What About Paris?

March 11, 2010

Patrick Lamb: Get used to it, Jack.

It's time to step back and re-think things when a hardworking optimistic trial lawyer and innovator like Pat Lamb writes this: "The "good old days" are not coming back". Quoting a Hildebrandt report he links to:

We enter 2010 with little prospect of a robust recovery and with mounting evidence that the profession is entering an era in which the fundamental economics of legal practice are likely to be significantly different.

Posted by JD Hull at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2010

Read it, brush yourself off, get to work.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:12 AM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2010

Start-up clients: A "miserable and tortuous" hell?

For over ten years, our firm has shied away from representing start-ups--even those run by savvy entrepreneurs with past successes and big bucks. To be more precise, we have routinely run from them.

Reason: Start-ups are not generally sophisticated users of legal services. They cannot distinguish between, say, a David Boies or James Freund, and JoJo the Demented Car Accident Lawyer. Although creative and way fun, start-up people are moreover (a) paranoid about lawyers ("lawyers are all alike and our enemy"), (b) flat-out cheap and/or (c) too wild and crazy to listen to us.

But we have been wrong about many things. Here's a gem we missed last month at Venture Hacks, guest-authored by Scott Walker, a Los Angeles-based lawyer with a solid background, and an interesting and relatively new boutique firm focusing on start-up clients. It's called "Top 10 Reasons Why Entrepreneurs Hate Lawyers". My favorites: No. 5. "Because they spend too much time on insignificant issues”. And No. 1--but you'll have to see for yourself.

Like the undersigned, Walker's a transplant to Southern California from the East and still keeps offices back there. He even mentions Skadden M&A legend and author James Freund. Freund's now decades-old classic on "lawyering" was required reading for new associates in the D.C. office I worked in at my old firm, marked the first time anyone married client service to substantive practice, and (unfortunately) would still seem revolutionary to most lawyers practicing today.

Walker also cites my talented friend Tom Kane, the lawyer-consultant who I had the honor to meet in late 2008.

So I was intrigued. There is hardly anything in Walker's post with which I disagree. None of its content is new to my firm or this blog. But it is written from the viewpoint of clients I generally think are without a clue about evaluating legal services. We do appreciate Walker's piece is in part a marketing exercise--but what isn't? (My post here and others at this blog imply that if you are an experienced GC from a publicly-traded company, please call; if you are not, don't even think about it.)

While I still think of working for start-ups as a miserable and tortuous hell, the post and the related fact that Walker's credentialed law firm specializes in that work--apparently without morning drinking, Thorazine, or routine institutionalizations of its lawyers--makes us re-think things. Nicely done. Thanks to Allison Shields at Legal Ease for bringing Walker's piece to our attention.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (3)

January 18, 2010

Hassan: You can't teach attitude.

Sorry--but I'm no Stephen Covey. Most employees cannot be "saved". Burning inside 99.5% of all employees worldwide is an overwhelming ambition to Get Home, Eat Twinkies and Watch Wrestling.

What About Clients?, July 2, 2009

But some of us keep make-believing we can "inspire" attitude. We get hurt. Worse, buyers, customers, and clients get hurt.

This MSNBC video is worthwhile. The attitude "can't be taught in a course" part starts at about 2:50. A native of Pakistan, Fred Hassan was chairman and CEO of Schering-Plough from 2003 until late 2009, when in merged with Merck & Co. (Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. outside of North America). Hassan is now on Time Warner's Board.

Nearly everyone sane believes what Hassan is saying. But hardly anyone (except maybe Jack Welch) has the sand to both say and act on it. You don't need to be mega-rich and have attended HBS to tell the truth. Straight talk is not a luxury of the world's elite.

Say it out loud first: "Very few humans will amount to the dream employees my customers and my firm want and deserve."

To be sure, "nice", "intelligent", "good", "talented" and even "brilliant" is not enough. It was never enough. You need people on fire. Is that what you have? Do you feel as though you have to demand quality? (If "yes", a bad sign.) Are you hiring and keeping people who are poor to mediocre--and then "pretending" they are good or will come around? (If "yes", a bad plan.)

Unless you have it in writing from your buyers, customers and clients that retaining "so-so" employees thrills them, get a new strategy.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:57 AM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2010

More on law schools providing value some day and hopefully before we all die.

Or, "You Got Anyone On That Campus Who Can Chew Gum, Cite-Check, And Look You In The Eye At The Same Time?". We note that practical skills are being mentioned more in writings about law school education. Bravo. Show us. We're tired of wasting our money.* Last month we wrote about American law schools--and this time only a few people complained. More recently we noticed these: "Problems in the law school 'business plan'" at From Burke to Kirk and Beyond, which shares a few things in common, mostly good, with this blog, and "The changing face of the early stages of law practice" at Libertas et Memoria, which comments on the recent ABA story about a possible new premium placed on practical skills that got us so excited we forgot to fire people last Friday.

Finally, an interesting excerpt from FBTK:

Law schools will be the last to abandon speculative debt as the means of financing themselves through their willing applicants, because a very large number of applicants are smarty-pants who couldn't make it as scientists, engineers, bankers, financiers, etc. The applicant doesn't realize how speculative his investment is until he is one to four years in.

*WAC? could care less about student debt. Your problem, Teacups. Don't any of you have family money? Enrique, would you be good enough to decant the Port? Kindly leave the bottle as well.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:44 PM | Comments (2)

January 13, 2010

The Unbearable Lightness of Lawyers?

Risk-aversion can be annoying. Get off your knees. Tell the client what it can do, too. What it should do. Take a stand. And just say it. See "The 7 Habits of Highly Useless Corporate Lawyers" and "Just Say it: More Good Things on Good Writing".

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:45 AM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2009

On American law schools.

Law schools are not in business to pay students to be trained. Students pay the tuition--not the reverse. The schools don't pay the students to be there to learn. Should law firms be any different?

Marc Randazza is a San Diego-based First Amendment specialist who writes The Legal Satyricon. Like the undersigned, he is hard-working, works out of several offices, and is obviously having fun. He is irreverent, "not prissy", and not concerned about what people think. Randazza's his own man, and a straight-up individualist. In short, an American.

None of which would be that unusual except that Marc is an American lawyer. And let's face it. Being eccentric, wild and/or "edgy" in American Lawyer Land is not a tough mark to hit. Just wear a bow-tie, tasseled loafers and a very dark trench coat. But maybe, say, in public, and on Fridays, and wear them all on the same day?

Anyway, almost a year ago, Marc wrote "The Worthlessness of American Legal Education", a piece we admired and which is certainly worth your time to read. And that theme--what should we expect now from law schools, anyway?-- has legs at Marc's blog and others.

We've written about it here at WAC? quite a bit--enough to know it's a very touchy subject.

Last year we wondered aloud--and just weeks before the federal government's late "announcement" that there was a "recession goin' on"--on whether law students and recent grads should start paying law firms (yes, new lawyers pay the firms) for training to be lawyers who could add value in a shorter amount of time.

In fact, our August 27, 2008 post was probably our most clicked-on but yet "unpopular" piece: "Should associates pay their law firms in the first 2 to 3 years?"

American law schools are some of the most impressive places of higher education in the world. They are exciting intellectually, great think tanks for business, and attract mega-talented humans, particularly in the quality of faculty. They hatch presidents, senators, captains of industry, great authors and diplomats. But many law firms these days are meeting new grads who won't be even marginally productive for two to three years. Or longer. And new grads--at a shop that actually tries to train you--often (not always) "get more" than the firm does out of the relationship in those years.

Law schools, certainly, are not in business to pay students to be trained. Students pay the tuition--not the reverse. The schools get the money. The schools don't pay the students to be there to learn.

Which gets us wondering again. Why should law firms pay new grads--even top students from fine schools--if they are often years away from being productive, and the law schools, for all their promise, potential and cache, are doing about 10% of the lawyer-creating job?

In many instances, the new grad is the only real beneficiary in the law firm-employee relationship. Turnover everywhere is relatively high. Many firms get zilch--and start over again. The current situation is bad for clients because it compromises value--and it cannot be good for students who think they are equipped to add value when they are not even close.

We suspect that legal education in recent years appears to have done many students a disservice by making them think that law school--by its very nature of being focused on teaching you "to think" like a lawyer--could ever give students more than 10% of what they need to be full-gauged lawyers and problem solvers.

Law done right is a hands-on profession and takes everything you have, and organizational and managerial skills the schools cannot teach or be expected to teach.

"Thinking like a lawyer" does not inform your every synapse, breath, and moment.

Moreover, lawyering is not necessarily a "PC", gentle or even gentile culture. Are the schools telling them it is?

To be fair, the substance of the work at a client-focused law firm doing higher-end problem-solving (in deals, courts, international work, etc.) may be very cerebral and challenging. A feast of exhilarating ideas and causes. Lucky people leading a Life of the Mind.

But the actual tone of the same place is more like Rahm Emanuel or John Wayne commanding brainstorming, fully-engaged troops. It will be less like Mr. Rogers or Alan Alda whispering kind and nurturing things to the latest crop of Teletubbies.

Bosses at law firms may be Coif, former Law Review editors, and writers of famous Matthew Bender tomes. But they are still bosses who "want stuff". They do not understand (or even like) younger people who can't get it for them. Many law firms are dominated by type-A problem solvers with strong personalities who live to get things done. Let's hope that never changes. It's good for the customers.

You may ask: has the "recession" or downturn in the global economy helped? Has it made students and graduates more likely to stick it out, and compensate for things they may not have gained from their legal educations? Are students and new grads "stepping up" to train themselves? Answer: No. We, at least, are not seeing it. Nothing has changed.

And finally there's the question: Is it really necessary for law students to be in classroom settings for three years?

At a minimum, we wish that law schools could convey a few truths, and what might be called "old verities", to part-time clerks, summer clerks and grads:

1. Even for the most brilliant, motivated, resourceful and ambitious people, law practice is time-intensive and very hard--especially in the beginning.

2. Graduating from law school with top grades and willing to give practice the old Siwash try is only the beginning of your travail. Again, practicing law is hard. Even harder to learn how. And hard to maintain as years roll by at a comfortable and honorable level of quality. You don't get to say this much: "Sorry, Jack, but I'm on my break."

3. Real-life client problems pose extraordinary ambiguity and complexity (you can't "Google" the answers; you may fret over some projects and have to stay late; at first, it may interfere with your relationships and your "real life").

4. Maybe you'll find that private practice is not for you. It's not about the lawyers, courtliness, lawyer-centric cults of "professionalism", bar associations, wearing cool suits, prestige, money or being in a special club. If you stay in it for all that stuff, even if you make big bucks, you will regret it. No, you will hate it.

5. Clients. Talented people with JDs are legion. It's really about those you serve.

(Photo: The Situationist)

Posted by JD Hull at 03:22 AM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2009

Can we change how good clients think about lawyers?

The work of a bricklayer goes to the blue.
The knack of a mason outlasts a moon.
The hands of a plasterer hold a room together.
The land of a farmer wishes him back again.

--Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), author, editor, poet, Pulitzer winner.

But first: Hearse Horses, anyone? Do you love what you do? Step back from the canvas and try some simple tool sharpening. Bone up on your fundamentals, maybe. Your techniques. Do you need some new ideas? How does your firm do its work these days? Do you get things right? What do you teach associates?

Now step back further. What of this Lawyering Thing?

Clients? What is it you really do for them? You serve, right? You mix your products and services with an overall experience that makes you unique, right? Or are you and yours indistinguishable from the rest of the generic law cattle out there? Is your firm really different?

Step back again. Are you problem-solvers?

Or just part of an insular and self-important "club" that needs clients as equipment to pursue a daily game?

Does practicing law and serving turn you on? Or is it just a past choice you, or your partners, made--maybe one that hardened around you too long ago--and now regret?

Carl August Sandburg: "The lawyers, Bob, know too much..."

Too many people practice law who should not. Practicing law is hard.

Client service is just as hard. But many people with law degrees--there are way too many of us in the U.S.--don't get that. Or they don't love it. If either applies to you, or to your colleagues, it's not too late to "get it", to get it back, to love it (again or for the first time) or just to try something different and new.

The law is not for everyone. And to do it right day-in and -out is a hard order. A privilege, too.

If you wish to stay in the profession, try to make it what it can and should be. Visit our world-famous, annoying, counter-intuitive but dead-on accurate 12 Rules of Client Service. See "Rule Four: Deliver legal services that change the way clients think about lawyers".

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

November 15, 2009

Clients: How to ditch bad ones.

Just drop off the key, Lee. Even hard-working, über-competent and genuinely service-oriented companies--all 5 or 6 of them on the planet--have at one time or another found themselves with a client, or customer, they no longer "like". To deal with that problem, see "Top 10 Ways to Fire the Client from Hell" at InsideCRM.

It's full of useful tips for dealing with just-not-getting-it or lawyer-paranoid clients like (1) the bargain shopper, (2) the control freak, (3) the "one who's never satisfied" or (4) the client who sees evil and imperfections everywhere.

Posted by Tom Welshonce at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

September 21, 2009

Redux: Martindale-Hubbell: Should we all just say no?

Note: The following is from an August 5, 2008 post. Any new takes on this?

Is a Martindale-Hubbell listing worth it anymore?

We're not unhappy with the M-H ratings process; generally speaking, if done responsibly and without in effect requiring the "purchase" of the rating, a credible if imperfect ratings process for the global legal community makes lots of sense. And M-H accomplished that decades ago.* But, in view of other and newer ways for law firms to have visibility and credibility, the price of listings at M-H is now officially a rip-off. Lots of fine lawyers seem to be complaining about it, at least in private, both in the U.S. and non-U.S. It's not that Martindale hasn't tried. See, for example, at Law.com the piece "Martindale-Hubbell Gets a Makeover" (mentioning Avvo, LawLink and Legal OnRamp, as new alternatives for marketing, networking and lawyer ratings).

*Martindale-Hubbell is no joke. It has a fine, time-honored and even classy reputation, and a history of good work and real utility in the profession. Our firm, Hull McGuire, has actively and earnestly participated in the M-H ratings processes for years; we are happy with the ratings our lawyers received. But, in good times or bad times, the current cost to list firm attorneys for any size firm, with or without multiple offices, is prohibitive and should be resisted on principle given other alternatives. It just isn't worth it. We predict that lawyers will bolt in droves in the next 2 years.

Our humble take: as other ways to locate lawyers emerged, M-H never saw the light fast enough, and didn't successfully change or expand its other services to preempt a backlash. It continued to charge big listing fees that everyone complained about for years. More recently (say, the last 3 years), M-H expenses managed to stay in law firm budgets--but exceeded just about everyone's irritation levels. M-H listings now makes no business sense to anyone sane. Only the embarrassingly lame, gimmicky "Super Lawyer" concept could make Martindale look good these days.

Start the revolution?

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (2)

September 05, 2009

Plan B for recruiting "Grunts"?

The "elite" associates you recruited: Would they fight for your clients? Would they fight for anyone? (Columbia Pictures, 1981)

Uh, "associates", rather. But maybe grunts is the "right" word. Who said their life was ever supposed to be easy? Who without a love and yen for complexity, challenge and hard things in life would ever chose private law practice? Well, many young people are; frankly, the law is "too hard" for them--way too hard--and they are failing.

Not much fight in these humans, either. Not much gospel. Remember: we're not taking about divinity, forestry or hotel management grads. People who attend law schools are signing up for war. And we're often getting Teletubbies on Thorazine.

Don't look to blame law firms or their clients. The demands of practice have not changed very much in the last 30 years. Blame the other "us": parents, and law schools. We are raising and educating Mega-Wimps. And they are miserable in any demanding job.

The Point. Are we recruiting from the "right" schools? Plan A: law review from top schools. Plan B: non-elite law school grads. (Plan C: dirt poor kids from evening divisions who think any work is a great privilege and honor--we'll get there yet, and it's probably the answer.)

Plan B. While you think about it--and we are as we are fascinated by the subject--see this month's issue of American Lawyer magazine, and a piece by Ronit Dinovitzer and Bryant Garth, "Not That Into You". Dinovitzer and Garth find that graduates of lower-tier law schools are more appreciative of their jobs at large law firms, so they start those jobs with the intent to work towards partnership. But graduates of elite law schools are less satisfied with the long hours associated with those jobs, in part because they view them as mere stepping stones towards their actual target positions. Nevertheless, large law firms cling to the policy of preference for the elite graduates. Should they?

Our thanks for the heads up to our coach, spiritual leader, and lawyer's lawyer Ray Ward. They broke the mold on you, sir.

Posted by Rob Bodine at 12:51 AM | Comments (0)

August 27, 2009

Ambiguity: There are several quality answers and solutions.

There are no right answers, proven-out formulas, connect-the-dots kits.

The current winners--think Jobs, Murdoch, Eastwood, Drudge--are those who are custom-making solutions and brilliantly implementing them.

--Jane Genova

"E" at the Beach: Grateful to be a guy who could think on his own.

An acceptance of complexity, of subtlety, of unclear-ness. Do you hire people who have and embrace that with open eyes, excitement and vigor? And can think hard things through? Well, do you, Jack? Or do you attract the cookie-cutter crowd?

My problem: for more and more younger people in the workplace, novelty--which I view as gorgeous, sometimes elegant, and always beckoning--makes their heads explode.

Complexity. A messy problem. A "hard" thing.

They don't like it. They can't deal with it. They want a "form".

But great work doesn't have "forms". Am terribly sorry about that. You will just have to think on your own.

So here's a true gem we love--written in late December 2008--by Jane Genova at Law and More (subtitled "Deconstructing What Happens in Law"): "Managing Partners: Are Your Millennial Gen Associates Not Dealing With Ambiguity".

