Well, it’s that time of year. The legal marketing community is headed off to the Legal Marketing Association’s annual conference. The conferences keep getting bigger and better. Pretty soon we’ll be saying goodbye to conference hotels, and hello convention centers. A few things to note:
Thanks to the folks at Spark Media Solutions for doing a great round of post-session interviews after our presentation, Generational Marketing: Strategies and tactics for engagement with Boomers, Gen Xers and Millennials.They really picked up on the main themes of our session, and provides a great recap of our session.
I love disrupting things. From a recent assessment I did for a leadership program (I’ll blog on that soon), my natural traits include having a very high tolerance to conflict, which they defined as challenging the status quo.
So I was incredibly excited to hear about Harvard Law School’s Disruptive Innovation in the Market for Legal Services conference.
Sadly, I could not attend live, in person or as it streamed.
I can, however, watch the four videos at my leisure, and you can as well.
Panel 1: The Nature of Disruptive Innovation in Professional Services
Panel 2: The Role of Regulation
Continue Reading Harvard’s Disruptive Innovation Conference Videos
Is live-Tweeting overrated?
That’s the question my friend Ben Greenzweig, Momentum Event Group, asked the LME group this morning. And, with multiple people live-tweeting the same sessions at a conference, I can understand why he’s raised the question.
Not too shockingly, many of us have an opinion, and a conversation has begun so
Swiping through my reader this morning on the train, and I was just shaking my head over the legal blog after legal blog after legal blog going on and on about Justin Bieber’s deposition.
It’s just link bait.
link·baitˈliNGkˌbāt/nounnoun: link bait
Well, the fall out from the Dewey implosion and bankruptcy has take a new turn with a 62-page indictment of senior partners and staff members, including a conspiracy charge worthy of John Grisham (ht Kathleen Pearson for that line). Attached is the indictment. Will take more than just a cup of coffee to read through
We all have our bad days. But when your bad day ends up in the social media viral loop, or on CNN’s website, your day just went from bad to f***ed-up.
Over in my Legal Marketers Extraordinaire group on Facebook* we’re discussing the LinkedIn rejection letter that has gone viral, as well as the founder of the latest pay-to-play on-line network for lawyers. She’s a peach. I’d link to a story about her, but, if you do your own Googling, you’ll understand why I won’t.
* message me via The Legal Watercooler page the email you use for Facebook for an invite
I suppose time will answer a new age-old question to rival the chicken and the egg:
Which came first, the a**h*** or social media?
Right now I have to go with a**h***s.Continue Reading Social media once again reveals the a**h***s
For quite a while now I keep telling attorneys in my firm that we need a Pete. For those of you who do not watch Mad Men, Pete Campbell is the head of accounts and a partner at Sterling, Cooper, Draper and the other guy. His job is to go out, find the business, wine and dine (and throw in a whore house or two) the clients. He is not an ad man. He’s a BD (business development) guy. Client services professional. And his role to the firm is key in their success:
Once Pete interests a client in the firm, he then introduces them to Don Draper, one of the agency’s partners and senior creative directors. Don then starts to get the potential client interested in the pizazz of what an advertising campaign run by him would look like. Once they get the green light to prepare a formal pitch, Don then brings his team together. Peggy, the head copy writer, and on her way to becoming a partner, along with the media buyers, art directors, and junior copywriters. They then work together to pull the pitch together and present to the client.
Nothing about this flow chart is unique. Accounting and other professional services businesses are run this way. They all have a Pete.
Law firms? For the most part, we don’t have a Pete. And our flow charts for new business doesn’t look like their process at all.
Continue Reading Mad Men and Law Firms: We Need a Pete
Last month came the news that another law firm is closing its doors. This time north of the 49th parallel.
One of Canada’s largest firms seemingly collapsed overnight. But, like most law firm failures, the collapse was a long time coming.
Canada’s online legal magazine, SLAW, sums it up well in this post, Requiem for Heenan Blakie:
Heenan Blaikie died from a combination of greed, poor management and failed leadership wrapped together in an antiquated business structure ill-suited to “more for less” client demands in a marketplace gradually filling with non-traditional competitors.
As I have said repeatedly, the Canadian legal profession is now entering the most disruptive period of time in its history. It has never faced such strong client demands for value and efficiency. It has never faced competition from non-traditional legal providers.
These are structural changes that never go away; they amplify.
And all of this in an environment of flat legal services demand, over capacity and legal tech entrepreneurs!
Layer in partners who are more loyal to themselves than to the firm and one can see that Heenan Blaikie (like every other law firm in Canada) was a house built on sand, not bedrock.
I fear that many of us can insert “name of American law firm” in place of Heenan Blaikie and tell the same story.
Yes, we’re chatting about this in my circles. What does this mean? Why? What will it take to change law firm culture and business models?
Some argue for the ability of non-lawyers to co-own law firms, thereby giving more control of the actual business function to the true professional business people.
Some argue we need true business development and sales people. Lawyers are not necessarily cut out for this.
Some argue that the services themselves need to be repackaged and sold (think AFAs).
Some argue that the growth through lateral hiring binge is unsustainable and a leading cause of law firm failure.
It’s the compensation plans. No, it’s the commoditization of legal services.
And then there are those lawyers who just want things to go back to the way things were. Institutional clients. None of this business development crap.
There are no single right answers. And there are no single wrong ones here either. These are all contributing factors, leading to a perfect storm that will continue to result in the roller coaster of growth through acquisition, and big law failures, along with a lot of mid-sized failures as well.
I’d like to add another layer to the conversation of change and disruption in the legal industry: There is a generational shift taking place and very few people are talking about it, nor the impact it is having on our sales culture, nor our business culture.Continue Reading Why the generational shift in leadership is impacting the legal industry
There’s a story breaking in Los Angeles. Our L.A. Rams might be coming home after wandering through the mid-west for the past 20-years.
And the Sports Dude is in there.
As background, the Sports Dude got really, really sick some years ago. It almost took his life, and it definitely impacted his career. He went