While working at a certain AmLaw 50 firm I submitted to attend the Legal Marketing Association’s annual conference. It was denied.
In speaking with the firm’s managing partner I asked her a few simple questions:
I don’t know what it is with my brain, legal marketing, and pop culture, but while watching the Grammys last night I couldn’t help but find lessons and similarities between the Grammys, lawyers and legal marketing.
What I saw last night was a living, breathing lesson on how to successfully (and not so successfully) evolve
If you were watching the game on Sunday those last two minutes were excrutiating. And then that last call. OMG. What was Pete Carroll thinking with that last call?
And then I read this piece today, Requiem For a Gambler: Why Pete Carroll Wasn’t Wrong, by Rob Pait, and I got it. Pete made
Time for some Monday morning quarterbacking and dissecting of the game around the water cooler. For the Sports Dude, it will be about the game (and I will never live it down, but his prediction was 27-24 Patriots); for me, it’s about the commercials … and legal marketing.
Let’s just do it.
For those of you wondering, “Who is Aric Press?”, he is the outgoing editor in chief for American Lawyer, and love it or hate it, through the AmLaw 100, and now 200, reports Aric placed a spotlight onto the business of law.
Aric announced his retirement from the American Lawyer late last year. Those
I started this year off wiping down my white board and getting ready to plan my year. 
So much white. So much potential. So many ideas. I am not a huge fan of large and intense marketing plans; they usually just end up buried in some drawer somewhere, only to be pulled out at the
In 2011, American households on average sent about
For anyone who follows the saga of the State Bar of Florida v. the First Amendment of the United States, I am happy to announce that the First Amendment has won yet again. In the latest ruling, as Larry Bodine points out on his blog, a federal judge,
[b]lasting the Florida Bar, … threw out
Mark this day down on your calendars, kids. We will one day look back on November 18, 2014, as the first day in the long anticipated end to the dreaded billable hour.
From today’s American Lawyer:
Law firms have been calling for the end of the billable hour for decades. And since the 2008 recession, they have increasingly offered cost-conscious clients alternative fee arrangements.
Now Jackson Lewis says it wants to take the next step in the evolutionary process of alternative fee arrangements by eliminating the billable hour as an evaluative tool for its 293 associates. As of Jan. 1, associates at the labor and employment firm will be assessed on efficiency, client service, responsiveness, team-orientation and pro-bono commitment in an effort to align the way Jackson Lewis “deliver[s] legal services with clients’ needs,” according to firm chair Vincent Cino. (The firm’s compensation model for partners is based on revenue rather than hours.)
“The billable hour is directly opposed to the best interest of the client and to the provider of service because by its very nature it adds an artificial barrier to the accomplishment of the only real objective, which is a quality legal product for a set and expected price,” Cino says.
Whether you agree or not that the “billable hour is directly opposed to the best interest of the client” you have had to wonder, at some point in your career, “Well, how did we get here?”Continue Reading You had me at “the billable hour is directly opposed to the best interest of the client …”
I’m reading a new survey from ALM, New Partners Ambivalent About Rainmaking, Survey Finds, and am aghast at the naïveté of the respondents. Apparently, 49% of new partners surveyed don’t think that their ability to make rain is a deciding factor in their being promoted to partner (equity or non-equity).
Asked how important they