The issue for WAC? is not just one about the care-and-feeding of often delicate Gen-Y, the new, complex, and astonishingly intricate "tea cups" in your shop. How do your lawyers, other professionals and staff of any generation with undergraduate degrees in, say, engineering (no Aggie jokes, please) and accounting deal with the wonderful chaos of hard, complex, messy, unruly and--"worst" of all--novel problems?

To me, those are the fun ones--and often the only issues I want. But novelty makes lots of us fold.

For many projects, for a great client or for your firm, Western logic and/or "the usual procedures" cannot provide all the answers. You either have that awareness--or you don't. Most lawyers just don't.

And it's the reason even good clients perceive us as "half-there" technicians and mechanics who, somehow years ago, lost their common sense and any degree of creativity we once might have had.

Read Genova's valuable, perceptive thoughts.

Link, and Inspiration: Stephanie West Allen.

(from a previous WAC post)

Posted by JD Hull at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2009

Litigation: Lawyering, Real Life and a Little Zen.

Keep Your Beginner's Mind. The ability "to think like a lawyer"--what you get in law school and then polish in practice--is at most about 8 percent of what you need to be an effective lawyer. That's right, about 8 percent.*

Legal reasoning. Lots of people finally acquire it. Some are famously better and faster at it than others. A revered M&A lawyer wrote years ago that, at a minimum, it requires the ability to think about something that is "inextricably attached" to something else--but without thinking about that something else to which it's attached.

Legal reasoning is critical--but it's never enough by itself to become an outstanding lawyer. The rest is frame of mind: energy, ambition, organization, logistics-sense, re-thinking everything all the time, a take-charge orientation, genuine people skills, and an urgent passion to solve tough problems.

Two pieces of great news: By the age of 25 or so, many of us already have the above skills and orientation. If we do NOT have them, or have ALL of them, we can still get them.

Some important--but maybe not so great news: If you want to do higher end work--and be truly valuable, get that other 92 percent in place as soon as you can. Smart and even brilliant will not cut it. Brilliant people and lawyers with talent out the Wazoo and no organizational skills or discipline is one of the oldest and saddest stories on earth.

These days, and more than ever, training associates and paralegals to be effective and productive ($) quickly is much on the minds of employers. Get competent at all levels of problem-solving, and working at problem-solving with others.

It's still done through mentoring--but you--the "mentoree"--can't be passive. Demand to be trained well--and by someone who knows what they are doing. We're not paying you to take you by the hand, coddle you, or make you laugh. Your problem, younger folks.

Further, if you think you want to be a litigator or trial lawyer, you will also need Very Tough Hide--something which you can learn the hard way.

Finally, no matter what, you need The Will, and Big Ones.

Almost all of students we have interviewed in the last five years made law review, and will graduate at the top of their class. Again, not enough. Lawyers need to learn to think and act on their own from the first day. You need the traits listed above.

Think of it as an inside job.

If you are new, "steal our clients", please. Be that good. That will take a while. While you are learning, please understand that you are getting more than you are giving. You don't know much. (Not PC but true--get used to it.) So it's not unreasonable for us to ask you to try to do perfect research, editing and proofreading.

But we love your ideas, your first impressions, and the trick is to be confident enough to ask dumb questions and make comments. Often, your first impressions or "reactions" to a problem or project are very good--but we don't always hear them right away.

You may not know at first very much law, or how to apply it to facts for a fee, and then give the "right advice". But you have instincts evolving all the time--they have little to do with law school--that may surprise you. You had them all along. Perhaps see Alan Watts.

naughty child–
instead of his chores
a snow Buddha

“Gimme that moon!”
cries the crying
child

--by Kobayashi Issa, translated by David G. Lanoue (thanks to DG).

(From an earlier post, "Keep Your Beginner's Mind")

*Our blog, our law firm: our numbers.

Posted by JD Hull at 10:48 AM | Comments (2)

August 21, 2009

Client Town or Lawyer Town?

"The Lawyers", circa 1855, Honoré Daumier (1808-1879)

Are the three gentlemen in this famous sketch client-centric or "lawyer-oriented"? We will never know.

WLCs, maybe?

A WLC is a Weak or Wimpy Local Counsel engaged by your firm and/or your client for litigation or other contentious matters who, after being hired, instinctively, routinely, and most often inadvertantly place their relationships with local lawyers and other players in their jurisdiction ahead of the interests of your shared client, which is almost always "an outsider".

Signature noise: "I have to practice in this town." They are akin to rocks, plants, and household appliances. They are legion. They don't get it. Avoid them. See our October 2008 piece "Weak/Wimpy Local Counsel: The Next Epidemic?".

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

August 10, 2009

So what did your Employees do for you last week?

Get off your knees. Come out of the woods swinging and angry--like a bad-ass preacher of the Church of the Final Thunder. --The Value Guy

You seek value for your clients? We got some value for you right here, in your shop, where it all starts. If you are "training them" (support staff, paralegals, associates) properly, and giving them meaningful things to do, good for you. Make them part of your client work, and get them to "think like" (a) a client which wants problems solved and (b) you--the owner, shareholder or partner.

And on item (b), are they treating you like a client? What are employees doing for you this week? How are they adding value? Do they advance things--or hold you back? Are they buying into the ethos of great substantive work, and 24/7-availability client service--like it's a crusade, a religion, and a way of life? After all, you are only asking for the minimum there.

Practicing law correctly is hard.

Learning it is hard.

Client service is hard.

And a job is a privilege--not a right.

Expect something great from employees. "Training"? To be sure, it is likely a myth. Good associates and other support people train themselves, jump into the fray with energy and resolve, and learn by doing. You can't teach it. So find them.

If you have to spend additional time "training" or explaining things to employees, and you still want to keep them, that's fine.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:50 AM | Comments (0)

July 16, 2009

The Divine Mr. Greenfield: Policing Your Kool-Aid for You.

Because let's face it: a lot of us drink the work-life balance Kool-Aid before we even read the instructions. See Scott Greenfield's from-the-heart "'Cause You Got To Have Friends". This is the most eloquent writing we've seen this year on (1) the meaning of lawyering, (2) why clients matter most, and (3) the hard but important reality that there are simply no short-cuts in this profession. Excerpts:

There are clients, real people who suffer real consequences, as a result of the delusions perpetrated on the internet.

They come to lawyers believing them to be competent, even expert, and willing and capable of helping them, saving their lives sometimes. And the lawyer's primary focus is to get paid and be home by dinner, with the client merely the conduit for the transfer of revenue and proof of the mastery of the secret to success.

So I leave my niche in criminal law from time to time to be a voice in the wilderness, that we are not selling laundry detergent, but are lawyers, professionals, in whom people repose their trust. I've seen their children cry when their lawyers fail to fulfill their duty. The need to enjoy a happy lawyer life will never wipe away their tears.

The Divine Mr. G, without eyeglasses. Scott Greenfield worries about the the profession because you and the WLB consultants won't.

The Divine Ms. M never mailed it in, either.

Posted by Rob Bodine at 09:57 PM | Comments (1)

July 07, 2009

Indiana Ivy-Leaguer goes national, makes good: Above The Law Editor on "The Law School Indicator".

One well-done, smart and useful interview by one tough guy. Bravo, ATL Editor Elie Mystal. Publisher Lat: Give this man a raise already.

Posted by Rob Bodine at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

June 30, 2009

Speeding the progress to useful lawyer.

Here's one thought-out solution to the "low value-added" problem associated with starting lawyers. Over the last 18 months, other writers and commentators, in bits here, and pieces there, may have suggested what LOR co-founder Paul Lippe says here--but certainly not as well or as comprehensively. See at the June 22 AmLaw Daily Lippe's article, "Welcome to the Future: Time for Law School 4.0".

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2009

It hovers, takes hostages, and moves on to the next town.

"I see defeated people. They're everywhere. They walk around like everyone else. They don't even know they're defeated." It's a choice--in your life and in your work. You always know if you are "there". You just don't know how you got there. You started compromising on things you once embraced as essential. Redford sent us this short Seth Godin post called "On the Road to Mediocrity" about "settling along the way". Avoiding mediocrity? Keeping the monster at bay? WAC? is no Seth Godin. But our take is that great habits learned early on difficult work is step one. Step two is vigilance. The fine thing about posts like Godin's? If it bothers you, you needed to read it.

"I see people who keep mailing it in." (Buena Vista Pictures)

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2009

Towards a reinvented Martindale-Hubbell?

Martindale-Hubbell also represents many other solutions that help law firms establish...a full range of marketing and client development services. One of our most recent, and proudest, releases is Martindale-Hubbell Connected, our premier legal professional network. Thousands of corporate counsel and attorneys have joined this network since it's launch earlier this year.

--Dave Danielson, Martindale-Hubbell/VP LexisNexis Client Development

A New Martindale-Hubbell? We'll certainly listen to that idea. Five days ago we ran a recycled yet timely post entitled Redux: Martindale-Hubbell: Should we all "just say no"?. In response, Dave Danielson, Martindale-Hubbell/Vice-President, LexisNexis Client Development, commented back. Dave's response is both honest and instructive. For some readers, it will even break a bit of news. We print it in its entirety below:

Mr Hull raises a fair point, one that we definitely hear loud and clear at Martindale-Hubbell. But, the picture in this original post ironically helps me make a very important point - that Martindale-Hubbell is viewed by many lawyers as "just a listing" or "just a book". This could not be farther from the truth. Let me explain...

Martindale-Hubbell subscribers are paying for a "listing", yes, but that listing puts them in Martindale.com as well as Lawyers.com and also syndicates their profile/contact information to many alliance partners like Google, Yahoo, CitySearch, MSN, superpages, and many others. If you see a law firm listed in Google "Local" there is a fair chance that our syndication was involved. We believe that this syndication value online is worth a lot in reduced cost and complexity for the typical law firm.

Also, between Lawyers.com and Martindale.com we have over 3 Million unique visitors each month with even more lawyer searches. Surveys have consistently put Lawyers.com and Martindale.com as a trusted source for ratings, content, and discussion - more of a decision support solution than a simple directory.

But, Martindale-Hubbell also represents many other solutions that help law firms establish their own Web Site/SEO presence on the internet, implement a pay per click program, manage leads for a complete ROI; develop market intelligence, relationship intelligence and business intelligence - a full range of marketing and client development services.

One of our most recent, and proudest, releases is Martindale-Hubbell Connected, our premier legal professional network. Thousands of corporate counsel and attorneys have joined this network since it's launch earlier this year. Members tell us that they want an opportunity to speak privately with other legal professionals, establish new connections to discuss legal issues, and even to create their own group and implement their own online seminar/discussion (we extend connections to LinkedIn as well)

So, while we appreciate and acknowledge the historic importance of our peer review ratings, we have changed quite a bit from the days of books but we still have a long way to go. We are establishing packages to reduce overall prices and to help law firms establish the best mix of solutions to fit their marketing needs. We even have a program that allows individual attorneys to create a low cost subscription when their law firm has chosen not to subscribe. We have an abbreviated listing for all attorneys we are aware of but we would prefer to establish the right memberships so that the full capabilities of the law firm can be presented for our large community of visitors to consider/review and so that all leads/opportunities can be automatically tracked.

But again, we must continue to improve. We are trying to make a concerted effort to listen to our proponents and our detractors so we can continue to grow our historic place in the market as the primary source for legal decisions and communication among consumers, attorneys, and corporate counsel.

I and my colleagues would appreciate hearing from all on ways that we can improve.

Thanks for allowing me the opportunity to post.

Regards,
Dave Danielson
Martindale-Hubbell/VP LexisNexis Client Development

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (3)

May 19, 2009

It's 7:00 PM. Do you know what your summer associates are thinking?

Summer at law firms, Congressional offices, businesses and government agencies mean new interns and clerks--and new blood and fresh air for more senior people who hire them. But the season is also useful for evaluating talent, developing talent and teaching great habits. See this 2007 post. Forget for a moment whether your summer people are "nice" or attractive people or not. That alone is not important, Jack.

Think about your clients. Is their work accurate? And how did they "get there" (to the answer), in that conclusion on "promissory estoppel against the government", anyway? Are they people who want to "appear" to be lawyers--or passionately want to be lawyers? BS artists? Some Slackoisie slip in there? And are they "smart"? Well, if you don't know, you should learn. It's about your clients.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:02 PM | Comments (2)

May 15, 2009

Redux: Martindale-Hubbell: Should we all "just say no"?

From an August 8, 2009 post. Martindale-Hubbell is still "no joke". We would all miss M-H--from the ratings process to the familiar look of staid old friends the books have in any library--if it disappeared. But has anything changed?

Is a Martindale-Hubbell listing worth it anymore?

We're not unhappy with the M-H ratings process; generally speaking, if done responsibly and without in effect requiring the "purchase" of the rating, a credible if imperfect ratings process for the global legal community makes lots of sense. And M-H accomplished that decades ago.* But, in view of other and newer ways for law firms to have visibility and credibility, the price of listings at M-H is now officially a rip-off. Lots of fine lawyers seem to be complaining about it, at least in private, both in the U.S. and non-U.S. It's not that Martindale hasn't tried. See, for example, at Law.com the piece "Martindale-Hubbell Gets a Makeover" (mentioning Avvo, LawLink and Legal OnRamp, as new alternatives for marketing, networking and lawyer ratings).

Our humble take: as other ways to locate lawyers emerged, M-H never saw the light fast enough, and didn't successfully change or expand its other services to preempt a backlash. It continued to charge big listing fees that everyone complained about for years. More recently (say, the last 3 years), M-H expenses managed to stay in law firm budgets--but exceeded just about everyone's irritation levels. M-H listings now makes no business sense to anyone sane. Only the embarrassingly lame, gimmicky "Super Lawyer" concept could make Martindale look good these days.

Start the revolution?

*Martindale-Hubbell is no joke. It has a fine, time-honored and even classy reputation, and a history of good work and real utility in the profession. Our firm, Hull McGuire, has actively and earnestly participated in the M-H ratings processes for years; we are happy with the ratings our lawyers received. But, in good times or bad times, the current cost to list firm attorneys for any size firm, with or without multiple offices, is prohibitive and should be resisted on principle given other alternatives. It just isn't worth it. We predict that lawyers will bolt in droves in the next 2 years.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:24 AM | Comments (1)

April 22, 2009

Real lawyers practice law. Blogging comes second

We got a profession for you right here. See Scott Greenfield's piece "Waiting For The Checks To Roll In", commenting on a WSJ Mark Penn column declaring that "blogging is the newest profession". Greenfield excerpt:

They [pro bloggers] work long hours? Again, I'm not quite impressed. Working 50 to 60 hours might seem like a great burden to some, but most lawyers consider that half time. We work as long as we need to work, and then we work a little more to make sure our work is done right.

Note: Greenfield is a trial lawyer who simply hasn't yet heard that hard and careful work has gone out of style. Odd guy.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

GC-heavy: InsideCounsel's SuperConference, Chicago, May 5-6.

Perkins Coie partner and DNC Chairman Robert Bauer

By General Counsel for General Counsel. Major conferences for corporate lawyers are usually attended by hundreds of fine practitioners from outside firms--but a just handful of in-house lawyers. In ten days, Chicago hosts a glaring exception, and, so far (the organizers tell WAC?), one with the opposite breakdown: InsideCounsel magazine's 9th annual SuperConference at the Chicago Fairmont May 5-6.
It's different: GC-heavy.

We won't, of course, look down our nose at InsideCounsel for having a few registrants from law firms like David Boies, Fred Bartlit, former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, and DNC Chairman Robert Bauer. But top in-house lawyers at SuperConference so far include GCs for Cisco Systems, Chevron Philips, LG Electronics, Ingram Industries, WESCO International, Xerox, Microsoft, Whirlpool, Office Depot, Union Pacific, TV One, C-SPAN, FMC Technologies, the DNC, the Milwaukee Brewers, and many more "majors" you'd recognize. Chief in-house litigation counsel for DuPont, IBM and Cardinal Health are also participating.

The two-day meeting is "re-designed for 2009". So topics at the SuperConference won't be much of a surprise. If you can think of it, it will be covered. More details are here.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2009

Bang, bang.

Break out of captivity
And follow me, stereo jungle child
Love is the kill.....your heart's still wild.

--Patty Smyth

No time for Weenies. Time for lawyers to lead. Put clients first. Tell clients what you really think. Give advice--not just options. Stop covering your ass. Take risks. Stop pretending you are "special". Minimize clubbiness. Stop making the law about your convenience and schedule. Fire bad clients. Fight mediocrity. Fight mediocre lawyering.

Stop writing documents which sound like mental patients talking to themselves.

Surround yourself with strong talented people who challenge you. Fire employees who who don't buy into your goals--or who don't or won't get it--and stop pretending they'll see the light. Demand that law schools give you minimally functional, motivated, self-reliant graduates who can think on their own--and who believe that any kind of work is an honor and privilege to perform.

Think like a business person and not a mere academic. Practice discipline and structure. Help clients control costs. Become a trusted consigiliere. Change the way people think about lawyers. Stop being a weenie. Act. Serve.

Warner Bros./Columbia Records

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 08:02 PM | Comments (3)

Desperately Seeking Value For Clients.

Four 'down-economy' questions:

1. After the economy stabilizes, "should associates pay their law firms in the first two to three years?"

2. American law schools need to step up--or get out of the way. Why not bottle up students for only 1.5 years--and then release them so they can learn something about lawyering? Isn't it time to shorten classroom legal education, and let Law-Firms-That-Teach be paid for--or at least not have to pay for themselves--what they give to young lawyers?

3. In the short-term, when Big Clients find out they were being charged in excess of paralegal rates for high-priced associates-in-training to do paralegal work, will those clients sue for the difference? Lots of great class action firms out there. Talk about strange bedfellows--and novel clients for the dreaded Rule 23 Royalty.

