sophisticated client expectations and the more powerful service delivery capabilities of advanced technology, to redefine what a "law firm" will look like and how it will operate in the 2020s...
...which are only a few months away.
Listening to Learn
What is the most important thing that a law firm or group of lawyers can do to respond better to fast change in their market?
Making Sense of the Chaos
The erratic attempts at policy coming from the Trump government in the United States have made commercial and financial prospects more unpredictable than perhaps in any period since the 1930s. Many investors and business people, as well as traditionally friendly governments, now wonder, often with good reason, whether the United States can be trusted to honor its international commitments at any level of enterprise or international engagement.
These forces and risks ultimately affect almost every law firm with any significant international or regional practice. This is a real challenge for the legal profession, because clients traditionally have looked to lawyers and law firms for analysis and problem solving in uncertain times. Yet the business futures of many of those firms are perhaps even less certain than those of their clients.
Every law firm — without exception — needs a Chief Innovation Officer.
No matter how large, how famous, or how successful your law firm has been in the past...
...if you want to increase the chances of your law firm still being in business ten years from now, you must have a Chief Innovation Officer.
Sorry, there are no exceptions.
Understanding Paradigms
Two of the biggest challenges for the Walker Clark "futures practice" are to break down the paradigms that prevent our clients from seeing the future — and sometimes even today — clearly, and to stimulate genuinely innovative responses.
Leadership in Times of Change
Law firm leaders tell us “We now have to accept change as the status quo."
And this means making judgment calls when there is insufficient time to find perfect solutions, or even to get all of the partners to agree.
Survival Tools for Small and Midsize Law Firms
Law firms — indeed, most professional services firms — will be confronted by some formidable challenges between now and the year 2030. Consolidation of the legal market, the emerging dominance of large service providers with national and global capabilities, a continued profitability crunch, and increased competition for professional talent are probably the most obvious threats to continued success.
Independent small and midsize firms are the most vulnerable.
New Paradigms and Old Lessons for Cyberlawyers
Technology has been a fundamental component of the practice of law for a quarter-century; but most law firms have failed to understand how it is fundamentally changing – indeed, already has fundamentally changed – the practice of law.
Law firms must continue to evolve. Not all will be able to do so.
You have decided to change your partner compensation system. What’s the next step?
It sometimes seems as if there is an almost infinite range of structures and options for partner compensation systems in law firms. Choosing among them can be a challenge for anyone.
The biggest challenge for most law firms, however, is actually making the change, once they have decided what it will be.
Learning from the Dragon: The Magic Circle Law Firms in China
Some foreign law firms are learning some hard lessons from the Chinese legal market.
The Lawyer has published a very interesting "long read" article on the disappointments that some prominent foreign firms, especially Magic Circle firms like Linklaters and Allen & Overy, are experiencing in their China practices. In "Why the Magic Circle is Struggling in China,” Yun Kriegler has summarized recent problems that some foreign firms are experiencing as the Chinese legal market matures.
Some of the observations and comments might describe some aspects of your firm, as well.
“Something’s wrong.”
We all know when "something's wrong" – whether we act on it or not. There is this place of inquietude in our thoughts that tells us "something's wrong" - whether in our relationships, in our careers, or in our organizations.
Is your law firm ambicultural?
A managing partner of a client law firm of Walker Clark recently told me, "The problem with our firm is that we have too many opportunities and too many good ideas. At the end of the day we are like dogs chasing our own tails."
This is a frequent phenomenon in successful law firms.
Innovation: The Small Firm’s Secret Weapon?
In an era when the legal profession is buzzing about what some claim to be the inevitable triumph of “Big Law,” small and midsize firms are defying these predictions of their doom.
One of the ways that they are doing this is by innovation in how they deal with clients and deliver legal services faster, less expensively, and with better results.
The Vortex Just Over the Horizon: Strategy, Succession, and Governance
Most of these firms are midsize firms (for their respective markets) that have enjoyed fast growth and financial success over the past 15 to 20 years. Their partners feel, with considerable justification, that they "are at the top of their games."
As these same partners look into the middle distance of 2020 to 2025, the most perceptive of them see serious problems ahead. Another of our clients recently referred to this as "our vortex — a place just over the horizon were several forces could come together in a way that could put in jeopardy everything that we have achieved and maybe even sink us."
Change Management and Strategic Success
Over the years — and especially in the past eight years — our firm has observed a direct positive link between the skill with which a law firm manages change and its return on investment in strategic planning.
