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?

Ugh. Again I get into the office and am checking the emails that have come in since I checked my emails before I left my house. I have trained my lawyers well, they know to ask, when that special congratulatory email arrives in their in-box:

Is this bogus?

I want to scream back:

YES! It’s crap. All they are doing is trying to sell advertising (or a plaque) by circumventing the marketing department and going straight for your ego.

Usually I just say, “Yeah, ignore. They’re just trying to sell you advertising.”

So how do we decide which ones are valuable and worth our time and money?

  • They are being run by a legitimate legal or industry trade publication
  • You have to actually submit information on your work and practice
  • They are selective. They don’t take everyone, and just because you got in one year doesn’t mean you’ll get in the next

I give a pass to Best Lawyers and Super Lawyers; other publications (US News & World Report, local newspapers) use their data to compile their “best” lists.

So, when in doubt, call your marketing department. If you don’t have a marketing department, go to Twitter and ask a legal marketer by using the hashtag #LMAMKT. But beware of these emails.

From time to time I use this blog not to opine on legal marketing, but as a vehicle for my voice. That is what this post is about today. I am not anti-gun, I never have been. I am, however, a mom, a sister, a daughter, a wife. I cannot shake what happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School this week. We have a problem in this country that we continue to avoid. While others look to Congress, or the White House, or their local legislatures for change, I say the change begins with me. With you. With us. 

For those who don’t know my background, before my career in legal marketing I was a lobbyist. A gun control lobbyist. As in Handgun Control, Inc. and The Center to Prevent Gun Violence. I was a Republican, working for a Republican, trying to make a difference.

I was in the White House the day President Clinton signed The Brady Bill. I even have a personalized signed copy hanging in my office.

I was there when we got the news about Luby’s, Columbine, Waco, Ruby Ridge, 101 California. I stood alongside the California Attorney General in Sacramento as we pushed new legislation, gave testimony before the Senate and Assembly. I walked the halls in Sacramento with victims as we worked to enhance our state gun control laws. Continue Reading Before I was a legal marketer, I was a gun control lobbyist

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

I write and speak frequently on the generational shifts and divides in law firms, along with my colleague Jonathan Fitzgarrald. We first started to identify generational trends and the impact on the law firm in 2013. We always mentioned the “next” generation, the “swipe” generation, but there was no data on them. Yet.

The studies are starting to come out, and if you’re worried about your Millennials, you need to start to panic about your iGen, a term coined by Dr. Jean M. Twenge. I just saw her on CNN, just read her article, Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

Continue Reading Here comes the iGen: And we all need to be worried

The Legal Marketing Association just released the slate of candidates for the 2018 International Board of Directors, and I plan to vote against ratification of the slate.

It has nothing to do with any of the individuals nominated, or any member of the nominations committee, but rather, it’s time for the slate to go. Or to at least be modified to allow for some direct voting of candidates (members-at-large, for instance).

We need diversity of thought and experience on the board. Recent decisions and actions show that there is something not quite right with our current process, and it’s not that the people on the Board are anything but great members of LMA and great people, not to mention good friends. However, together, the diversity of thought and thought process is lacking.

Teamability over individuality

In the spirit of Teamability–an assessment test I took when I was on the board last–we need a variety of personalities to make an effective team.

Teamability is a great assessment because it is not about “Heather, as an individual” but “What does Heather bring to the table as a member of a team?” The diagnostic breaks the personality types down, and actually pairs you with your counterpart: Continue Reading Why I plan to vote against ratifying the LMA slate

I have been very outspoken on the LMA Board of Director’s decision to cancel three popular recognition programs within our association. Considering that many of these people are my personal friends (and not just Facebook friends), it sucked at times.

Today the Board announced that it is reinstating the three programs for 2018, and will be collecting both formal and informal feedback, including the introduction of member surveys, to help guide them in making a decision moving forward as to “recognize excellence in the LMA.”

Please join me in thanking the Board for listening and taking action on the feedback that they have received. I know there was an enormous amount of discussions and emails going back and forth over this issue and what to do. I am certain it was not an easy decision to make, but it was the right thing to do.

Thank you.

A little over a week ago a conversation began about the use of the term “non-lawyer” in the context of referring to business executives in law firms.

It started with the American Lawyer‘s coverage of Husch Blackwell‘s new CEO: Husch Blackwell’s Next Leader is a Newly Employed Non-Lawyer (subs. req).

When Paul Eberle assumes the top leadership role at Husch Blackwell in February 2018, the non-lawyer manager will have spent less than two years working at the firm he presides over.

Sadly, the American Lawyer failed to give credit to Mr. Eberle’s for his 20 years of executive experience as a CEO, and that caught the eyes of the legal marketing community. Continue Reading The use of “non-lawyer” is destructive to the business of law