4. Restitution is the millions would be in play. But is there money left in the law firms to pay for the judgments?

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 05:20 AM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2009

Demand evaporates. Then what?

Department of Dues, Blues and Hatin' Life. You saw it coming--but now what do you do, dear? For more than clues, see Jim Hassett's "The Down Economy (Part 9): What To Do When Demand Disappears". Part Nine? The guy's on a roll, uncanny, an animal. Read Hassett.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 04:23 PM | Comments (0)

March 12, 2009

Redux: The Big Six lawyer sites--plus Real Lawyers have what?

The only six (6) legal websites you really need. During The Recession. After the Recession. And to take the edge off any "down economy". From a February 9, 2009 WAC? post: "Watching Legal Blog Watch, Blawg Review, and four more". Consider the Big Six list in stone. Consider, too, our lesser pantheon of sites by working stiffs.

All ye know on earth, and all ye need to know (J. Keats, 1819).

What men or gods are these? ...What mad pursuit?

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2009

Revisiting "leverage".

Stop working for a moment. Yes, we said that. More accurately: stop for a few moments. The one non-billable thing you should read and digest this week: "The Great De-Leveraging" at Adam Smith Esq. (Bruce MacEwen). It's long--but read it anyway. Here is just one excerpt in this "must-read" tome:

Non-equity lawyers don't have to beat their brains out. So they don't. Their deal—again, a perfectly rational one, to them—is that, premised on good behavior, they have a job essentially for life at, say, $350,000 to $450,000/year, adjusted for inflation.

If you think that's not an attractive deal, I suggest you immediately take the elevator down to the street and ask the first ten people you encounter if they'd like such a job.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2009

Gen-Y Rerun: WAC? and Charon QC talk frankly in July of 2008.

What? You're kidding. Lawyers are not special? Hear the "pre-Recession" July 8, 2008 Charon QC interview, "Podcast 66: Dan Hull, US Attorney, author of WAC?, on client service and other matters". Their February 13, 2009 follow-up discussion is here.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2009

Performance Reviews based on Client Service standards.

We talk about real service every single day, almost as if it were a substantive area of law practice. It's a running conversation. If you are serious about building and keeping a "client service culture", you need to underscore it at every performance review.

It's an idea that is here to stay--in this, or any other economy. See "Performance Reviews Based On Client Service Criteria?" Are you serious about all that "client service" stuff on your website?

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 01:59 PM | Comments (0)

Growing in a recession.

Michelle Golden at Golden Practices: "Operating and Growing in a Down Economy". Missouri-based Golden consults for, and writes about, all professional service firms. And see Holden Oliver's world famous collection at "Optional: Panic, Pessimism & Self-Pity".

Posted by JD Hull at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

February 16, 2009

Jim Hassett: More on alternative fees.

Got some best practices for you right here. We still like the billable hour due to its flexibility in the hands of honest and client-centric American and European law firms--all eight or nine of them--but we listen to other ideas and regimes. See Alternative Fees (Part 5): Discounting at Jim Hassett's consistently thoughtful and insightful Legal Business Development. "Best practices" updated every Wednesday.

Life's short. WAC? likes to take stands and just tell you what to do. Here is our advice. If you are struggling with how to position your firm with clients in the "new" era of uncertainty that leers at each of us every morning--especially with corporate clients--hire Jim. You can read his blog and his books. You can listen to his arresting no-b.s. tapes. But skip all that--and just hire him.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:22 AM | Comments (0)

February 09, 2009

Watching Legal Blog Watch, Blawg Review, and four more.

...all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

(JK, 1819)

WAC? likes to "review" Blawg Review each week--but lately we've been too busy to do it right. We missed a few, and at least the internal weekly deadline (i.e., "do something on Blawg Review by Wednesday") we've been blowing isn't a jurisdictional one. We hope somehow to get to the ones we missed. Certainly, Blawg Review's weekly aggregation of the best posts doesn't become stale.

In the meantime, we have advice for this blog's readers, which according to our sitemeter are in four groups, likely overlapping: people from (1) large cities, (2) large firms and (3) "civilized" nations in western Europe, and finally (4) Gen-Y lawyers at larger firms who intensely dislike WAC? and Holden Oliver on "associate" and "work-life balance" issues, or anyone who vaguely looks or sounds like him. Intensely enough, in fact, that some comments and e-mails we get on Holden's "State of the Slackoiesie" essays are so spectacularly vile that we can't even edit them. (If nothing else, the Young, the Lost and the Lazy possess both the focus and the demented energies to type a mean misspelled blue streak about why they are Victims of the Boomer Era.)

Anyway, to all four groups, here's a suggestion:

The Big Six lawyer sites to read. Since you are busy and, like us, self-important, you really should read or at least skim six (6) lawyer sites--all of these technically qualify as "blogs"--every week. All six are must reading. The first one, and for us The King, is Legal Blog Watch, last week's Blawg Review host of No. 197, and one of the few sites for lawyers that always delivers. This past week LBW hosted from the LegalTech show in NYC. And then there's Blawg Review itself, consistently a phenomenon, and a labor of love, by Ed. and his talented "Sherpas", a Boston ADR specialist we respect, and a West Coast-based in-house counsel with dual Brit-Yank citizenship who writes as well as Flaubert when he's in the right goddamn mood. We think Legal Blog Watch and Blawg Review cover, quickly and comprehensively, what's happening in American and global legal markets for (A) news and (B) new ideas. Subscribe to each, and you'll get both.

The other four sites that supplement these two, and do the same thing if slightly less comprehensively? They are: newcomer and often visionary Law21 of Canada, the analytical Adam Smith, the enormously popular ear-to-ground Above The Law and WSJ's Law Blog.

That's it. All you need to read and know. Read no further--unless you want extra credit.

Practicing Lawyers Who Get It, Write About It. There are lots of other fine sites for lawyers and business people. Here are our favorites. At Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield is smart, funny and brave. As rich, famous and handsome as Scott is, however, he's still a fancy busy working trial lawyer. So NYC's driven Greenfield, co-founder of the WAC? Value Movement, can't do everything to lead us to the top of the mountain. Ray Ward at Minor Wisdom, another practicing lawyer, is like WAC? a product of the traditional large law firm culture and school for old boys--where we assume with absolutely no evidence that for years you could say "secretary", "stewardess", and "chairman" without being investigated by the EEOC, National Public Radio and Anita Hill. WAC? has some serious and fatal Southern DNA, and so we do like Ray, as well as his lyrical well-roundedness. However, and like the blawgosphere's spiritual leader David Giacalone at f/k/a...--David is the only sensitive guy we ever liked even a little bit--Ray keeps both his talent and his soul. These three lawyers can think, feel and write.

A few others beyond the Big Six get your juices flowing. California's Craig Williams has consistently set a high standard for legal journalism at his May It Please the Court. Feisty Kevin O'Keefe at Real Lawyers Have Blogs, possibly separated from WAC? at birth, is a hard-headed evangelist for legal blogging, and it turns out he was right after all. Even feistier, and tragically not even Irish, Dan Harris at China Law Blog is wise, practical and prolific. Finally, out of London, Charon QC, and GeekLawyer--when GL is not locked up for his own good at Suffolk's Big Dog Country Care Farm in Hadleigh by worried barrister colleagues at Lincoln's Inn--each have done very different but amazing things for global legal writing. Note: GL works as hard as ever at winning that elusive 30-day chip, as he has been doing since the mid-1980s. Next time he's in the U.S., we'll take him to a meeting. He'd like the one in Georgetown near the corner of Wisconsin and P.

At What About Clients?/What About Paris? we earnestly peddle a few important gospels: real client service, the employer's "entitlements", the Value Movement, sane legal writing, the horror of becoming unhappy law cattle, working internationally in a muscle boutique, and "punching above your weight" for fun and profit. We also seek comic relief from work. We write when inspired on the fly in between urgencies, but we do try to get lawyers to be leaders and Renaissance humans again in the new world. But clients come first; that's not a gimmick. So like you, we need all the news--and new ideas--we can get quickly and efficiently. Like you, we don't have time to screw around.

The Big Six must-reading lawyer sites listed above can do that work for you. The "rest of us" you read for extra credit.

Blawg Review's founder-editor "Ed." The Big Six have your back.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (8)

January 26, 2009

Running firms: Tighten Up.

In Houston, we just started a new dance
Called the Tighten Up.
This is the music we tighten up with...

Archie Bell and the Drells, 1968, Atlantic Records

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 10:33 PM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2008

Canada's Law21: Leverage--and redesigning value.

Firms: Your call, your move. From "The New Leverage" at Jordan Furlong's Law21:

The thrust of the results [a survey by pioneering Legal OnRamp] by is that in-house lawyers aren’t especially happy with outside counsel in terms of service, partnering and communication — nothing new there — but are surprisingly tentative about predicting major change in how they go about acquiring services from these law firms.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2008

Just Moxie

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

December 01, 2008

Value and more value.

Here’s the really important thing that’s happening right now: the price of legal services is finally becoming uncoupled from the costs lawyers incur to produce it.

See Jordan Furlong's "Decoupling Cost from Price in Legal Services" at his Ottawa-based Law21. Also read just about anything Patrick Lamb, a Chicago trial lawyer, has been writing these days at his In Search of Perfect Client Service.

Posted by JD Hull at 03:30 PM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2008

Anti-Client Remark of the Century.

"We" versus "Them"--and clients not even part of the equation. Anti-client, clueless and--but we'll be charitable and stop there. In response to Legal Blog Watch's post "Should Firms Cut Bonuses in Response to Clients?", the first comment was:

Associates don't share in the good times the way partners do, so why should they suffer in the bad times? The answer is not to cut associate bonuses, but to cut profits per partner.

"Jesus, Beavis, get over it. The partner guys--who work for those client guys--will always stiff us."

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (2)

November 21, 2008

In any year, just firms--not sophisticated clients--should care about associate bonuses.

Permanently Happy Useful Associates are the rarer younger lawyers you paid higher bonuses to who are straight-up kick-ass, energetic and mega-talented wunderkinds you can't practice law without; you want to be partners with them some day. They did better than their peers at work. ("I like the cut of your jib, Sally.")

Three days ago, Above The Law drew more than its usual avalanche of comments on Kashmir Hill's "Associate Bonus Watch Warning: Outlook Bleak", as part of the ongoing never-ending comment-generating "Bonus Fest" slew of posts that's keeping that blog busy. (We don't know how much Kash, Elie and David get paid, but these days, it's not enough.) Anyway, in Tuesday's post:

With the dismal economy and the frequency of law firm layoffs, we speculated last month that regular bonuses may be less than last year, and special bonuses would likely disappear. The New York Law Journal agrees with us, and suggests two other reasons for it:

The scale of the expense and the almost compulsory nature of the market are widely resented by partners. But they also realize bonuses play a huge role in associate morale, recruitment and retention. Most managing partners who spoke to the Law Journal about bonuses cited potential problems with associates in requesting anonymity. But this year they all also mentioned another interest group keeping a watchful eye on bonuses: clients.

The comments to Tuesday's post--mostly from associates at larger firms--are fascinating because at first blush many of them reflect an angry sense of entitlement (yeah, it's overused but useful here) to year-end big money without any, well, basis--i.e., and we paraphrase, "I'm here, Big Papa, so pay me."

[We did like this one: "I deserve to make $200k or more because I'm one of the smartest and hardest-working people in this country." Call us, dude. And this one: "Bonus? You guys are lucky to have jobs." Friend, we'll buy you a drink.]

So ATL also asks in the post, what about clients? Should great clients care about associate bonuses this year--this evil and financially difficult one of 2008--more than any other year?

The answer: absolutely not.

Unless this happens: clients begin to perceive that bonuses paid to associates in 2005, 2006 and 2007, and will be paid again for 2008, reflected something other than actual value-added or superior associate performances. In short, in any year, firms didn't: (a) pay great associates great bonuses commensurate with the firm's overall performance, (b) pay marginal or bad associates little or nothing (or get them to leave), and (c) reward everyone else accordingly as they stack up on the scale in between "great" and "marginal".

Any other regime or system--except maybe if you live in Cuba, and really really like living there--sends the wrong message to everyone.

Back to entitlement theory. No wonder there are almost no attempts at even bad arguments in the comments in support of "why I get my being-there bonus". The "compulsory nature" (NYLJ) of the bonuses make you side with the associates. Why be grateful, or have to make an argument for, something you thought you'd get whether you were any good at your job or not, or whether you were "getting lawyering" quicker than Wendell down the hall, the clueless Law Review editor from Cornell Law with big grades, and absolutely "no engine" for practicing law?

"Just being-there" bonuses tells the whole world--not just your clients--that your law firm values "talent retention", crowd control and morale in the associate ranks over common sense economics and the kind of things clients think about: reward, punishment, incentive, efficiency, penny-pinching in good times and bad. Hey, this is still America; you reward performance, you give incentives for doing great work in the future, and you stiff people who didn't perform (but still hold out that carrot).

And a profit is still a reward for being efficient; you need to protect it, and keep being efficient with it. It's not something you spread around like a demented old sea captain buying everyone hooch at the end of the voyage to celebrate good fortune. You don't dole it out without a metric or a standard in mind. Query: Also, partners, think about the details of your current bonus program. What kind of money managers are your associates going to be as partners, once they are steeped a few years in the program at your firm?

Have law firms been thinking that way in past recent years? Probably not. WAC? thinks that, generally, the best law firms in the world need to re-think how to compensate even some very talented associates, especially those in their first couple of years (they don't know much of anything--and they can rarely do much of anything.)

To sum up: Clients getting ragged off at associate bonuses in view of the rotten economy? Nah, we don't see it. In fact just the opposite: in good times and bad, you pay extra to your good people as a reward to them and incentive to others. But across the board? No, we don't see that either--good year or bad--but we don't suspect that firms will give up the practice of "being there" bonuses any time soon--even after 2008. Yearly bonuses, given no-matter-what, should make anyone sane nuts, crazy, twisted, Flip City, in short order. Give the firms time to get properly and routinely tight with money, which they should have done all along.

If they do not, clients are going to have problems with that--and with "being there" associate pay generally--in good economies and bad ones.

Value, anyone?

Temporarily Happy "I'm-here-so-pay-me" Associates are younger lawyers who got Being There bonuses; you have no earthly idea why you ever pay them anything. ("Hey, Justin, go away, grow up.")

(Photos: M. Shulman/20th Cent. Fox., M. Judge/El Greco)

Posted by JD Hull at 01:26 AM | Comments (3)

November 18, 2008

Chuck Newton: "Sir, your electronic cottage is here."

Your future office may well be a "shed", and Texas-based Chuck Newton at Chuck Newton Rides The Third Wave makes it sound a lot more appealing than, say, your digs at Washington Square in downtown D.C., Pittsburgh's U.S. Steel Tower or the Generic Dweeb Office Building in Every Town, USA. Behold "Shed Work Might Be A Solution For Many Work-At-Home Lawyer Hopefuls". You could get a lot done in one of these--if you can just keep your family and friends out of it.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 03:06 AM | Comments (1)

November 14, 2008

"An aggregation of narrow views". Curse of the larger law firm?

"Boom!! Morrison nails it. Elefant names it." (Photo: HBO)

By "broad-gauged" lawyers, I mean law firm leaders and facilitators who, in addition to their own specialties, have an "expansive frame of reference" about the world, business, other practice areas, and how they all fit together.

Thanks to Carolyn Elefant at Legal Blog Watch, and the alert eye of the mysterious Ed. of Blawg Review, I read Rees Morrison's comprehensive and perceptive piece in the New York Law Journal about what larger law firms can and cannot do for clients. It's called "Why Law Departments Should Beware Super-Sized Firms". Despite its title (apparently given by ALM editors to get our attentions), Morrison's article is thoughtful, fair and generally flattering to large law firm (1000 plus lawyers) cultures. On size, we're talking about total headcounts here, not gross revenues or profits per partner. There are about 30 in the world this size (1000 or more)--all out of the UK and the US--and at that size they are a relatively new phenom.

My take, and orientation: I "like"--and have always liked--"larger firms" more than I like smaller ones, even though I am a shareholder in an aggressive and varied boutique that works all over the U.S. and abroad in some unique ways. I am a product of one, and in my own firm prefer senior lawyers who made partners in one as my colleagues, and associates who can work at one (but have advisedly chosen not to) as associates.

In fact, I strongly prefer "larger" firms--Morrison uses 1000 lawyers as a number, but let's use 500 or more lawyers here--even while many larger firms don't get, and will never get, the client service cultures they will need to survive. But I do like their energy, combativeness, spirit and moxie, when those features are present. If I don't know where to go, I go there; a functional larger firm with good leadership and management is a wonderful library of humans you just don't get everywhere. And seven or eight ideas or viewpoints is always better than one or two.

(By the way, small and medium-sized firms often make noises that their size somehow naturally ensures a greater "client service" focus in their performance. Well, this is a huge, if entertaining, crock. Smaller firms as a group are way less CS-savvy than larger firms because, unlike their bigger brethren, they have never really thought about, studied, implemented or "enforced" CS regimes at their shops. Reasons: many smaller and medium-size firms make money and survive in spite of themselves; think they already "know" about CS; or think they don't really need to know about CS.)

"I want Quarterbacks--not dweebs. Value--not size. Send me workaholics with brains and perspective who don't all dress like goddamn FBI agents." (Photo: HBO)

Moreover, I buy into three different notions about larger firms. First, more aggressive and competitive lawyers, and some very fine law students, are attracted to larger firms. Second, to the extent those firms represent corporate clients--and most of them do--the work is often way more interesting, complex and challenging than you will find at smaller firms. Third, larger firms do try to hire, and pay for, promising young lawyers, even if their younger talent is unproductive and a drain in the first few years. So, as a general rule, if you are that rare GC who doesn't know the terrain yet, and have no idea where else to turn, by all means go to a big firm first. I can name seven or eight good ones between 500 and 3000 lawyers and professionals in five or six key practice areas that my firm, and other boutiques, conduct as well. Why not? The talent is there. It's still a good bet.

