business of law

Subscribe to business of law via RSS

The Hall of Fame and Your Honor Awards are being honored and showcased this morning at the 2018 LMA Annual Conference. These are our best members and our inspirations. And we are celebrating them this morning.

  • At 8:15
  • In the morning
  • On Day 2 of a conference.
  • In New Orleans.

I’ll just leave that here.

LMA Recognition Awards | Hall of Fame

I want to personally thank Ann Gallagher and Jeff Reade for your contributions to our association and to our profession as a whole. Thank you for blazing the path that I was easily able to follow.

Congratulations to all who were recognized with a Your Honor Award. The LMA conference is all about connecting and inspiring, so PLEASE click through and learn more about what your peers (and competitors) are doing:

2018 LMA Your Honor Awards Winners

Continue Reading #LMA18 – Honoring and showcasing the best of LMA

Okay, let’s begin with the rooms size. Who would have thought so many people would want to participate in a deep dive program on strategic planning lead by this group ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Let’s begin with the why? Why is strategic planning so popular again?

What’s the difference between strategy and strategic planning?

Kim: A…

AI is more than just a buzz word. AI is touching everything that we do, even when we don’t recognize it as doing so.

So, let’s start with the room is too small for a topic this relevant, especially considering last year the room was three times the size and PACKED. So, when the room is standing room only, I have no issues sitting on the floor.

AI doesn’t just understand the words, but understands what the words mean for a phrase like “raining cats and dogs.”

WHAT IS AI?

Mark Greene, Market Intelligence LLC, goes over what AI is. I went to the session last year. I know I tweeted on it, but apparently I didn’t write a blog post … sorry about that. It was one of the best programs I attended. But here are a couple slides from today:

WHAT IS WATSON?

Continue Reading #LMA18 – How Legal Departments are Leveraging AI

I received notice earlier this week that I am now a Class of 2018 Fellow-Elect with the College of Law Practice Management (COLPM). The notice is posted publicly, so I hope I am not breaking any rules or traditions by posting this.

I truly am humbled by this honor. It recognizes my overall contribution to the legal industry … not just the legal marketing slice of the pie.

Friends and Fellows

I had someone ask how/why I was selected. Truly, it has to do with my overall contributions to the business of law, not just my role in legal marketing. Along the way, however, I have met some incredible people. And many of these people have become friends, and now we’re going to be inducted into the COLPM together.

The early years and CRM

The business of law has changed over the course of my career. I was brought on board my first law firm in June 1997 to run a major conference and get out newsletters. Very quickly I ended up rolling out InterAction (which was still an InterFace product).  In fact, our firm was the first to go fully live with this CRM product. I was even featured on the cover of CRM magazine. Ironically, I have come full circle and recently redeployed InterAction at my current firm.

Early adopter and promoter of social media

I began this blog nearly 10 years ago because I had no idea what a blog was, and I wanted to understand the technology better. What I didn’t expect to find was my voice.

I eventually rolled out four blogs for my firm, and helped a practice group establish itself and create a line of business for the partner that is still overwhelming profitable today.

I was part of that group who were out there trying to figure out what Twitter was. I saw a Tweet one day from this guy, Kevin O’Keefe, wanting to know who would like to grab a beer at the hotel near my office. I ran over. I was the only one who showed up. We sat that afternoon getting to know one another and discussing blogging and Twitter. I remember having a very competitive battle with Greg Lambert over who could get the most Twitter followers over the course of a weekend (he far surpasses me today). And meeting this “kid” Adrian Dayton, who had gotten caught up in all those layoffs of associates and was building his own business around social media for lawyers.

If it were not for Twitter, blogging, and social media, I would not have these professional relationships that have all turned to personal ones. To be inducted into the COLPM with these men truly means the world to me.
Continue Reading Call me Fellow. I might even buy the plaque.

We’ve all been there. A vote is coming up before the partnership that requires individual partners to vote against their own best interest.

  • It could be the opening or closing of an office, that you reside in
  • The investment in new technology, but you’re about to retire
  • The deequitizing of a partner, but you’ve been buddies since you were summer associates
  • A change in the partnership agreement; it’s equitable, but not for you

It happens all the time. But should it?

