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November 25, 2006
Getting it together for 2007.
Clients, employees, delivering services. Step back from your canvas a little. Get back to the real work of long-term planning. Tough decisions. Fine tuning. A brush stroke here and there. Peek out from under your billable hours during the holiday rush, and think-- maybe do a little self-ass kicking. Employees and clients are your main assets. Who at your firm gets it? Who will never get it--even though you like him or her? How best to staff this or that project? New types or niches of work? Which clients are draining you and need a new law firm? Are there new clients to target? This is the hard but joyous discipline of renewal. While you are at it, see Tom Collins' post "Nine Steps to Improved Law Firm Financial Performance in the Coming Year" at More Partner Income. Or anything Tom writes.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Music for Young Lawyers: "Another Billable Christmas"
Heads up, associate lawyers, but also partners because you have more money. First, turn your speakers up. Just keep your meters running, Bluebooks out, and billable hours high (to hit 2350 by December 31, if you're on the wimpy side). Then, to get you in the mood for the holiday season, and to help you work with a song in your stomach, see New York lawyer Lawrence Savell's "Merry Lexmas From The Lawtunes"! Larry gives you a great sampler at his Lawtunes.com site, but you'll want to purchase the full "Lexmas" CD and other CDs for your very own.
Maybe buy some for your Mom, and high school friends, who won't be seeing you that much this Christmas anyway. My favorite could be "Santa And I Are Gonna Pull An All-Nighter On Christmas", or maybe "All I Want for Christmas Is A Stomach Lining" - not sure yet. Oh yeah, Larry, the composer and creator, told me in an e-mail that that's him singing on these. Even if Larry weren't a friend of my friend Patrick Lamb, I'd hire the guy. He's got Moxie, Madness and The Spirit. And he knows how to treat associates. Now get back to work.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
Don't try this at work: Stern dumps (on) his "client base".
From Forbes.com, see Has King of All Media been dethroned? Whether you like him or not, Howard Stern is a great man, good soul and extraordinarily successful entertainer who has done gutsy things for radio, comedy and the 1st amendment. But taking his show in the middle of a hugely popular run on a syndicated CBS-owned FM radio station to Sirius satellite radio in 2004 and in effect repudiating his "client base"--for whatever reasons--was a dumbass move. The guy and the un-PC world he created will survive, but there's a lesson here: if it works great, don't dump on it.
Posted by JD Hull at 03:20 AM | Comments (0)