The Hitch: That talent. It's there somewhere--not throughout, and not in all areas--and you do have to find it.

On talent, both abroad and in the U.S., large law firms currently are a double-edged sword. They do have, and always will have talent; however, in recent years, they've diluted the gene pool on lateral hires in order to get bigger. So Ferraris, Jaguars, Chevy Aveos, pick-up trucks and rickshaws all run together on the same track. And large firm offices in smaller cities abroad can be spotty, mediocre and even scary. (Do you really want "Borat" as your company's lawyer in, say, Eastern Europe?--because that is what you might get.)

Many, if not a majority, of the partner-level lawyers my firm has seen in cases and transactions over the past ten years from "name" law firms have been disturbingly mediocre, and are often malpractice threats to their own firms. Morrison, who is one of the few writers to even mention this, calls it "global coverage, but inconsistent quality and coordination". I think of it as the "Borat syndrome"--and in larger firms you see it both in the U.S. and abroad.

Further, and as Morrison points out, there are in larger firms troublesome inflationary pressures on hours billed. Value questions. Forget about what the markets will bear; on a good day, first and second year associates are worth about -$50.00/hour, once you factor in what it takes to teach, guide and monitor them, and "remediate" their work.

"An aggregation of narrow views." The biggest problem, however, and one I don't see a solution to any time soon, is what Morrison calls "deep specialization, but narrower perspective". Oddly, in the last year I have heard two in-house counsel mention this themselves about mega-firms: they are seeing few "broad-gauged" lawyers. By this, I mean leaders and facilitators who, in addition to their own specialty, have an expansive frame of reference about the world, business, other practice areas, and how they all fit together.

As Ari Gold would say, "Boom!" Morrison has nailed the biggest substantive large law firm problem. In her summary of Morrison article at LBW, wordsmith and D.C. lawyer Carolyn Elefant describes it the lack of "the ability to offer a broad perspective--only an aggregation of narrow views."

Bravo, Morrison, and Elefant.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:02 PM | Comments (0)

November 12, 2008

Action Item: In FY 2009, get nicer narcissists on Executive Committee.

Refer please to your DSM-IV. Respected global law firm consultant Altman Weil reports a finding (of sorts) that millions of people have known--under various rubrics, and in many languages--for thousands of years about leaders, doers, movers and shakers in other contexts. It's that "Narcissists with Big Egos Lead Many Law Firms". To be fair, AW realizes that the solution is, in effect, to get better narcissists. But there is another happy spot in the report--well, for WAC?, anyway. We were heartened that the ABA Journal article summarizing the report notes that such "nonreflective" and insensitive law firm leaders may directly cause "high lateral partner movement and high attrition among younger lawyers for whom money and status are not primary motivators." (Guys, please be serious. That's a bad thing?)

John William Waterhouse's "Echo and Narcissus" (1903)

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 07:38 PM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2008

Got good habits? If so, can you teach them?

M.G. Krebs, Hero of the Work-Life Bongo Movement.

Only about 1% of employees--if that--have a "passion for excellence" 24/7. The rest have their moments. These other employees, even if brilliant and energetic, constitute, say, about 90% of the work force. And like anyone else, even your Coif and Law Review people after a few years can lapse into complacency, smugness and the work ethic of your no-good Uncle Seamus, who went out for a pack of Luckies one day and never came back.

The above is from one of our favorite posts, of November 30, 2007, called "How Do You Teach Great Habits at Work?" It begins:

"What the poets and philosophers say about Man (and Woman) is true: we are all miracles capable of miraculous things. But how do we get there? Well, someone much smarter than me said that excellence at work and in life comes from great habits. In life, examples would be eating fruit instead of glazed donuts or Egg McMuffins in the morning, running two miles 5 times a week, or each day without fail saying thank-you and praying for guidance to God, Allah, Yahweh, [more]"

A. Gold, Mean Person, Enemy of the Rank-and-File.

(Photos: HBO and 20th Century Fox)

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2008

Simple Justice for Clients and Customers?

Did you have the stones to fire this man?

When a young person has no clue what to do with his life after clutching that liberal arts sheepskin in his sweaty hand, he goes to law school. This isn't exactly the best reason to chose a career in the law. It tends to produce lawyers who lack much interest in doing the job...

If we were to stop worrying so much about the young lawyer, and worry a little more about the client who is subsidizing the young lawyer's education, would that be wrong?

--Scott Greenfield, "Simple Justice"

The Value Movement gets a boost? Hopefully, there's this silver lining in the Down Economy: a renewal of the notion that workplaces exist to serve and give value to Customers and Clients, and the companies organized to help them. Not to serve and cater to Employees. As we see it--and most states have traditionally seen it--it's a privilege to work. Not a right. And it's a special honor to learn and practice the law.

1. Another radical idea: Employees--no, not just associate lawyers, but all employees--should treat Employers themselves as valued customers and clients. How an Employee treats you--the Employer--gives you a preview of how he/she will treat your best client.

2. If they can't or won't, those employees should just leave. They are of course free to start their own "businesses" which cater to the needs and desires of their employees, and make a go of it. We suggest relocation to Europe, Mexico or maybe the former Soviet bloc nation Borat came from.

3. Is it okay now to start talking about how Employees should conform to Employer requirements--and not the reverse? Too soon?

4. Are you, the Employer, hiring and retaining Looters and Watchers--or Producers and Doers?

5. Are you off your knees yet, Employer?

6. By the way, what has your Employee done for you, the Employer, lately?

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 07:49 PM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2008

America: Work-Life Balance Now Officially A "Dumb-Ass Issue."

"Now more than ever..."

I have met many hot worm lawyers and I suspect there may be whole firms composed primarily of hot worms. These lawyers thrive on conditions that might prove injurious or even fatal to other lawyers.

--Stephanie West Allen, Hero of The Over-Achieving, The Energetic, and Similarly Oppressed Workers.

In our down economy, please, remember your humanity: Free The Driven. See past posts and related links. And, brother, can you spare some hot worms? If so, send them over. Please.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:59 AM | Comments (3)

September 24, 2008

Jim Hassett: More on the down economy--and what to do.

Like Tom Kane, Boston's Jim Hassett can tell you how to think about marketing and client retention in good or bad times. If you are not reading these two gentlemen these days--especially if you do higher-end work in a large or boutique firm--you are flat-out stone nuts (as in "Holden, get the net"). And then we will worry about you. See, e.g., Jim's "The Down Economy, Part 6: How Bad Is It?", and Parts 1-5, and his posts on "How To Improve Relationships With Large Clients".

Jim Hassett

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

"Pay Tuition, Then Pay For Experience?"

The Value Movement. As we were saying, we don't have all the answers. Maybe shortening law school to 3 or 4 semesters is one piece of the puzzle. We revisit the issue because growth and productivity by young lawyers who really want to be at their law firms and not just go through the motions is important for both junior lawyers and firms. So here's one small bite-sized thought at a time, lest some readers again become adrift from their moorings, get unhinged and blow tubes. Here's a reaction from The Legal Beat blog of Law.line, a CLE site:

Should recent law graduates have to pay law firms for the experience they receive?...

At first glance for any prospective law student, or current law student, this idea seems ludicrous. However, it is a notion that the United Kingdom has been practicing for a hundred and fifty years. Additionally, this is similar to the education structure we have in the United States for doctors. Some argue that if this concept was implemented, only those with a strong passion for law would seek to go to law school.

(Emphasis ours).

Currently, everyone is losing.

Clients are the biggest losers--if not victims. Clients in effect subsidize firms that retain high-priced but unhappy/unproductive associates who are not even likely to stay in their firms, and often serve to pad bills. The best clients do not need to pay high rates to cover "training overhead" for the very marginal (if any) value added by 1st/2nd year timekeepers. We can do better for clients.

If you are a Law Firm of any size: If you haven't heard, the markets worldwide are flirting with a recession. So why don't you guys get off your knees and keep/hire just the lawyers who really want to be there? You can't just wait until your clients complain; and your clients will complain, in any economy, once they realize increased value in young talent at law firms is possible, and that the current "talent sweepstakes" and associate system does not work for anyone. Forget for a moment "what the market will bear". You still have duties to your firm and to your clients to make hiring and retaining associates more efficient, and a better investment.

To Associates: If you hate what you're doing, plan to do something different as soon as you can. You still have options. You can get out of debt another way, and keep your sanity and self-respect. You obviously have the talent to accomplish that.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:00 AM | Comments (5)

August 27, 2008

"Should associates pay their law firms in the first 2 to 3 years?"

New "Value Movement"? On Sunday night at dinner, an out-of-town friend since college, and member of a large U.S. law firm, raised the above question. "Jack's" verbatim query was a bit, but not much, different. After being startled for a moment, I wrote it down:

"If associates get all the benefits of training at my law firm in the first three years, and can't really add much value anyway, why don't they pay us?"

I admit to planting this seed of heresy in Jack's head years ago, when we had talked often, and passionately, about the understandable difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of making even the most talented law school graduates productive, client-oriented and economic inside of two years. Yes, we were both grumpy about the competitive and increasingly high salaries being paid to new law grads, by his firm and mine. And so I had first brought it all up back in 2003.

But back then we had also talked about the unlikelihood that the typical new associate at a large or higher-end firm--even those with part time jobs or summer clerkships under his or her belt--had enough work and life experience to decide to chose a law firm career without actually doing it, and thinking about it, for a while. Private practice at any law firm is not law school; it's far more demanding, and arguably demeaning. It's not for everyone.

Only doing it along side experienced, hopefully sane, lawyers in the trenches of real practice tell the new lawyer and the firm much about the truth.

So starting five years ago, Jack and talked I on the phone a lot, with verve and imagination, about a new "value movement". In the movement we half-joked about, law school graduates would be paid chiefly in the experience gained at a firm. Not money. Or, alternatively, gulp, the associate lawyer would pay the law firm.

But over time, we stopped joking. So here are the bare bones of the value movement:

A. No or nominal money. Initially, say, in the first 2 or 3 years, under "VM", an associate would be paid in the form of experience of being immersed in learning how to be a lawyer as he or she worked with more senior lawyers. A "trainee" would: (1) be paid either very minimal or at most paralegal-level salaries--don't laugh, a good paralegal is often markedly more valuable and cost-efficient than a "brilliant" first-year associate--and perhaps some other benefits; or (2) actually pay the law firm a nominal stipend--a "tuition", in effect, to cover some costs (and risks) of "training"--in a flexible apprenticeship arrangement which could be revisited.

B. Associates bear some risk. At a minimum, making the associate bear the risk of the investment in his or her training might have the effect of deterring some new grads who were just biding time, or perhaps clearly not going to stick around after debts were paid off, from going to the law firm in the first place. It might force some new lawyers to chose. (Further, the specter of such a system might even deter undergraduate college students from applying to law in the first place; students who know what lies ahead of them following law school may be less likely to chose law school as a "default" post-graduate alternative.)

C. Flexibility. Of course, the apprenticeship details would vary with the needs of the firm and the perceived abilities, energies and commitment of the trainee. The training term could be as short as 1 year and as long as 3 years. Obviously, if a law firm were somehow more certain a new associate was at least earnest enough about practicing law to stick with the experience for a long enough time to become a productive lawyer, the firm could pay the new hire anything it liked.

D. Firms get a more reliable look-see; new associates get experience. The idea is merely to ensure that both the law firm and the new graduate "get something" of value--in the firm's case, at least a stronger expectation of receiving value--in the first few years. Young lawyers may need time to test the waters; however, in the meantime, law firms should at least not have to "guess" as much about who is serious about law practice and who is not. Further, summers and part-time clerkships don't tell candidates or the law firms enough. Insufficient "data" for both.

E. Evaluation; parting of ways; negotiation. At the end of the training term, either (1) end the relationship, or (2) start talking about real money, real commitments and real professional futures, and commute the relationship to a permanent position. In short, use the training period to make decisions that make sense for both the lawyer and the firm, and avoid wasting the time and resources of either.

Draconian? Preposterous? Anti-"something"?

Maybe.

But associates, Jack and I would both argue, gain far more than their firms--and by a long shot, even if hard to measure--in the first 2 or 3 years. This is especially true at firms with demanding or high pressure "blue-chip" practices. There, brand new associates are paid very well to contribute very little, especially in larger firms or higher-end boutiques, in an expensive, somewhat nervous and very uncertain "talent-retention" exercise and sweepstakes. "The talent" we invest in, however, doesn't know anything; it can't really do anything for 2 to 3 years.

Law firms continue to invest big in associates with no guarantee that the associate will remain for very long. After very few years, he or she may choose to leave the firm after paying off school debts, decide against life in the medieval partner-associate structure and work environment, choose to work in another firm, the government or teaching, and/or leave the profession completely. That's fine. And that's human. But in any case, firms in the first few years "net", in most cases, Zilch. However, at a good firm, the associate generally retains a substantial, often incalculable, benefit of experience and know-how if he or she leaves, and can use that benefit at a new firm, other law job or even other career. No one "forgets" their first few years of practice at a solid law firm. At the very least, one grows up.

Final score: Associate Lawyers 100; Law Firms 0, or Less-Than-Zero.

So why should my boutique firm and Jack's big white shoe firm pay new lawyers to be "in school"--especially if many of them can be expected to drop out? And drop out "enriched"?

Finally, while the ability to think like a lawyer learned in 3 years of law school is a critical prerequisite to lawyering, the real education is forged in the first few years of practice. In the scheme of things, that training comprises by far the biggest part of becoming and remaining an effective problem-solver for clients. No one achieves great lawyerdom in law schools as we operate them in the U.S. or Europe. No one ever has. Our current rags-to-riches/school-to-firm regime assumes that some thing, process or force "completes" a lawyer in law school. But no one really believes that. It is not happening. In my view, the "value fantasy" about new grads with top grades is equally as harmful to those lawyers personally (and perhaps emotionally) as it is to their employers economically. And it is harmful to clients--the innocent bystanders--in ways too numerous and disturbing to list here.

Law firm compensation systems--especially in the U.S.--presuppose a value in new law grads that simply does not exist, even in the barest shadow form, and perhaps never existed. No, I don't have all the answers. But can't we come up with something different, sane--and in the true interest of both private firms and new lawyers? And clients?

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (31)

August 23, 2008

Legal OnRamp: Worth Watching?

WAC? and Hull McGuire PC are "old school" and get cranky or bored when being sold the next cool tech thing. Generally social networking tools don't excite us. However, here's an exception we've followed off-and-on since January 2007, and we'll write about it more next week. In the meantime, see Robert Ambrogi's piece earlier this month about Legal OnRamp in Legal Blog Watch.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:52 AM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2008

All this law business: Foonberg, Cartier-Liebel & Greenfield

Two must-read and related posts, triggered by Beverly Hills lawyer Jay Foonberg, who literally wrote the books on building practices and getting/keeping good clients: "My Unexpected Phone Call with Jay Foonberg" by Susan Cartier Liebel and "The Professional Business of Law" by our buddy-for-life Scott Greenfield.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:46 AM | Comments (0)

July 15, 2008

Hubris, Muprhy's Law, and real life.

Ah how shameless–the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes, but they themselves with their own reckless ways, compound their pains beyond their proper share.

--Zeus, in Homer's The Odyssey

Muphry's Law dictates that (a) if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written; (b) if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book; (c) the stronger the sentiment expressed in (a) and (b), the greater the fault; (d) any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.

--G. M. Wallace, in A Fool in the Forest, quoting Radley Balko.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (2)

July 10, 2008

100 blogs for brass: leadership and mangement.

A resource you don't see every day. Lisa Haneberg at Management Craft notes that HR World has assembled a list of 100 top-notch blogs on management and leadership, including sites on branding, marketing, finance and technology.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:11 AM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2008

Good habits as hard-won.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

--Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 01:20 PM | Comments (2)

June 09, 2008

Blawg Review #163: Client-savvy More Partner Income hosts.

For the past three years, and regularly, we've singled out More Partner Income, founded by Tom Collins, as the best overall site on the subject of building and running a client-centric law firm. If you manage a law firm from 3 to 3000 lawyers in size, and read only two or three blogs or periodicals, this should be one of them. Today, MPI hosts Blawg Review #163 in one of the most worthwhile and hardest-working BR performances this year.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2008

The Slackoisie

Passion for mediocrity. See Scott Greenfield's inspired "The Slackoisie Fight Back", capping off a week of noises from the "no artificial time constraints" and "clients last" crowd. The Gen Y issue hits nerves. This past week Above the Law had some fun with it, too. For the next week Dan Hull exchanges the elegance of FRE Rule 612 (his favorite) for pretending to hawk scripts and ideas in Los Angeles. Even as a lowly if mature law clerk, I can get some things done for him this weekend while he's gone. Including the blogging. I know the City of Lights better than even Dan does--and so our weekend experiment What About Paris? is in good hands. After all, I am a younger-end boomer; I do value work and our clients. Hey, wait a minute, why am I the only one in the Pittsburgh office today?

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 05, 2008

This week on the "Baby": Selling Science and Technology

This week's theme on "I'm There for You Baby" is science and technology--and selling them. Neil Senturia and Barbara Bry talk with Larry Bock, entrepreneur and venture capitalist, and Allison Rynne, Executive Director of the San Diego Science Festival. The Festival, which launches in March 2009, aims to encourage those in Gen-Y to look into science-related careers.