Gina Passarella Cipriani wrote about the issue today in The American Lawyer: The Death of the Law Firm Partnership Vote? With an eye on efficiency, firms are ditching old methods for a more corporate form of governance.

“There’s increasing recognition that partnership agreements, a lot of them, fundamentally are obsolete, in the sense that they were written for a different time and place,” Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith Esq. says. “Notions that it takes some super-majority … to de-equitize a partner, you can’t run a firm that way.”

It used to be that everything from a lateral hire to new leases to major capital expenditures on new laptops for lawyers would require a vote, says Frank D’Amore of Attorney Career Catalysts, who handles lateral and group moves as well as mergers. But those days are fading.

“You could do it in 1950, but it’s a heck of a lot harder in 2018,” D’Amore says of holding partner votes on most initiatives.

Law firms are big business

Legal is not just a partnership, it can be, and often times is, big business. Our industry just welcomed in our first $3 billion firm (congrats, Latham). But sometimes we’re caught operating no differently than when the doors opened decades (or even a century) ago.

Whether you are operating in 10s or 100s of millions of dollars, or billions, operating as a business should not be held hostage by personal interests. 
Continue Reading Should the partnership vote be up for a vote?

I’m back. Did I miss anything? Nothing was going on with me except life, work, college applications (for kid #1), the holidays, and now a bathroom remodel that has to get done before our annual Super Bowl Party.

But really what it came down to is that I haven’t found much to write about these days. Perhaps it’s the noise coming out of Washington and Hollywood, or maybe it’s because I have been too busy to put fingertips to keyboard. But then THIS story caught my eye in the LME:

Male Clients Disfavor Women Partners

When you read a headline like that, do you really need to click through to read it to know the answer? Can’t you just guess? It’s what it’s always about. Relationships.

From the article:

“People give business to friends,” says a former Big Law woman partner. “So, if a client is male—as most clients are—he will often give business to his frat brothers, law school roommates, golf partners, fellow club members, etc.” The only “fix,” she adds, “is to have women rise to more positions of power as clients.” (Women make up about 23 percent of chief legal officers in corporations, reports Acritas.)

I would add that, within the law firm, there is a network of relationships at play that limits the number of women and other diverse attorneys in senior partner positions for a multitude of reasons that have been discussed ad nauseam over the years. We get it.  And we’re still sucking at it.

The study’s author suggests that the solution is quotas, but that goes against my grain, so I have a better solution. And, since we’re in the legal industry, it has already been proposed, and there are THIRTY well-regarded firms on record doing it … so your firm  can do it too. 
Continue Reading Women, diversity, law firms, and why are we still having this conversation?

I heard the news yesterday and it shocked me to my core. A dear member of our Legal Marketers Extraordinaire / LMA community had passed away. Tragically, he died from suicide. His was not the first death by suicide of a man in his 50s that I knew this year.

Researchers don’t know why, but suicide rates peak for men in the 50s. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been touched by such a tragic loss. I wrote about suicide and our profession after Chris Cornell, an icon for we GenXers, died:
Continue Reading We lost an LMA shining light

With all the talk of sexual harassment in the media these past couple weeks, I’m not sure about your office, but conversations in the hallways and in the kitchens–only between the women–have been taking place in mine.

We’ve been sharing our stories. Some from our college days, some from our early careers. But we all seem to have a story.

Here are mine:

My college professor

Call me naive. I just didn’t get it. I had a professor, much older than me. Old enough to be my dad, maybe even my grandfather. He wasn’t in shape or attractive. He drove a 1960s era VW.

I was a Lit Writing major, and I was taking his poetry classes. He took a special interest in me.

First it was conversations after class. Then in his office. He took me to dinner, which, as a poor college student, I always appreciated. He got me a gift–a Chinese coin as I was a Chinese studies minor. Then another gift–a first edition of one of my favorite books. I was being groomed.

My boyfriend Todd was really sick and I was having a hard time. Having a safe place to go and sit, having a place where I could release my emotions–which was in my writing–was so necessary for my sanity.

Seriously, I really didn’t get that he was hitting on me.
Continue Reading #MeToo – My story