Walker Clark
Worldview Archives
When Cash Flow Dries Up
The Colorado River in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico no longer flows into the Sea of Cortez. Instead, due to diversion for irrigation upstream, it evaporates in the desert about nine kilometers away.
Many law firms are experiencing an analogous situation with cash flow during the COVID-19 crisis.
Here are three tips to keep at least some money in your firm's revenue pipeline during these difficult times.
Six Months from Failure?
An article posted today in the Law Society Gazette suggests that as many as 5,000 small English law firms and solo practices could be forced out of business within the next six months. Most of these firms are retail firms, or "high street" firms, that primarily serve individual clients and small businesses in relatively small matters, such as real estate conveyancing.
The problem is cash flow.
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.
Business Intimacy in an Age of Social Distancing
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has introduced social distancing as a basic business practice.
We also need to master the skills of business intimacy.
Even If You Don't Have a COVID-19 Plan
Effective crisis management involves more than just good planning. It also is a valuable learning experience.
Most law firms have been caught unprepared for the short-term and potential long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether you have a well-developed tested plan, no plan at all, or something in-between, one of the most important things that you can do is to document all the practical problems that you have encountered in responding to the pandemic.
A Quick — But Not Easy — COVID-19 Strategic Checklist for Law Firms
The March 9, 2020, issue of Bloomberg Businessweek contains a practical strategic checklist to "make your company disaster-proof-ish."
The nine steps listed in the article apply with full force to law firms, especially small and midsize ones. It should be required reading for every law firm managing partner.
Considering a new practice area? Consider outsourcing.
Your firm has decided that you should open a new practice area or expand an existing one.
You have the lawyers that you need to deliver a credible service to an increasingly demanding legal market.
What else do you need?
A Four-Day Work Week for Law Firms?
There has been considerable discussion recently about whether a four-day work week promotes greater individual and group productivity.
Some of this appears to be relevant to law firms.
What would your law firm have to do to move to a four-day work week?
“More Law” not “Big Law”
Service delivery capability, not size, is what will determine the profitability — and perhaps the survival — of most traditional law firms between now and 2030.
Women as Emerging Leaders of the Global Legal Profession
Women lawyers have substantially increased their presence and prominence in law firms worldwide, especially in the common-law jurisdictions of the Caribbean region.
This process is not finished.
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.
Metrisiphobia
Why are some lawyers afraid of performance measurements?
In many cases, it is because the management of the firm doesn't understand, and therefore fail to communicate, the benefits and advantages of better performance measurement for each lawyer.
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.
“Black Box” or “Black Hole”
Some law firms use "black box" systems for partner compensation because they want to avoid internal disputes among partners.
A former partner’s case against a major U.S. law firm points out how these systems often can make things worse.
What is your business plan for 2020?
Yes, not next year but two years from now.
But even if your law firm is not prepared to move to two-year business planning, the suggestions in this article will help you to improve successful results next year.
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.
“New Law”: When Being an Excellent Lawyer is not Good Enough
As one managing partner of a U.S. law firm recently commented, "Today we have to be experts in subjects that they never taught in law school, not even five years ago. Being an excellent lawyer is no longer good enough."
Advising clients about compliance with international economic sanctions is one such challenging "new law" area.
Why don’t they want to become partners?
This is not just something that we can blame on "the Millennials."
For the past 20 years, partners from law firms of all sizes, in almost every part of the world, frequently have told me that they can't understand why so many of their best associates and non-equity partners decline the offer of equity partnership.
Partner Compensation and Individual Partner Profitability
Even the most effective partner compensation systems sometimes have difficulty basing a partner's remuneration on the profitability of each partner’s practice.
This is because they try to take too simplistic an approach to a complex and highly individual concept.