Neil and Barbara also speak with Rocky Smolin about his new book From Program to Product: Turning Your Code into a Saleable Product, which is meant to guide software entrepreneurs from the idea stage to selling their products commercially. Finally, they discuss tips for engaging and retaining quality employees. (We're all ears.) You can listen to the "Baby" live Wednesdays from 12:30-1:30 p.m. (PT) at SignOn Radio.

Posted by Brooke Powell at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2008

Your summer clerkship: Your real value to the firm?

Zero--and hopefully not less than zero. But don't take that so hard. We are paying you--and our most inarticulate lawyer could make a persuasive, cogent, and eloquent argument for the reverse arrangement. You're an investment. An experiment. It's nice having you around. You're nice kids, from great schools, with great grades. But you don't know anything. So our advice:

1. Proofread, and be careful. Paying attention to detail is one of the few things you can do for us now. But valuable. (What else valuable can you really give us this summer?) Get that habit, and get it forever.

2. Give us your ideas (not your tech savvy).

3. Give us your best answer, get to the point--and then show us your thinking. Back it up with the best authorities you can find so far, even if it's a work in progress. And don't guess.

4. You say you're brilliant? That's nice. But that and a dollar will get you a Diet Coke, or maybe a beer at the Tune Inn. We seek Huntin' Dogs--workers who use everything they have and are to do great work for great clients. We know such creatures when we see them. Takes about a week to spot "it" or "no it".

5. Ask dumb questions. Frequently.

6. Proofread, and be careful.

Posted by JD Hull at 08:20 PM | Comments (0)

May 28, 2008

The Greatest Generation interviews the Lamest.

Or, Work much? About a 60 Minutes segment on Generation Y, originally aired in November and updated this past Sunday, Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice has a few thoughts in "Millennials: It's Awesome to be Us". Excerpt:

One of my issues with 60 Minutes is that, while they court controversy well, they rarely challenge the self-serving statements of their interviewees directly. As the video shows, the consultants who are busily earning some very good fees from companies by advising how to make Millennials "feel good" about their work, the only thing that seems to matter to the members of this group, attribute some wonderful qualities to them.

Are Millennials really so wonderful? Let's see: They're well educated, but inherently lazy. They are techno-savvy, but don't see themselves as serving anyone but themselves. They are the most talented generation? Says who? Are they talented in treating your clients with respect? Not that I can see. And they have to be taught how to eat with a fork and knife? They have to be cajoled into showing up for work every day?

Ah, the new Slackoisie.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2008

How To Work With A Weenie, If You Must.

Two fine posts on Gen-Y, Gen-X, Boomers:

Scott Greenfield, NYC, Simple Justice, "Hull to Gen Y Lawyers: Get It or Get Out". Greenfield is a criminal trial lawyer and writer.

Jordan Furlong, Ottawa, Canada, Law21: Dispatches From A Legal Profession On The Brink, "How to Work with Boomer Lawyers". Furlong is Editor-in-Chief of National magazine at the Canadian Bar Association.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2008

The Dumbest Generation?

See last week's WSJ piece "Can U Read Kant?" in which David Robinson reviews Mark Bauerlein's new book. In The Dumbest Generation, Bauerlein, an Emory English prof, contends that the digital revolution and cultural factors "have conspired to create a level of public ignorance so high as to threaten our democracy". OK, it's bad, but let's not go nuts.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)

May 15, 2008

Profits

Ron Paquette at More Partner Income has a 3-part series: "Partner Cost And Client Profitability".

Posted by JD Hull at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)

Holden heads to northern England, gets his solidarity thing on.

Hearing "Blackleg Miner", a 19th century Northumberland, England folk song, could make a serious, union-hating industrialist drink too much, give all his money away to orphans, and buy up all the Pete Seeger recordings in Palo Alto. Especially this version with video. Via the UK site White Rabbit:

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:03 AM | Comments (0)

May 01, 2008

The 7 Habits of Highly Useless Corporate Lawyers.

Here.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

April 30, 2008

The Complete Lawyer goes totally holistic...

...and tries to get you integrated, dude. Which, seriously, is not a bad idea. A whole issue (Vol. 4, No. 3) of Don Hutcheson's great online magazine for lawyers is devoted to "A Sound Mind In A Sound Body". It's Spring, a time for new beginnings and to kick out the jams.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 07:47 PM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2008

Golden on mentoring.

Mentoring can be ugly or rewarding--and even euphoric. It depends on whether you plan it and tweak it right. See Michelle Golden's "Internal Mentoring Programs: The Wrong Approach" at her Golden Practices.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

The best books on "all you can be".

...Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . .

--F.Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

See the second appearance of Stephanie West Allen's "Reading Minds" column in the ABA's Law Practice Magazine for April/May. Marian Lee, Bruce MacEwen, Michael Melcher and Catherine Hance make their selections. Which one of these reading minds chose The Great Gatsby?

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 01:22 AM | Comments (1)

April 14, 2008

May Day: DePaul Ethics Symposium in Chicago.

The DePaul Business and Commercial Law Journal of the DePaul University College of Law, together with the Commercial Law League of America, will be hosting its Sixth Annual Symposium on Thursday, May 1 from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Westin Michigan Avenue in Chicago. The theme is "Lawyers, Law Firms, & the Legal Profession: An Ethical View of the Business of Law". There are four panels, including "The Roberts Court, the 2008 Election & the Future of the Judiciary".

Posted by Brooke Powell at 11:59 PM | Comments (2)

April 09, 2008

Don't compete on price. Don't compete on price.

If clients come to you for price, they will leave you for price. To land and keep good corporate clients, never compete on price--unless, of course, your Executive Committee has decided to re-brand your firm Generic BizLaw Dweebs (GBD). Compete on value. And that means: pitch and work only for lawyer-savvy clients. Do see at Korea Law blog this gem by Seoul-based Brendon Carr: 'I Don’t Care What You Charge; Whatever It Is, It’s 15% Too Much'. At best, the bargain-hunting corporate client Brendon describes isn't a sophisticated user of legal services, is well aware of that, lacks confidence, and therefore makes rube-like demands for "price reductions". It can't discern differences between one set of corporate lawyers and another set.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2008

"Why not a teaching law firm?"

Concurring Opinions.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2008

Outsourcing: India firms paying better.

At Legal Blog Watch by Carolyn Elefant: "Firm Salaries on the Rise in India".

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

Billing: Is London/Paris/Prague a high-priced city, or what?

LAX-bound Dan Hull (under LA sniper fire, he claims) got a link today from similarly peripatetic and warlike Ed. of Blawg Review. See at David Lat's Above the Law "Charging $1,000 an Hour Is For Chumps". Ed's suggested title for our post is "Will Work for US Dollars". Ours is "Breaking: European associates even more overpriced-and-useless than Yank counterparts". View David's chart and decide for yourself.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:55 AM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2008

Lamb: Where young legal talent may now go.

See this gem by Patrick Lamb we almost missed, and wish we could call our own: "Problems--The Mother's Milk of Innovation" at his In Search of Perfect Client Service. I've seen this pattern for years--but Pat isolates and describes it.

....what's emerging is this paradox: the best and the brightest leave the high priced big law firms in search of an alternative that provides better alternatives. They find it, receive better training and better opportunities to develop, and actually do develop. They develop so much they are actually better and more experienced than their former colleagues, many of whom are still reviewing documents manually, slowly and at great expense to the client.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2008

Clients v. Employees: Are we asking enough of ourselves on client service?

Here's a fine post on an important subject: Clients or Team Members - Which Comes First? at Innovative Practice Management. Obviously, for WAC?, the client is first. Employees and "team members", while key, can't ever be put ahead of the client. And I get all the Stephen Covey peace-and-love stuff about employees. My firm just believes that good employees buy into customer service in the first two weeks--or they don't--and there is rarely anything you can do to "teach" a client service mindset. Lots of very intelligent staff people and associates in the market are very happy going through business life without a client-focus. The answer is to avoid them or get rid of them right away. My question: is the standard in our profession for client service and actual delivery of legal services high enough in the first place? And do we ever even meet it? The marketplace has become much more employee-friendly in the last 20 years. But what about clients and customers? My take is that on CS, we're still in the dark ages, and mediocre is the best we can do. The key is employees. Are we asking ourselves and them to do enough--and policing it?

Posted by JD Hull at 12:49 PM | Comments (2)

March 17, 2008

Scottish

"The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week."

Robert Frost, poet and accomplished Yankee.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2008

21st century lawyers: "A profession on the brink".

Brit Nick Holmes at Binary Law has always had a good eye for new things on both sides of the Atlantic. Through Nick, we just noticed Law21, "Dispatches from a Legal Profession on the Brink", by lawyer-journalist Jordan Furlong, who is also Editor-in-Chief of National magazine at the Canadian Bar Association. Unlike some other bar associations, the CBA has underscored and promoted client-focused methods, techniques and overall thinking in law practice. See PracticeLink, where client service seems to be a main event--not an add-on or obligatory PR to trumpet on lawyer websites.

Posted by JD Hull at 06:30 AM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2008

"Increase Income By $100k Per Partner In 1 Year"

At More Partner Income.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2008

Perfectionism: Great Destroyer of Great Young Lawyers.

Be more excellent without it. From our client service "12-step" program, which we never joke about: Rule 10: Be Accurate, Thorough and Timely--But Not Perfect.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 09:08 AM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2008

"Work-life balance" is still a red herring and a dumb-ass issue.

Here, there, everywhere, ya' big Gen-X babies.

But have a good weekend.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

February 07, 2008

It's a money thing.

Relationships are money. So teach associates the discipline of how to build and maintain them. See Jim Hassett's piece "Teaching Associates to Build Stronger Relationships".

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2008

Tom Kane: "Is Your Firm Ready for a Leader from Outside?"

Here.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2008

Law Biz: "Downbeat" is the word.

Not a pretty mosaic--but you should see at Bill Gratsch's Blawg's Blog a collection of recent reports and articles on the new lay of the land in "Legal Industry Forecast Downbeat". Includes annual Hildebrandt report and posts by Rob Millard, Pat Lamb and Carolyn Elefant.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2008

Law firm logos are still goofy, useless, and a waste of time and money.

It lacked subtlety--but we got our point across, and lots of people clicked on it two years ago. Our post, from January 2006, is here. It was inspired by a series of Tom Kane posts on whether firm logos help or hurt. Conclusion: (a) you already have one in your own trade dress, (b) so don't change it, and (c) don't go any further and embarrass yourself.

Posted by JD Hull at 01:00 AM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2008

Non-law firms: Be big or be boutique?

And to quote a wise friend of ours: "The Future is already here--it's just not evenly distributed." From Business Columnist Steve Pearlstein at the Washington Post:

We've been hearing it for years from corporate executives, management consultants and industry analysts: To survive in highly competitive markets, you either have to be big enough to have scale or small enough to find cover in protected niches. In between is a competitive no man's land where no company can make it. [more]

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2008

Patrick Lamb's new firm: Valorem

And speaking of Value Pricing as an alternative to the Billable Hour, see in the National Law Journal: "Chicago Startup Touts Alternative Billing Structure, Lower Fees"

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2008

Value price this. Part V.

There's more commentary--to your right and below--including Allison Shields', and her fine post "Even More Talk About Pricing". WAC?'s continuing take: billing by the hour for our firm--which depends on repeat business from publicly-traded clients we have represented in many cases for decades--is not a broken system for us. When it breaks, or if the markets change, we'll fix it and/or adjust. And quickly. In the meantime, we know lots of ethical, forward-thinking, ultra-competent lawyers who provide value for GCs the "old way".

But let us change the subject(s). If you want to improve things, work to: (1) eliminate contingent fee agreements (the greatest anti-client device ever), (2) replace the popular election of state judges (an embarrassing, medieval travesty) with a merit-based selection system, and (3) make the lawyers and all staff in your shop profoundly and religiously client-focused. Further, please oh please work (4) to take the emphasis off "lawyer comforts" like (a) "professionalism"; it encourages lawyer clubbiness and compromises clients by, for examples, taking emphasis off procedural rules when you really need them, and turning local litigation counsels into wimps who won't go to bat for clients. And like (b) "work-life balance". Yeah, practicing law is hard.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (6)

January 09, 2008

Value price this. Part IV.

Value Pricing v. Billable Hour. Scroll down. It's not often that we get a total of 17 comments on any subject, it goes on for 5 days, and all of the comments are informed and sane. How do we ensure that clients--from GCs to small businesses and individuals of more limited means--get value? The last comment, from trial lawyer John Day, who arguably speaks for billable hour Tories*, old schoolers and other high-functioning dinosaurs like WAC?, is likely not the last word:

I had lunch with an assistant general counsel of a publicly traded company today and discussed this controversy. His thoughts: "We do value billing on every matter where we employ counsel. We pay them by the hour, but if we don't think we get fair value for what we paid, we don't use that lawyer again."

Next?

*WAC? is part Irish (and yet generally factual). "Tories", interestingly, was first used to describe rural bandits in Ireland. And then, of course, it changed.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

January 05, 2008

Value price this. Part III.

WAC? has retreated to the desert to recover from the holidays. But scroll down, read the comments. Savor the passion, the wisdom, the brutality. Anyone else?

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:21 PM | Comments (2)

January 04, 2008

Value price this. Part II.

WAC? listens and is frequently trainable. Scroll down a little on your right, and see the comments in response to our post below: from Ron Baker (we have always liked his unrelenting pluck on value pricing) of the Verasage Institute, and from Tennessee trial lawyer-blogger John Day (he's a very smart and thoughtful man). Some great questions and details...like change orders. More on this later--we worry changing from the billable hour for litigation projects for longstanding GCs--but, for now, from Baker:

"Utilize price-led costing;
Utilize Change Orders;
Utilize project management;
Utilize Key Predictive Indicators;
Utilize After Action (and Before Action) Reviews;
Engage in value conversations with each and every customer."

Update: And also a later comment from Christopher Marston at Exemplar Law Partners, LLC, another leader on value pricing. Next?...Pat Lamb, maybe? Will I get any work done today?

Posted by JD Hull at 11:11 PM | Comments (2)

Value price this.

Fact 1: WAC? and Hull McGuire like the billable hour; clients like it, and it works best, in their cases, to align their interests with ours. Fact 2: They don't ask for anything else besides the billable hour. Fact 3: We listen and are willing to learn about new things, and even take a lead--but we need more information on how value pricing or flat pricing alone could ever be in anyone's interests in high-stake projects with daily or weekly surprises. How does this stuff work? We need details about the solution--not battle cries and rhetoric about the problem. We seek a Value Pricing Users' Manual by a person with (a) an eye for nuance and (b) a intimate knowledge of (i.e., experience with) actual law practice in a pressure cooker context. We understand the arguments. Show us solutions and how it would work. Fact 4: The subject won't go away. See Carolyn Elefant's "Time Again for More Criticism of the Billable Hour". More later, but I need to fill out this timesheet.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:11 PM | Comments (25)

January 03, 2008

Redux: Dude, if you can't steal our clients, you're fired.

Is the promise of "client service" at your shop just drinks-and-dinner b.s. and website lip service? Or is it real? Here's a new standard for associate and paralegal performance reviews we suggested a year ago. And it's a test, of sorts, for you rainmakers and partner-level lawyers. If the idea appalls or amuses you folks, fair enough--but do ask yourself why.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 02, 2008

Patrick Lamb: What is he up to?

See "A New Value Based Law Firm" at Michelle Golden's Golden Practices. Let's all watch Chicago-based trial lawyer and businessman Pat Lamb. Value pricing. If anyone can make it work, he can.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

December 06, 2007

Trends for 2008: The hot, the un-hot, and possibly dying.

Via our friend Tom Kane at The Legal Marketing Blog, see Robert Denney Associates' 19th annual 4-page, single-space and interesting "What's Hot and What's Not Hot in the Legal Profession". HOT: IP, corporate investigations/SOX-related/white collar, global warming/environmental, "animal law", China, UAE markets (it's what we've been telling you). COLD: Medical malpractice, workers compensation, insurance defense (upside = a legal mind is a terrible thing to waste). NOT too cool right now: Martindale-Hubbell (still needed?) and mandatory retirement (annoying to baby boomers; see Dennis Hopper commercials).

Posted by JD Hull at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)

November 30, 2007

How do you teach great habits at work?

"Hey, kid. This document, that contract, your proposed cross-examination--it isn't good. Not even close. It isn't good work, and it was never good in any known universe or context. Your standard is low. And unless someone tells you this NOW using roughly these words and this tone, you'll be hatin' your work and your life by the time you're forty."

What the poets and philosophers say about Man (and Woman) is true: we are all miracles capable of miraculous things. But how do we get there? Well, someone much smarter than me said that excellence at work and in life comes from great habits. In life, examples would be eating fruit instead of glazed donuts or Egg McMuffins in the morning, running two miles 5 times a week, or each day without fail saying thank-you and praying for guidance to God, Allah, Yahweh, the Kibo Demon or The Big-Ass Oak Tree in your yard.

Great work habits? Examples: outlining an argument or contract before starting out; proofreading a document like your life (or job) depended on it; structuring and monitoring with discipline the course of a strategy for a case, deal or marketing campaign; making that marketing phone call or writing that thank you note two days before the big meeting in Europe or the trial in the Southern District of New York; and "following" your good habits even on a bad day, or when you are tired.

Get it down and get it down early.

There are scads of books out there on bringing the best out of our employees based on notions of somehow cultivating their best instincts and igniting the joy of doing great work with a "team". These are noble works. And they almost always miss or omit one ugly truth.

