This post scrapes the bottom of pessimism. Still, the mismatch that must happen between relatively uninformed lawyers and the savvy partners they presume to direct deserves comment. So did the Emperor’s clothes. We make three assumptions about inside lawyers who have retained outside counsel to give advice in an area…
Lisa Hart, the CEO of Acritas, shared research on what law departments find effective when law firms solicit business from them. These five attributes of pitches come from her presentation at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession conference three weeks ago. Acritas surveyed…
One of the most profound conclusions I drew from Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance (Princeton Univ. 2010) concerns the ageless debate: should a law department base retentions on the law firm or the individual partner. The iconic strip serves as a useful…
Change comes so hard between a law department and a law firm because they have to be in reasonable synch. Their respective champions of change need to be in roughly the same psychological space. Imagine two bell curves of willingness to embrace change, one for law departments and one for…
When a British newspaper obtained an enormous pile of receipts from politicians who might have filed bogus personal expenses, it put them online and invited the public to help spot abuses. A clever app let anyone look at a receipt and flag it as dodgy. The paper honored those with…
Consultants love to recommend comprehensive processes through which law departments tell their key law firms how the firms are doing. In an ideal world, such full-scale evaluations need training, software, databases, forms, number crunching, meetings, roll-out plans, post-mortems, interviews, and complicated activities galore. Consultants thrive on all that hustle. The…
An experienced marketing consultant, Dan Ross, said something worth pondering. He spoke about law firm brands at the conference two weeks past at Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession. Ross said that customers often choose a brand because of how that brand helps define the customer’s…
Practice groups in law firms make sense for both them and their clients. If you are a law department lawyer, however, and a partner from a law firm touts the firms “[Fill-in-the-blank] Practice Group,” what should you find out about to determine the Group’s value to you and your client?…
Much was said about law firm brands at an excellent conference organized by Mitt Regan of Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession. As summarized memorably by one speaker, a law firm’s brand is its “promise to clients,” in the words of several law firm marketers and…
At the recent conference of Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, Lisa Hart, the CEO of Acritas, shared research data on why law departments retain the law firms they do. In the course of her remarks she said that Acritas has observed “an increasing focus on…