Product Description
Featuring contributions from both legal practitioners and management researchers, Managing the Modern Law Firm seeks to present the latest insights from Management Studies in an approachable, practical, and relevant manner for lawyers involved directly and indirectly with the management of law firms…. More >>
Managing the Modern Law Firm: New Challenges, New Perspectives
Tags: Challenges, Firm, insights, law firms, lawyers, legal practitioners, management studies, Managing, Modern, new perspectives, Perspectives, relevant manner
#1 by Rolf Dobelli on March 23, 2010 - 11:24 pm
Editor Laura Empson has collected papers that present the latest research on the evolution of the modern law practice. Although the writers here are academics, their papers are not overly technical. In straightforward language, they discuss the various challenges new international, corporate structures present to legal traditions, from public service to the “partnership ethos” to billing. getAbstract recommends this book to strategically minded legal executives who want to map out new directions while retaining the best of the old values and ethics.
Rating: 5 / 5
#2 by Craig Matteson on March 24, 2010 - 12:44 am
This book is for those involved with managing law firms, especially those impacted by the move of legal practices from partnerships to corporations and from local firms to behemoths that span the globe. The papers collected here represent recent research on current topics in the legal industry. Their goal seems to be to keep the best features of the traditional firm while accepting the efficiencies and realities of the global corporate legal firm.
The book’s ten chapters cover the range of topics in the book in a paper by the Laura Empson, the editor, and Stuart Popham. Chapter 2 looks the decline of partnership and the implications of the rise of the corporate structure in legal practice. Chapter 3 looks at the issues surrounding Diversity in Europe and compares them to the lessons learned from the American experience. Chapter 4 provides a recipe for successfully adding new initiatives to your practice and why failure follows efforts that vary too much from the formula their research revealed.
Chapter 5 covers the issues involved with customers and why marketing is necessary to not on create new customers, but to hold onto your existing base. Chapter 6 looks at the different kinds of value a legal practice has and what that implies about income. In a related area, Chapter 7 looks at the kinds of capital your legal practice has and how you can manage each. Chapter 8 explores the issues of competition in the modern legal practice and the evaporation of the old gentleman’s agreements among firms. Ethics and the failure of preserving traditional ethics in some modern corporate law firms is reported in chapter 9. The book concludes with a plea for the preservation of the partnership ethos in chapter 10.
While the book has a definite focus on Europe, there is value for American firms and their managers if they deal in the practice of supporting global clients. You will know more about how your European competitors think and work, if nothing else.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
Rating: 4 / 5
#3 by Janet H. Moore on March 24, 2010 - 1:14 am
What makes one modern law firm successful–and another less so? This compilation of chapters analyzes today’s multi-national firms and clarifies why some succeed and others fail.
The authors delve into a wide variety of topics–from law firm mergers across cultures, to the morphing of traditional partnership arrangements. As Bruce MacEwen correctly points out in his detailed review, the book thoroughly explores–and challenges– the concepts of traditional partnership and the partnership “ethos”.
Lawyers working for US-based law firms will particularly enjoy the critical analysis of 200 or so large U.S. firms. Some of the results may be surprising, such as that U.S. firms with limited international presences have the highest per partner profits. In addition, the book explains why the firms that internationalized later are usually more profitable. These firms took careful note of the early internationalizers–and learned from their mistakes.
One chapter reveals strategies for successfully launching new practice areas, including giving such attorneys lots of internal support (tangible and intangible). Perhaps surprisingly, hiring a “heroic founding partner” to launch a new practice area does not correlate to the practice’s success.
Lawyers at global forms will particularly enjoy the comments about the “Magic Circle” firms and their ability to cultivate a sense of teamwork and partnership despite cultural divides.
This book ranks as one of my favorites of 2007. Any lawyer working at a global firm–or aspiring to do so–will really benefit from this book’s insights.
Rating: 5 / 5
#4 by Bruce Mac Ewen on March 24, 2010 - 2:21 am
This valuable and multi-faceted collection of essays jointly comprises one of the most sophisticated and nuanced views of how 21st Century law firms are trying to cope with growing pressure on the “partnership ethos” which largely sustained them for a century or more.
The primary source of that pressure is simple: Today’s global US- and UK-based law firms have become substantial enterprises in their own right. (Nearly 20 have gross revenues in excess of US$1-billion/year.) Firms such as these can no longer be managed by untutored amateurs, nor can they be governed as Athenian democracies. But if the “Quaker town meeting” style of consensus governance is no longer feasible, firms are equally loathe–rightly so–to turn to pure command-and-control corporate models.
The struggle to reconcile the high-minded and intrinsically precious values embodied in the partnership ethos, with the need to be supple and economically powerful global institutions, is what this book is all about.
While many of the contributors are academics, the approach is by no means “academic.” And the final chapter, by Tony Angel, global managing partner of the UK “Magic Circle” firm, Linklaters, is alone worth the price of the book.
Finally, Dr. Empson herself is aware that not all aspects of the partnership ethos are per se good.
* While partnership can form cohesive bonds, it can also work to exclude those outside the blessed fold, such as non-equity partners and extremely high-quality C-level executives.
* Are partners who view themselves as owners entitled to exercise “extreme and inappropriate behaviors”?
* Do clients and potential recruits (your firm’s two key aspirational constituencies) understand and value the partnership ethos?
* If the “socialization process” that indoctrinates one for membership in the partnership is too effective, it can “represent a potentially serious block to change more generally…[the] partnership risks becoming a self-perpetuating collection of clones.”
* Finally, the partnership ethos can be strengthened not just by preferentially selecting those candidates who embody it but by dealing decisively with those who belong to the partnership but who, for whatever reason, no longer embody its principles.
Incidentally, Dr. Empson just moved (mid-June 2007) from the Said Centre at the University of Oxford to a newly created chair as Professor in the Management of Professional Service Firms at Cass Business School in the City of London.
Rating: 5 / 5