Only about 1% of employees--if that--have a "passion for excellence" 24/7. The rest have their moments. These other employees, even if brilliant and energetic, constitute, say, about 90% of the work force. Like anyone else, Coif and Law Review people can quickly lapse into complacency, smugness and the work ethic of your no-good Uncle Seamus who went out for a pack of Luckies one day and never came back. And if they are young employees (under 35), you may have a problem on your hands.

With the "life habits" above, at first, we are more likely to do out of fear for our health or questionable salvation or whatever bad consequences are out there if we don't take care of our bodies and souls. Same goes for work. Every once in a while I meet a young person in the 1% who is driven to do things "right" at work--even to the point of perfectionism.* Most employees I see at my shop and others have that inspiration--but only fleetingly. As un-PC or brutal as it sounds, these wonderful folks need not only inspiration but fear, a kick in the self-esteem, a challenge, or a blow to their pride to get them back on track and moving. Sorry. They don't have that engine that drives them to excellence, and probably never will. But they are still well worth it.

Your feed-back to them--especially at first--needs to be both constant (i.e., in "real-time") and honest. It's training. And it's damn hard work for you.

Much has been written about Generations X and Y. This is the self-esteem generation that my "driven" generation (Boomers) somehow created. They are the beneficiaries of "life" grade-inflation, pretty nice circumstances economically growing up, and being told that everything they did was "just great". Everyone apparently made the soccer team; no one saw their name on a cut list. I see them every day, especially at other firms--at my firm they either change or leave--and someone at their law or accounting firm or Fortune 500 company of the screw-up variety is still telling them that they are "just great".

And, well, gulp, they just aren't.

"Hey, kid. This is not personal. But this document, that contract, the deposition you're taking--they all suck. They aren't good, they were never good in any universe or context. Your standard is low. And unless someone tells you that NOW using roughly those words and exactly that tone, you'll be hatin' life and your work by the time you're forty."

My point: To develop good habits, you cannot rely 100% on appealing to his or her "passion for excellence". That's partly a great notion and partly a ruse. Using the fear of losing his or her job is fair game, and you should even back it up. You have a job to do and a business to run. If someone gets in the way of that, feel free to take them to the woodshed, warn them, fire them. You need to be honest. And your business needs to survive and prosper by having people in it who "get" what you want--not what they want.

Practicing law and most kinds of problem-solving work is hard, and should be hard, especially at first. Use positive reinforcement when it's due and deserved. But don't shortchange the development of your employees by telling them "you're great, keep up the good work" when you don't mean it, and it's not true. Even if it means you're not being "nice". Your clients will suffer, you will suffer, and you'll be hatin' life. If the work sucks, say it sucks--and explain why.

*Perfectionism is bad, folks, but I can work with it.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)

November 29, 2007

Perks in the war for talent that make sense.

Boston's Paul Clifford is a fine business lawyer and consultant who I and other members of Hull McGuire have known for about a decade. We meet with Paul a couple of times a year at various venues all over the globe: Salzburg, Cardiff, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Rome, Lisbon, San Francisco, Mexico City. He flagged this article for us in the NYT by Lynnley Browning: "For Lawyers, Perks to Fit a Lifestyle". What especially interested WAC? was the discussion of Seattle-based Perkins Coie which, lawyer perk-wise, seems to have distinguished itself from other larger firms by also competing on (1) fun, (2) surprise and (3) attitude.

Posted by JD Hull at 09:11 PM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2007

Shields: The holy gritty surprise of systems that set you free.

Ah, devil details: the discipline of getting organized, staying that way, and making things happen on schedule at work. At WAC? we've written about making structure a habit--see In Praise of Structure--but not nearly as much as we should. A few key office "systems, processes and checklists" are short, simple, written, intuitive, simple to remember, monitor and enforce, and both pro-client and pro-employee. Sound too abstract? See "Need to Get Control of Your Practice? Systems May Be The Key" at Allison Shields' Legal Ease Blog.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2007

George Will on the The Plaintiff's Bar

No matter what you think of columnist George F. Will--someone once called George America's best 19th-century mind--he's a smart guy, and an interesting writer, and we very much like the bow-tie thing. Besides, WAC? reads everything. Will's piece below is consistent with our belief that no one will ever write a book entitled The American Class Actions Bar: A Passion for Client Service Excellence (whether or not the author is a "specially-compensated" Rule 23 plaintiff). Anyway, in The Washington Post, see Will's Sunday piece "Edwards, Lerach and the Little People". While we are on the topic, please be reminded that, to us, it's always about the lawyering. For clients--the ones who get it, the ones you value, the ones you want to keep.

We don't care what your politics are.

Two years ago we launched What About Clients? because we were certain that putting clients and clients' interests first is a rarity. How even the best corporate clients on the globe are still served up a third-rate legal services-client service mix mystifies us; we are inclined to conclude that they put up with it because so many GCs don't know anything better. So we still think the "client service" rubric on most law firm websites is a ruse. We suspect that individuals--actual humans with their transactions, family matters, estates and claims--don't fare any better than corporations.

Finally, WAC? likes presidential candidate John Edwards, and even briefly but seriously considered working with his campaign four years ago. We just have a tough time with the "I represented the little people" overture.

If you're a lawyer, you know what we mean.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2007

India LPO

Or Legal Process Outsourcing. An article we missed in last month's ABA Journal about India's Pangea3: "Manhattan Work at Mumbai Prices".

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

October 12, 2007

The Billable Hour: The Way of the Happy Rich Dinosaur?

Or, "No thanks, I'll just watch". Call me a Mastodon but my firm's not willing to give up the billable hour. Clients like it. So we like it. It works for our clients and our firm, especially in providing value, especially for longstanding clients, and for our model: high-end services for high-end clients who know and trust us in a "muscle boutique" setting. The hour gives us the power to be enormously flexible in adding value.

For all clients and all lawyers, the billable hour model is not perfect, I admit. There is a huge potential to abuse clients. But resorting to a value-billing/flat-fee model, in my view, would make matters much worse.

As an aside, my firm's clients apparently do not believe that hourly billing for us is supplying Hull McGuire with blank checks, or that we milk engagements. This has nothing to do with being good or morally superior. It's a business thing. Clients know we want repeat business. So we work hard at keeping the bills both fair and satisfying on a gut-level so they'll come back. The rest is done with trust--the most intangible, important and pivotal element is the relationship. I can't help you there--but you'll know it when you get it.

I'm sure there are many firms like ours in these respects. And so far

not one of our clients--i.e., GCs from large and often mega-large companies--have asked for any arrangement other than hourly billing. Some have had over 20 years to ask for value-pricing or something like it. They have not. When they do, we will listen.

However, I think that even in the long-term very few sophisticated and sane GCs will ask for complex litigation or regulatory disputes conducted on a straight value-pricing basis. It would alienate the best commercial trial and administrative law talent in America, as the course of the law's more contentious matters can be truly wild and unpredictable. It's hard to budget for a war.

For some transactional (which can be quite war-like) and some less contentious work, value-billing may make sense. But asking many of us to do it because it's fair and makes sense--and without market pressures and an existing value-price-based economic structure--is like asking us to "give peace a chance". If we agree, we'll feel both good about ourselves and smart--but we'll get run over. There's simply no business incentive for many to join in that good fight.

Moreover, let's assume for a moment that "value-billing"/flat fees went beyond its current status as an alternative client-lawyer arrangement and that it became the "norm"--don't worry, it won't--or to stretch this out a bit, it became, in effect, "required" across the board. It would: (1) compromise good clients who want outlandishly fine legal talent and niche specialities, which this country, by the way, has in abundance; (2) further dumb-down corporate legal products and services (additionally, dilution of the gene pool in recent years at some of the larger firms as they expand, nationally or abroad, is already a problem); (3) make client service even worse; (4) excuse if not exalt mediocrity in legal work in general; and (5) cause some fine lawyers to leave the profession. Welcome, folks, to McLaw. I hope that I am wrong, or that it never happens.

Further, and in a slight variation on the theme, until the market somehow changes, our firm is simply not interested in would-be clients of any size who want up-front "deals" on rates and services. We work too hard. We run from such companies when they find us; they don't get what we offer. We also understand that in-house counsel of a few fine American companies conduct "bidding"-type and RFP programs. Well, again, no thanks. For us, participating would degrade client and firm alike. Color us grandiose.

But if our clients and new clients we seek in the future change, we will change, too. So in the meantime, we listen. We watch. If we're not getting something important about the BH issue--which right now seems to us about as compelling and as relevant as the dreaded Y2K crisis--we'll come around. So we start with Carolyn Elefant's article in Legal Blog Watch, "Boston Firm Bans Hour", reporting on Jay Shepherd's firm and recent post at his fine Gruntled Employees.

Updated: 5:00 PM PT, 10/12/07

Posted by JD Hull at 10:56 PM | Comments (1)

October 11, 2007

Got new associates?

Then see "What are you thinking?" Also entitled: "If a neuron fires in a brilliant young lawyer's head, and no one hears it go off, did it even happen?"

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2007

UK: Accounting Divas of Cardiff, Wales.

Attractive and ancient Cardiff, Wales, with its Roman and Norman past and hard-working people, is a favorite WAC? city. And one with conquering women, gathering from the way they take over the town on weekend nights. Our St. Louis, Missouri friend Michelle Golden directs us to an interesting interview in BusinessGears.com with two young Cardiff women--Sophie Hughes and Lucy Cohen are each 24--in her post "A Younger, Hipper Accounting Firm". These folks make money, too. If you hate the interview, the pictures are, well, fetching.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:27 PM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2007

Duval & Stachenfeld, salaries, real life: Value Movement?

Markets pay lawyers what markets will bear--and you need great young people to help you serve high-end clients with complex problems. Just the same, will it take strong partners with great clients bolting from firms to get some law firms off their knees? Besides, and (gulp) sorry, brilliant 27-year-old ex-law clerks don't know anything. Even they know that. And some of them will never get it and catch on. How about merit-based pay based on actual experience? The new Actual Value Movement ("AVM")?

See at Legal Blog Watch Carolyn Elefant's "Law Firm Salaries: If You Can't Beat Them, Retreat From Them" her report and links there about Duval & Stachenfeld LLP (NYC, LA and Las Vegas), which

pays starting associates $60,000--or $100,000 below the going rate. Salaries don't stay flat, however, and by their third year, D&S associates [the 50% who "prove themselves", according to D&S] can expect to match salaries of their counterparts at top firms.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2007

Malaise ender: turn up speakers, point, click, dance around, continue work.

To get you and especially our staid Pennsylvania office through those first tough days after Labor Day:

Ride like the wind, at double speed
I'll take you places that you've never, never seen.

--MPJ, Buenos Aires, 1995

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

September 06, 2007

Work-Life Balance is PC for "Slacker"?

I told WAC?, at an LA restaurant called "The Ivy", about this 2006 post. It may have been the espresso, but he was very jazzed, said he will name his next born son after the guy who wrote it--maybe call him Very Excellent Mo. Last August Dan Morris of the VeraSage Institute, and a man who avoids mediocrity, wrote "Work-Life Balance is PC for 'Slacker'". Morris adds to the strange but interesting new conversation about work v. real life (as if they are capable of separation).

Our thanks for finding it goes to Idealawg's Stephanie West Allen, who monitors and thoughtfully writes about the WLB "issue" from time to time, and without ever being doctrinaire, presumptuous or pig-headed about it, like we are. We just think that lawyering, good work, problem-solving and innovation are all hard. After all, that's what makes these things great.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)

August 06, 2007

Strongest small business areas in US: Ah, Albany, lad, what's your secret?

Whether 250 years old or a start-up, most professional services firms in the U.S. and Europe--including most people's idea of a large law, accounting or consulting firm--are small businesses. According to BizJournals, the American markets with strongest growth of small businesses per 100,000 residents from 2000 to 2005 were the following. Note that "southern" American urban areas seem to do especially well. One exception: more wintery Albany, New York. WAC?, cursed and blessed with some damn strong Gaelic DNA, attributes this to Albany's large, colorful and hard-working American-Irish population:

Sarasota-Bradenton, Fla. 9.3%
San Diego 8.2%
Jacksonville 7.2%
Orlando 6.4%
Oxnard-Thousand Oaks, Calif. 5.3%
Miami-Fort Lauderdale 5.3%
Albany, N.Y. 5.2%
Virginia Beach-Norfolk 5.2%
Tampa-St. Petersburg 5.1%
Los Angeles 4.7%

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:25 PM | Comments (0)

July 21, 2007

Change your eyeglasses; well, hell, just change your eyes.

Still summer. And WAC? is now here in Laguna Beach, California, in an undisclosed B&B for limousine liberals, and other flakes I generally like, thinking of becoming a Republican, and wondering how the other 99% live. I will be joined by the exotic, talented and highly difficult Ms. Ellen, having for weeks planned her escape from The Palisades, and from her children. But WAC? never closes. Summer is also time for tool-sharpening--or becoming a different and "improved" human and problem solver. No resting on your laurels, if you have any. If you need to rest that much, like all summer, consider a move to Europe.

Anyway, ever wonder if you are missing the obvious? The really important? Seeing problems at work or in life is kind of like looking at my hopelessly demented cat "JD". In JD, I can see another randy

dirt-loving tom who wants to trash my kitchen, and has made it his life's mission to destroy all hummingbirds, rabbits and lizards. If I so choose, I can see JD, the clown, my dirtball cat.

Or I can see what Leonardo da Vinci ("the smallest feline is a masterpiece"...) saw: a marvelously complex wonder of nature. An inspiration. Tens of thousand of years of powerfully-bred instincts and movements which have resulted in the perfect hunter-survivor of strength, grace, quickness and "uh, dudes, let's stalk and kill something--and then eat it". (Not to mention a few truly weird skills.) Think about that next time you see one of those goofy strays in Rome sunbathing in the old Forum or near the Colosseum or at Hemingway's house in Key West, Florida.

The point here is not cats, which I never liked anyway--well, not until today. It's the holy discipline of slipping easily into new perspectives; real growth requires that. To see what I mean, visit a 2005 post called "See life through the eyes of a child--Living in Wonder Again" by Robert Paterson of The Renewal Consulting Group, based in Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Posted by JD Hull at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)

July 15, 2007

Gen-X Contest: and the Winner is....

A gentleman named Ray Steib, who wins for attitude and phrasing.

"How many Generation X associate lawyers does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

Answer: "That is an impossible question, because screwing in a light bulb is manual labor and Gen X associates would rather sit in the dark than get up off their lazy asses and get their hands dirty."

Well done, Ray. (Pat Lamb was runner-up with: "One. The person holds the light bulb while the universe revolves around them.")

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)

July 06, 2007

Real Lawyering: Flash vs. Hard Work--and Clients

Here's a you-must-read gem by Carolyn Elefant at her "beat" over at Legal Blog Watch: "How Law Students Become Lawyers".

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

July 05, 2007

Holden's "Mr. Rogers" Contest: A Cry for Help...

Please enter Holden Oliver's damn Gen X light bulb contest. New deadline is July 9. And for inspiration see from today's WSJ "Blame It on Mr. Rogers: Why Young Adults Feel So Entitled".

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 29, 2007

The Entrepreneur's Guide to the Galaxy: Tech firms and simple solutions

“Everyone today must think like an entrepreneur whether it’s in your own business, a large company or a non-profit organization.”

--The Baby (Neil Senturia)

Tune in to San Diego's CA$H 1700 AM, Saturdays 1-2 p.m., Pacific Time, or listen live via simulcast on the CASH web site. Or visit www.ImThereForYouBaby.com.

With WAC?'s friends Neil Senturia and Barbara Bry.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)

June 28, 2007

Should we put employees first, and clients and customers second?

WAC? may soon stop degrading and humiliating the summer help.

See "Put Your Employees First and Your Customers Second" at Jay Shepherd's fine blog, Gruntled Employees. Jay is right. Employees, through "emotional contagion," do color customer feelings. Job satisfaction is communicated to customers. I talk about this a bit in Rule 11 of WAC?'s 12 Rules of Client Service: Treat Each Co-Worker Like He or She Is Your Best Client .

When I wrote Rule 11, I mentioned that in practice treating employees as well as clients is difficult for me personally. To be honest, I've found that most employees don't understand client service, don't understand lawyering, and don't even get the concept of work and its simple joys. Although I am positive and optimistic by nature, I am very cynical about the white collar work force--in America and abroad. This, of course, is my failure alone. But am 100% certain that employees don't perform better or worse if you are "nice" to them. Good and happy employees map out their own job satisfaction. The issue for my firm is simple: how do you find these people?

But let's get back to Jay's post and into the sunshine. His more "pro-employee" post--and an article by two profs at England's Manchester

Business School he cites--even goes one step further. It says that companies grow and do well if employee satisfaction exceeds customer satisfaction.

Bottom line for managers and HR: employee satisfaction can actually be used as a metric to provide a leading indicator for company growth. Maybe that will get the boardroom's attention.

Amazing notion, and I am thinking about it. In the meantime, WAC? would add: make sure you've got the right employees. Sorry, but there just aren't that many great workers at any level out there--and most employees certainly will never get or care about client and customer service. Before candidates get to or have even heard of your shop, they either care or don't care about customers and clients. You can't teach, force or even bribe people to do it. Client service is an instinct--one that mixes pride in work with deep needs to communicate and serve. Find, hire and keep the naturals.

Posted by JD Hull at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2007

It's 6:00 PM. Do you know what your summer associate is thinking?

Summer at law firms, Congressional offices, businesses and government agencies are fun for both the new clerks and interns and the more senior people who hire them--but the season is also useful for evaluating talent. And for developing talent and great habits. So once, again, and from a March 2007 post:

WAC? can't think of a better question to ask any associate or junior lawyer in the course of serving a client: "What are you thinking?" Ask it over and over again. Make them tell you about their thought processes. And educate them to tell you without asking.

