Walker Clark
Worldview Archives
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.
Are you a law firm or a condominium?
This is an important question, especially for small and midsize law firms that want to have a future.
Many smaller law firms are firms in name only. The partners share a common brand, office space, and expenses, but almost nothing else.
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."
The Succession Balance
First-generation law firms face a special challenge when planning and managing the transition of the firm from the founding partners to the "next generation.”
How strong is your bridge to the future?
We expect to see an unprecedented number of law firms go through their first generational transition of leadership between now and the mid-2020s, as founding partners retire and the next generation assumes leadership of the firm.
This will not be a smooth transition for many small and midsize law firms, especially in emerging and recently emerged legal markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
This post is not about the Chambers and Partners Awards for Excellence.
Like some of you, when I reviewed this year's short list for the Chambers and Partners Awards for Excellence for Latin America, at first I was a little surprised by some of the very good firms that were not finalists for these prestigious and coveted awards.
This post is not an attempt to debate or explain the short list selection criteria that the awards team at Chambers and Partners uses. Instead, I want to share two observations about the firms that did, and did not, make the list.