Each project, or each of its subparts, by nature has a "running conversation". Try at regular intervals to bring everything back to one conversation--and not two, three or more different, internal ones, of two, three or more junior lawyers or paralegals working on the same overall project. Keep that conversation unified, external and live: real people with real voices meeting or talking on the phone.

You want to get really "interactive"? Then get off the Internet for a moment, stop the e-mailing, stop typing, stop blogging--and just talk. Active transactions, negotiations and litigations change every day. As we've written before, partners and senior lawyers in my firm want client service--i.e., solutions delivered in a way that puts the client first and changes the way clients think about what is possible from lawyers--to be good enough to permit the younger lawyers to steal, in a heartbeat, any client or client project we have. To do that, to work at that level, to improve legal products and solutions through the running conversation, lawyers doing the day-to-day work must be able to tell you, co-workers and the client what they are thinking. Keep thinking. But keep talking about it.

Give people that habit.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 03:31 PM | Comments (0)

June 13, 2007

Announcing The Generation X Riddle Contest....

7/01/07 UPDATE: WAC? is extending the deadline. New deadline for submissions is July 9. Winner will be announced on July 13.

To win, you must supply the best answer to the riddle:

"How many Generation X associate lawyers does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

Here's a sample but not necessarily suggested answer: "Ten. One to screw it in. One to feel good about himself/herself for just showing up at his/her $130,000 job that day. Eight to blame their parents, others or unforseen events when the project fails."

Deadline for submissions is July 1. Decision of WAC? is final. Winner to be announced on July 6, and will receive an e-mailed collection of WAC?'s past most empathetic posts on Work-Life Balance and The Work Ethic. Next month's contest: Same riddle with Baby Boomers, workaholics, plantation overseers.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 06:45 PM | Comments (3)

May 13, 2007

Legal Sanity and Blawg Review #108

New York's Arnie Herz is a thinker, writer, seer, and a guy my Mom in Ohio wants me to be more like. He will be hosting Blawg Review #108 tomorrow at his fine Legal Sanity blog. Arnie is and always has been light years ahead of most lawyers on issues of law firm culture, workplace and mentoring. He knows that great lawyers are great people: the ones who can grow. His theme at BR #108 will be creating successful business relationships in the law. In the meantime, see this recent Legal Sanity post, one that people I barely know keep e-mailing to me, called "Why Evolution Doesn't Favor Lawyers Who Are Jerks."

Posted by JD Hull at 03:10 PM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2007

Redux: In Praise of Structure

For a long time I've thought that American business schools and the training programs of global and often publicly-traded companies do a much, much better job than do law firms of training recruits to value and adhere to the structure of a plan on an item for action.

Do we lawyers know how to get things done, done right and done on time? Do we even value that? I wonder.

I am not talking here about the simple "keeping face" and survival requirements of meeting client deal or court deadlines, or even about the cliches of working hard, creative thinking, "out of the box", working smart or being persistent. I mean structure, a real standard, and "practicing structure" every day--the discipline of (1) having a plan or strategy for any one project, client or non-client, (2) meeting internal project deadlines no matter what, and (3) applying the will to work that plan and timetable.

"Structure" is not just the hard process of getting things done. It's a frame of mind and a value which must be sold to others in your shop--like the importance of making that 5 minute call to a client about a loose end at the end of the worst day you can remember, even while you could do it the next morning at 8:00. It's realizing that letting anything but emergency tasks "slide" makes you inefficient, unlikely to meet your real goals, and tired.

Do you get up early every day with a idea of what needs to be done on each project, and knowing the difference between "important" and "urgent"? Example: Monday is your deadline to have the final changes and notes to your web designer on your new firm website, an important but not urgent project you've talked about at internal meetings for months. So far, for once, you have been on track. But on Monday a longstanding client calls with two new projects; the new projects are exciting but not THAT urgent in the sense they need to cut into internal deadlines and other goals for Monday. You need to take some first steps, though, to get on top of the new matters for your client. After all, these folks are the main event.

Key ongoing internal project v. new client project. Which gets the most attention that day? Which slides? Answer: they both get attention, and neither slides. The website (long-term important) and the new client project (short-term important) are both critical projects. Years ago the Stephen Coveys and Edwards Demings out there pointed out that business people burn themselves out by waiting around only for "the urgent" in a kind of manic crisis management that keeps other important things from ever getting done or ONLY getting them done when they morph into a crisis. For lawyers, other examples would be only respecting deadlines like transaction closing dates and court-filing deadlines--to hell with everything else.

For a long time I've thought that American business schools and the training programs of global and often publicly-traded companies do a much, much better job than do law firms of training recruits to value and adhere to the structure of a plan on an item for action. It's almost as if law school and firms deem us all such "professionals" and "artists" that we are beyond learning skills of project planning and execution. What a crock. Not learning the value of pushing non-urgent but important things along at a steady pace has cost us dearly. As motivated as lawyers often are, our discipline for sticking to anything and seeing it through is often poor; again, unless it's urgent, we just don't see its value. Do our best clients run their businesses that way?

This attitude is the norm, and we lawyers--who rarely innovate or take a leadership position on anything in commerce--are just fine, thank you, with it. After all, "all the other law firms" are mediocre on the discipline of getting things done, and have "crisis-only" mentalities--why shouldn't we be that way? So we waste time blowing off important but longer term projects. Worst of all, we send to others in our firms, and especially to younger lawyers, the message: "No worries--just work on a barely adequate level; don't do things until you have to; and if it's not urgent, let it slide." As with client care and service, our standard is not only embarrassingly low, we are exporting that low standard internally whenever and wherever we can.

Posted by JD Hull at 05:21 PM | Comments (2)

March 09, 2007

Work-life balance is still a dumb-ass issue.

Republished here from an October 20 WAC? post. Our sitemeter says that people love to hate this post. But, hey, don't strain yourself--if you are a new lawyer, it can wait until Monday, maybe. Who cares if a few young dweebs are working in your shop on Saturday, or Sunday? All lawyers are the same, and equal, right? And learning how to be a useful lawyer shouldn't be that hard, probably, should it?

Man, you have a law degree--so you already made it, sort of. Have a drink. Smoke a big doobie--one that looks like a super-giant cigar and makes the whole room crazy. You are an elite person. You've got some great ties. Tell the waitress you're a lawyer. Time to be somebody...it can all just wait.

Relax. Don't suffer. Coast. Mail it in. Get by.

Have a good weekend.

Posted by JD Hull at 04:08 PM | Comments (0)

March 07, 2007

"What are you thinking?"

If a neuron fires in a brilliant young lawyer's head, and no one hears it go off, did it even happen?

I can't think of a better question to ask any associate or junior lawyer in the course of serving a client: "What are you thinking?"

Ask it over and over again. Make them tell you about their thought processes. And educate them to tell you without asking.

Each project, or each of its subparts, by nature has a "running conversation". Try at regular intervals to bring everything back to one conversation--and not two, three or more different, internal ones, of two, three or more junior lawyers or paralegals working on the same overall project. Keep that conversation unified, external and live: real people with real voices meeting or talking on the phone. You want to get really "interactive"? Get off the Internet for a moment, stop the e-mailing, stop typing, stop blogging--and just talk.

Active transactions, negotiations and litigations change every day. As we've written before, partners and senior lawyers in my firm want client service--i.e., solutions delivered in a way that puts the client first and changes the way clients think about what is possible from lawyers--to be good enough to permit the younger lawyers to steal, in a heartbeat, any client or client project we have. To do that*, to work at that level, to improve legal products and solutions through the running conversation, lawyers doing the day-to-day work must be able to tell you, co-workers and the client what they are thinking. Keep thinking. But keep talking about it.

Give people that habit.

*See our previous post "Associate Reviews: 'Dude, if you can't steal our clients, you're fired.'" If after serious reflection this idea genuinely threatens you, you clearly are not a business person who prizes "client service" beyond something cool to slap up on your website. Self-evaluation is in order.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (2)

February 07, 2007

Get off your knees: "Law Firm Pay Rates And The Domino Effect"

"We want to attract and retain excellent lawyers." Blank Rome, Philadelphia, USA

See the article at Law Fuel--The Law News Network re: starting associate salaries between $135,000 and $160,000. I'll give the NYC white shoe firms a pass on this; NYC is expensive, especially if one values the pleasures of the flesh it offers, so what the hell. And, folks, I get competition and place-holding for talent. But, dudes, you ever hear of the "value movement"--which my firm started a few years ago. We pay first-years well, very well, and anyone with the credentials, a work ethic, real class and a passion to learn things the right way can go to www.hullmcguire.com/recruit.htm and take a shot......but $135,000 for brilliant kids who are marginally productive for 3 years and will get way more from you than they will ever give back in those years? Get off your knees, be part of a solution, start acting like business people, and do yourselves, the associates, me and your clients a favor: cut it out. Your associates (and partners) think you guys are chumps. Stop it. They'll respect you more and still sign up if you promise to teach them how to be great lawyers.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:06 AM | Comments (3)

February 05, 2007

Redux: Deming's 14 Points

W. Edwards Deming, who died in 1993, was a statistician and consultant credited with the rise of Japan as a manufacturing power, revitalizing the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement and creating interest in management systems of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). In 1982, he published his 14 points so that American business could effectively compete in the new global marketplace. The 14 points can apply to a law firm delivering services as well as to a multi-national manufacturing company selling products world-wide. And they can certainly apply to the operations of a law firm's business clients:

1. Create constancy of purpose for the improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive, stay in business, and provide jobs.

2. Adopt the new philosophy of cooperation (win-win) in which everybody wins. Put it into practice and teach it to employees, customers, and suppliers.

3. Cease dependence on mass inspection to achieve quality. Improve the process and build quality into the product in the first place.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag alone. Instead, minimize total cost in the long run. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production, service, planning, or any activity. This will improve quality and productivity and thus constantly decrease costs.

6. Institute training for skills.

7. Adopt and institute leadership for the management of people, recognizing their different abilities, capabilities, and aspiration. The aim of leadership should be to help people, machines, and gadgets do a better job. Leadership of management is in need of overhaul, as well as leadership of production workers.

8. Drive out fear and build trust so that everyone can work effectively.

9. Break down barriers between departments. Abolish competition and build a win-win system of cooperation within the organization. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team to foresee problems of production and in use that might be encountered with the product or service.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets asking for zero defects or new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

11. Eliminate numerical goals, numerical quotas and management by objectives. Substitute leadership.

12. Remove barriers that rob people of joy in their work. This will mean abolishing the annual rating or merit system that ranks people and creates competition and conflict.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job.

Posted by JD Hull at 10:37 PM | Comments (0)

December 06, 2006

The Greatest American Lawyer: Never graduate.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." C. Darwin

Posted by JD Hull at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

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)

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)

November 22, 2006

Real life, courage and gratitude.

WAC? is about happy clients--and how hard it is to get client service right. It's also about happy lawyers, a prerequiste to good service: family, friends, rest, food, exercise, health, renewal, and a spiritual life. But WAC? has limitations. For example, Real Life, which happens to us and those we love, is cruelly shortchanged in this blog.

So, if I were going to read just one overall blog to meet all my life-and-lawyer needs, it would be Ray Ward's at Minor Wisdom. A New Orleans lawyer, Ray just did his 1000th post at Minor Wisdom, a blog which grabbed me when I started reading blogs 18 months ago because it was what I thought a blog should be: brave, personal, well-written and damn interesting. A gifted and well-rounded human and lawyer, perhaps put here on Earth to make up for some of the rest of us, Ray writes on everything from excellence in lawyering, writing and appellate advocacy to Christian mystics, politics, music (well, real music), Katrina, Darfur and Chad, human rights, and plain rites. The guy knows we are all just here for a cup of coffee--so make the best of it, help others, increase love. He has things to share, and a sense of humour. He never moralizes. He's curious. And fear seems truly to have been replaced by faith.

Shucks, Ray thinks when he reads this--but I ain't done yet. Themes of human potential, growth, real class and courage--things you want to see in blogs, humans and lawyers--run energetically, lovingly, through his posts. And Ray has also written about lawyers and depression, which plagues the legal profession more than others, and has written about it, and passionately, several times. How he knows this subject evades me. Me? Well, I know some things, in my case personally, about alcohol abuse. I have written about it once in "Born Lucky". I should have the stones to write about it more. Twenty years without a Heineken, shot glasses of Jamesons or even wine with dinner does not make me superior, immune or even well. I have a responsibility to tell others about my turning my hardships and defeats into opportunities for growth. Bad cards, or bad choices in life, can have big rewards; they are worth talking about. They teach. For whatever reason, this Ray Ward knows well. I'm grateful to him for the reminder.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2006

Saturday's Charon & Maitland's Lament

London's Charon QC, one of 3 or 4 Europeans who can use "dumbass" properly in a sentence, is regular WAC? reading on Saturday, whether traveling or working. Today as usual lots of good things from Charon, and he refers to UK IP solicitor Maitland Kalton on the link between unhappy lawyers and unhappy clients, springing from a piece in The Gazette, the official publication for The Law Society of England and Wales, and the major legal weekly in Europe. Has Mr. Kalton hit a nerve for us all? See also Justin Patten's heads-up post on this subject.

Posted by JD Hull at 07:00 AM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2006

Euripides (480-406 BC) on Soldiers, Lawyers, Life.

"Ten soldiers wisely led, will beat one hundred without a head." Over at Rob Millard's The Adventure of Strategy, see "Ten Soldiers Wisely Led ..."

Posted by JD Hull at 07:58 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2006

"Ten Ways Law Firms Lose a Lot of Money"

From the the always excellent Clients section of the Canadian Bar Association's Practice Link, it's here, an article by Janice Mucalov. No. 7 is "Keeping Mediocre Clients". CBA Practice Link is rich with resources on running firms and client care and retention.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:45 AM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2006

Newton's Law: "Third Wave Law Firms"

WAC? always did like Texans. A man with a true virtual law firm, Texas lawyer Chuck Newton at Spare Room Tycoon has burst of fine posts on the law practice of the future. I've posted about Chuck's month-old blog and his Third Wave Firm ideas before. Others may have done what Chuck has done--but this man's turned virtual into a religion. From his bio:

My law firm does not maintain a traditional office or offices that most consumers typically associate with law firms. We have no... reception area in which to be ignored, no meeting rooms for client visits, no file room in which to lose files, no law library, no messy private office for the firm’s attorneys to hide. We have no walls to hang our licenses and diplomas, no rec room to chat with staff over coffee and donuts, and my firm’s shingle hangs from no building. Look in any phone book and you will see no yellow page ad for my firm.

We try to be the king of the Internet. We use email, Internet telephony, Internet faxing, electronic case filing, and Internet research, both to and from computers and other devices. There is virtually no one that cannot be reached, and no document that cannot be received or delivered, by phone, fax, email or (if no other alternative) mail any place in the State of Texas or the world. My law firm and I believe that staying connected allows us to tear down the barriers that keep us from our clients and their objective.

But there are these other blogs Chuck's got, like One Liberal Sum' Bitch, subtitled "One Blue Guy in a Red State" and featuring Chuck TV. Whoa. Go visit Chuck Newton.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

October 30, 2006

In Praise of Structure.

Do we lawyers know how to get things done, done right and done on time? Do we even value that? I wonder.

I am not talking here about the simple "keeping face" and survival requirements of meeting client deal or court deadlines, or even about the cliches of working hard, creative thinking, "out of the box", working smart or being persistent. I mean structure, a real standard, and "practicing structure" every day--the discipline of (1) having a plan or strategy for any one project, client or non-client, (2) meeting internal project deadlines no matter what, and (3) applying the will to work that plan and timetable.

"Structure" is not just the hard process of getting things done. It's a frame of mind and a value which must be sold to others in your shop--like the importance of making that 5 minute call to a client about a loose end at the end of the worst day you can remember, even while you could do it the next morning at 8:00. It's realizing that letting anything but emergency tasks "slide" makes you inefficient, unlikely to meet your real goals, and tired.

Do you get up early every day with a idea of what needs to be done on each project, and knowing the difference between "important" and "urgent"? Example: Monday is your deadline to have the final changes and notes to your web designer on your new firm website, an important but not urgent project you've talked about at internal meetings for months. So far, for once, you have been on track. But on Monday a longstanding client calls with two new projects; the new projects are exciting but not THAT urgent in the sense they need to cut into internal deadlines and other goals for Monday. You need to take some first steps, though, to get on top of the new matters for your client. After all, these folks are the main event.

Key ongoing internal project v. new client project. Which gets the most attention that day? Which slides? Answer: they both get attention, and neither slides. The website (long-term important) and the new client project (short-term important) are both critical projects. Years ago the Stephen Coveys and Edwards Demings out there pointed out that business people burn themselves out by waiting around only for "the urgent" in a kind of manic crisis management that keeps other important things from ever getting done or ONLY getting them done when they morph into a crisis. For lawyers, other examples would be only respecting deadlines like transaction closing dates and court-filing deadlines--to hell with everything else.

For a long time I've thought that American business schools and the training programs of global and often publicly-traded companies do a much, much better job than do law firms of training recruits to value and adhere to the structure of a plan on an item for action. It's almost as if law school and firms deem us all such "professionals" and "artists" that we are beyond learning skills of project planning and execution. What a crock. Not learning the value of pushing non-urgent but important things along at a steady pace has cost us dearly. As motivated as lawyers often are, our discipline for sticking to anything and seeing it through is often poor; again, unless it's urgent, we just don't see its value. Do our best clients run their businesses that way?

This attitude is the norm, and we lawyers--who rarely innovate or take a leadership position on anything in commerce--are just fine, thank you, with it. After all, "all the other law firms" are mediocre on the discipline of getting things done, and have "crisis-only" mentalities--why shouldn't we be that way? So we waste time blowing off important but longer term projects. Worst of all, we send to others in our firms, and especially to younger lawyers, the message: "No worries--just work on a barely adequate level; don't do things until you have to; and if it's not urgent, let it slide." As with client care and service, our standard is not only embarrassingly low, we are exporting that low standard internally whenever and wherever we can.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

Fear kills--but first it makes you paralyzed, fettered and dumb.

A celestial character played by actor Rip Torn in the 1991 Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life referred to earth-bound humans as "little-brains"--because their fear and inability to seize moments and take risks rendered them immobilized, self-imprisoned and "dumb". So, in the movie, humans couldn't learn anything, get anything done, have new and better relationships, grow and be happy. The Stage Manager in the Thornton Wilder play Our Town makes similar comments about the lives of the town's people. And now see Nathan Burke's new post "Fear and Good Enough" at his lawfirmblogging.com.

Posted by JD Hull at 03:59 AM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2006

Talent and Elites in America: Which cities?

Los Angeles, NYC, Boston? DC, Seattle? From Adam Smith, Esq. (Bruce MacEwen), see "Is Your Firm Where 'The Brains' Are?", inspired by an article in October's The Atlantic Monthly. Look at the maps.

Posted by JD Hull at 09:59 PM | Comments (0)

October 20, 2006

Work-life balance is a dumb-ass issue.

[Note on 3/8/07: Life at the Bar by Julie Brown was a fabulous blog in October and its a fabulous blog now. WAC? just has a different take on the issue.]

There's another good post touching on the "work-life" issue, this one by Julie Brown at Life at the Bar. I'm not an expert, but here's what I know and think about work-life balance for lawyers, especially junior ones:

1. Practicing law is hard and demanding--even for brilliant, diligent and accomplished people. I've said this before. No big deal.

2. If you wanted just a job, you got into the wrong line of work.

3. WLB is "your" problem--not mine. Each one of us creates our own quality of life as we learn to lawyer, keep lawyering and serve clients.

4. If you are a job-hunting student or young lawyer expecting my firm to support a regime of work-life harmony, please try another shop. Your problem. We are happy and well-rounded people who work our asses off. It frightens us and makes us angry that you would ever think practicing law could be easy in the beginning. People twice as smart and as hardworking as you paid huge dues to be able to call himself or herself a "lawyer". Go away.

5. Color me Midwestern. It's privilege to work. It's a privilege to practice law.

Posted by JD Hull at 10:24 AM | Comments (2)

October 18, 2006

Time Management Made Simple--An Alternative.

1. Espresso
2. Food
3. Make lists--and work.
4. Exercise
5. Sleep

That's it. Can WAC? get a book deal?

Posted by JD Hull at 10:23 AM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2006

"5 Things You Shouldn’t Spend Money On When Starting a Business"

It's from Ben Yoskovitz's Instigator Blog. Thanks to BusinessPundit.com.

Posted by JD Hull at 04:05 PM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2006

Performance Reviews Based On Client Service Criteria?

And why not? At least once a year each employee at our firm is evaluated in a process in which written evaluations are delivered, followed by a meeting with comments, questions and gripes. It's 2-way process, too. "They" (associates and support staff) get to evaluate "us" (partners and senior lawyers), and then talk about it. It works well. We've followed this procedure for 5 years. However, starting this year, our evaluations will also be tied to the "12 Client Service Rules" which we set out in this blog as an off-shoot of our firm practice guide and completed in early April. We talk about real service every single day, almost as if it were a substantive area of law practice. It's a running conversation. But if you are serious about building and keeping a "client service culture" at Hull McGuire, we need to underscore them in every performance review.

Posted by JD Hull at 07:29 AM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2006

Building a Great Culture Is An Inside Job.

Michelle Golden and Allison Shields each have an important post about this. If you are selling your services firm as happy, fun, competent and collaborative professionals, it's got to be real. Ironically, it takes discipline and hard work to get that look and feel and to keep it. Great "cultures" start with great internal communications--both about what is happening in your firm and, in my view, what is happening on a particular project for a client as well. (See Rule 11 re: co-workers, too.) Do read Michelle and Allison's posts. They are worth saving and reading again.

Posted by JD Hull at 10:31 AM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2006

"Oh Rare Ben Johnson..."

Great post and heads up from Ed Poll at his LawBiz Blog about how things have changed in our business in the last 35 years through the eyes of an Atlanta attorney at one of Atlanta's leading firms (and one of my favorite BigLaw firms). From a Law.com piece on Ben Johnson, the Managing Partner of Alston & Bird.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2006

Fighting Bozo-osity At Your Shop.

From ex-Apple evangelist and guru's guru Guy Kawasaki, who gets more visits to his blog in a day than most people see in a month, these fun but serious two posts on preventing a Bozo explosion and the Bozoification aptitude test (the dreaded GBAT) escaped my attention at first. Law schools and bar associations don't cover this crippling syndrome in ethics classes or CLEs--so feel free to take notes. Consider these a corporate public service announcement.

Posted by JD Hull at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2006

Adam Smith, Esq: "What P&G Teaches".

Please read this February 19 Adam Smith post. This is lawyer blogging at its best: taking ideas that work for successful businesses which manage and sell outside the bubble of lawyerdom and seeing if they might work for law firms. Adam Smith (Bruce MacEwen) in "What P&G Teaches" makes a daring but on-mark stab at applying consumer products leader Procter & Gamble's simply-stated, flexible and disciplined world view on who it is and what it does to the law firm. Or to any business which takes itself seriously and is willing to change when it must. Accompanying Bruce's post is a recent WSJ piece and a July 2005 McKinsey & Company interview/article covering changes in "dog-eat-dog" P&G brand manager culture, the importance of constantly listening to customers and its current "turn-around" CEO, A.G. Lafley, who breaks ranks with many past P&G chiefs in his nearly Stephen Covey-like leadership style.

Posted by JD Hull at 07:54 PM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2006

Lovemarks Update: Catch Lisa Haneberg's Mini-Series.

Management Craft is a blog by Lisa Haneberg. All week long in honor of Valentine's Day Lisa's discussing Kevin Roberts' Lovemarks from a management perspective. Today's post is part 3 of a series she calls "Love and Management--Lovemarks Revisited All Week". Again, thanks to Arnie Herz at Legal Sanity for this one.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:32 PM | Comments (2)

February 02, 2006

"Law Firm Logos are Goofy, Useless, and a Waste of Time and Money"-Part 3.

The original subtly-titled January 21 post is here with a follow-up collecting some instructive posts I admired here by professional marketers who know about logos and design. So, and once again, now I'm not so sure--no hobgoblins problem at this blog. Here's another solid recent post getting closer to answering the questions of why and how law firm logos can work by Boston-based Nathan Burke at LawFirmBlogging.com called "Debate About Logos".

Posted by JD Hull at 02:49 AM | Comments (1)

February 01, 2006

Sane and Worth Reading--but you read it first...I'll get to it later.

In the first things first department, Arnie Herz and/or whoever is in his winning collection of writers over at Wall Street-based Legal Sanity has a fine post on the subject of what my mother (and yours) would call "you-need-to-slow-down". Arnie's post is entitled "Note to Lawyers: Slow Down and Loosen Up". It mentions some really interesting sources, including a book and a related new ABA Law Practice Management Section article--both called In Praise Of Slowness: How A Worldwide Movement Is Challenging The Cult Of Speed by Canadian journalist Carl Honore--and another ABA piece entitled "Finding and Keeping the Clients You Like" by Susan Saltonstall Duncan at RainMakingOasis. Arnie's post is both salve and instruction for the legions of us who are bombarded, numb, moving too fast, and never doing anything about it.

Posted by JD Hull at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2006

Logos, Branding and What's in Your Name?

Julie McGuire and I are still waiting to hear from Bill Clinton in answer to Friday's ad to make WJC of counsel to Hull McGuire PC so he can help with both lawyering and branding--an idea which, by the way, we take seriously. Life's short, WJC's talented, branding is hard and, well, why not? In the meantime, while he's deciding what to do, we noticed an interesting post from Larry Bodine at Professional Marketing Blog called "For Law Firms, Names Are the Brand" based on an article printed in the Raleigh-based Triangle Business Journal reprinted on MSN.

Larry's post follows up quite a few good recent posts on the subject of logos by experts and authors in and out of lawyering and law firm marketing: Dave Opton of ExecuNet, Bruce Allen of Marketing Catalyst , Tom Kane, Patrick Lamb, Tom Collins, me (in the non-expert category) and Michelle Golden on branding generally. Okay, now we are getting somewhere. Shorter names are branding, according to the article Larry Bodine cites. That makes sense, and firms have been doing that. But let's get back to logos. Exactly what additional value beyond a professional firm's unadorned name--e.g., Jones Day, Freshfields, Clifford Chance, Butler Rubin, Hull McGuire--do you get in a "Coca-Cola" or "Nike"-like designed and copyright-able logo using the name? Does that help brand a firm?

Posted by JD Hull at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2006

Law Firm Logos are Goofy, Useless, and a Waste of Time and Money.

At some point I'll reveal how I really feel about law firm logos. For the time being, Tom Kane in The Legal Marketing Blog has a nice recent post about firm logos. I agree that quality service and not logos should be the main event, as Tom and others say. And I would add that if you have a logo, don't change it--but if you don't have a logo, don't bother to develop one. Logos are really about your "look". Whether you know it or not, your firm already has this "look".

Your "look" is on your stationery/letterhead, envelopes and (if they match), your business cards. These all have your firm's name on it. Hopefully, these same patterns, lettering, and colors are reproduced on your marketing materials: website, brochure, blog. When people see Hull McGuire PC, usually underlined in burgundy with black Gothic lettering on pastel-colored stationery or business cards, that's us--our trade dress and our "look". Clients, agencies, courts, and contacts have been seeing it for 12 years. The repetition does it, and it likely has value. We wouldn't change that look even if we decided we didn't like it.*

A great example of repetition yielding recognizability and therefore value is the Yahoo! home page (and in fairness, I likely got this idea from Harry Beckwith's writing). First, forget about the easily recognizable Yahoo! logo for a moment (Yahoo!, Google, IBM and Coca-Cola have logos--but they've spent millions on them). Then go to the Yahoo! home page. It's very basic--even boring--but Yahoo! has stuck with it because people recognize it through repetition of the format you see when you open the page. To me, that consistency is bracing, reassuring. And, originally intended or not, it has value. Yahoo! knows the "look" of its home page is basic and boring, it can certainly afford to develop a new one, and it wouldn't change for the world.

* Besides, "HMPC" sounds more like a fuel additive than a symbol of quality legal care.

Posted by JD Hull at 08:47 AM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2006

Know Your Client, Its Business and Its Culture--Great Post From More Partner Income

Thanks to a nice post by Arnie Herz at Legal Sanity, I focused more quickly on another great post on January 10 by Tom Collins of morepartnerincome called "Why Don't Outside Lawyers Understand Our Business?". I regularly read Tom's blawg, but I'll use his post in an upcoming rule in the "12-step" program I've been writing for us service-challenged lawyers (we're up to Rule Six, and one of the final six will be about really knowing the client you serve).

Because understanding your client deeply and thoroughly can't be emphasized enough. In December Pat Lamb posted and I posted on the actual "real life" Georgia meeting of GCs that serves as a springboard for Tom's post. And consistently Tom Kane at The Legal Marketing Blog has posted a lot of insightful things about the subject. But Tom Collins's recent post says it all for me in his concluding paragraphs:

The dialogue between the panel and the audience of corporate counsels highlights the difference between what clients perceive as “good service” and what attorneys continue to believe is their obligation regarding quality service. It is not about how competent you are. You are supposed to be competent. It is about your “bedside manner”. You are in the service business. You happen to be in the lawyering service business.

If you want to retain and grow your relationship, you have to invest in understanding the Client’s purpose, its goals, its culture, the issues it faces, and even its “words”. If the client calls its employees “associates”, you need to call them associates. If the client calls its trucks “package cars”, they are package cars!

Excellence must be earned through the eyes of your client.

I add only this. It's more natural for any sane shareholder or senior partner to know a lot about his or her firm's business client, what it does, where it does it, who the players are, what its words and phrases are, what it says it expects from lawyers, and what its "culture" is. Call it a touchy-feely concept or not--but a "business's culture" is a living and breathing thing. All businesses have them. But everyone in your firm--paralegals, support folks and especially associates, who in our firm have lots of contact with clients--need to (1) study new clients, (2) "get" them and (3) keep getting them as life for the client develops and inevitably changes. I'm glad Pat Lamb, Arnie Herz, Tom Kane and Tom Collins and others are talking about this.

Posted by JD Hull at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)

January 11, 2006

What Your Firm Website Needs Is...

Larry Bodine in a post last week tells you the answer. In the course of reporting a new study published recently in Law Firm Inc., he says that at a minimum a law firm website should have: (1) industry experience, (2) representative clients, and (3) success stories. My firm's website could certainly benefit from better "speak-for-themselves" descriptions of the industries we serve. I think I'll suggest using that idea.

And on the 3 minimum things, I agree. But on client identities (either in success stories or as representative clients), there's a wrinkle for me. I am not comfortable with listing specific clients--even though more than a few of our engagements involve courts or public record information. And I am very proud that several well-known companies here and abroad regularly engage us--and have for years. But I am not there yet. It may be me, a matter of form and smacking of old ways. But it seems to me that who we represent--while in most cases not technically confidential and maybe in some cases ascertainable from the descriptions in the site--is information not to be trumpeted on the website. I'd rather tell you in person. Love to.

So instead we have not listed clients (as some firms do in Martindale) on any marketing materials, and have described success stories on our website without identifying the client. Instead, we have made it clear in a summary/overview of who we are that we will make general counsel references available in a heartbeat.

Posted by JD Hull at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2006

Just Drop Off the Key, Lee: "When To Fire A Client".

Here's a great self-explanatory post by Tom Kane of The Legal Marketing Blog. We tell clients who are potential defendants that it's better to have "no lawsuit" against them than to have a "slam-dunk defense". That's obvious. By the same token, it's better to have "no client" than the wrong one. Sometimes not so obvious?

Posted by JD Hull at 04:23 PM | Comments (0)

January 05, 2006

Branding Revisited--and Explained. Golden Comments.

In response to the December 29 post on the apparent failure of most lawyers to brand their firms, Michelle Golden at Golden Practices got to the heart of the matter in a couple of fabulous posts (here and here). And Tom Kane of The Legal Marketing Blog added depth to the dialogue in his January 3 post.

Michelle is saying to me that: (1) we lawyers (and other professionals) are all trying to distinguish ourselves from each other based on words, (2) the standards/words we claim are the same anyway, (3) the standards aren't too high to begin with, (4) we can't even meet those standards, (5) truly differentiating your law firm from "the others" must come from actions--not marketing rubric, and, most importantly, (6) the actions can't be just any action.

Even actually providing "quality service" is not enough. That, Michelle continues, should be a "gimme":

[S]ervice quality isn't going to be impressive enough as a differentiator. Most firms pay lip service to things like "responsive," "on time," or "proactive" in their brochures or on the web. These are basic expectations, folks. No one can argue that they should be the rule, not the exception! Just as competence is expected by a paying customer, so is good service.

In marketing, nearly every firm now claims the above traits (though few consistently deliver) so while doing these might actually make you different, claiming them doesn't at all differentiate you, rather it throws you right into the pack. And citing these as advantages of working with your firms just shows how low the bar is within the profession, doesn't it?

All this "timely, proactive" stuff just sounds like blah-blah-blah to the customer who has found that firms don't usually do a good job despite their claims....

Real distinction, in my mind, is stuff like:

Value pricing in advance (using fixed price agreements and change orders as necessary)

Specialization in an industry or a narrow area of practice whereby you become highly visible in the circles of your customers

Humanizing your people: some do it through unique bios/bio photos and others do it by featuring "a day in the life" of their people.

Service packaging/bundling for instance offering a level of all-inclusive services such as the "concierge model" with no charging for phone calls or other access to you.

And real branding is hard:

There is a price to pay--an investment--in becoming distinct. Most firms won't DO these things because they aren't easy. And they are non-traditional. They are different. Innovative. Not safe.

But customers and recruits eat them up.

Posted by JD Hull at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2005

Another Great Blawg I've Been Missing

Here's another client-centric blawg I missed and now intend to check regularly: Jim Calloway's Law Practice Tips Blog. It's useful, well-written, funny--and it's got attitude. Calloway obviously thinks it's a privilege to practice law. I like his August 22 post on law firm management and time-management in "Basic Management Skills." In fact, I like everything about this blawg.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:09 AM | Comments (2)

September 13, 2005

My Kind of Blog: Mark Beese's Leadership for Lawyers

Here's a quality contribution to the blawg community. Last week I discovered Mark Beese, the self-described in-house "marketing guy" at Denver-based Holland & Hart. He writes Leadership for Lawyers, and it is my kind of blawg. Mark's site purports to be about lawyers as leaders but goes way beyond that -- it could also be entitled "Lawyers as People".

LFL has great writing, links and resources on what I call the Art of the Client. In particular, two May 16 posts caught my attention. The first discussed the well-known Clients for Life, (J. Sheth, A. Sobel, Simon & Shuster 2000) and the second touted a newer work, How Lawyers Lose Their Way (J. Stefancic, R. Delgado, Duke Press 2005).

Read Clients for Life when you have time. I haven't read the newer book, How Lawyers Lose Their Way, which was published in March of this year. It investigates why our profession breeds burn-outs. This book really interests me -- and I'll buy it -- because my working theory (see my first post) of why client service is poor is that so many of we lawyers hate what we do. If How Lawyers Lose Their Way tells me the reason, I may be able to scrap my blawg and will do so happily!

Posted by JD Hull at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)