The annual “Best 50 Law Firms for Women” list, released mid-year by Working Mother magazine, remains one of the key surveys of 2015.
The list reports that law firms featured in the Best 50 employed more female equity partners, at twenty percent, than the national average (seventeen percent). The Best 50 compilation also boasts that sixteen percent of the firms now have three or more women among their “top ten rainmakers,” a five percent increase from 2014.
Five firms appeared on both the Working Mother’s ‘Best 50’ list and The American Lawyer’s “Eight Firms Where Women Thrive“: Quarles & Brady, Baker & McKenzie, Sidley Austin, Holland & Hart, and Reed Smith.
Read more from the report here.
Does the increased transparency of firm finances benefit or vitiate its partners? A recent article by The American Lawyer investigates, positing that “as part-owners of the business, law firm partners have both a financial incentive and an ethical responsibility to take an active interest in the firm’s strategic and financial conduct.” At small firms, this is easily apparent–but at the AmLaw 100 and Global 100 firms of today, with hundreds of partners and offices spread across the globe, the business significance of the partner title becomes much less obvious.
In fact, notes James Jones, senior fellow at Georgetown Law’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, while the partner title is “still very important symbolically,” the actual ownership role “has reduced quite significantly,” to the point that “if you’re a partner at a really large firm, you maybe own 0.005 percent of the equity” (as quoted in The American Lawyer).
While many believe that transparency is “key to engendering partner engagement and ensuring management accountability,” (Peter Kalis, as quoted by The American Lawyer), some believe that financial transparency can actually be detrimental to the firm. John Morley, associate professor at Yale Law School, asserts that transparency actually “enhances the risk of partners fleeing in response to changes in profitability.”
AmLaw furthers Morley’s view by citing the ruination of Finley Kumble, the first major American firm to enter bankruptcy–and a firm known for its incredibly obscured operations, the unveiling of which incited a mass exodus of partners.
Visit The American Lawyer to read more.
Fifteen Southern California firms have just been featured by The National Law Journal as demonstrating “excellence in practice areas critical to the Southern California economy and legal community.”
Loeb & Loeb received the top honors in the Entertainment industry. Nossaman was crowned the winner for Government Contracts, and global giant DLA Piper took the Real Estate category. Morgan, Lewis, & Bockius won for Litigation.
Read the profiles of the winners and finalists here.
Innovative strategies are necessary for continued firm growth in the corporate legal market, according to a recent article from The American Lawyer. William Henderson and Evan Parker report that due to decades of organic growth, when law firms simply grew with their clients, the “supply of capable outside counsel [now] exceeds demand,” requiring firms to consider a new, focused approach for future expansion.
They posit that the Am Law 200 firms are now forced to grow solely by taking the market share. Henderson and Parker believe that focus is key to successfully doing so, quoting the approach that Apple’s Steve Jobs took of “starting with the customer experience and working backwards to the technology.” They encourage law firms to act similarly by exploring their particular niche and studying their existing clients in order to effectively take the market share.
The article also broke down market size by practice area, and found that “the largest market is the one most synonymous with large-firm practice: antitrust, corporate, securities, finance, and insurance”–essentially, the commercial world.
Henderson and Parker use the $15 billion labor and employment market as a case study to illustrate Jobs’ focused approach, attributing the L&E firms success to “working backwards from the needs of the client” in order to build “an ark that won’t sink.”
The article also uses New York City-based firm Skadden to further exemplify the potential success for firms who employ industry focus and who value understanding their particular market.
Firms are taking a more analytical approach to partner compensation, reports LegalTech News. While partner compensation has traditionally been calculated in a more subjective manner, experts from legal software producer Aderant posit that “analytical models should be the best practice for determining law firm compensation.”
Dan Ronesi of Aderant argues that although law firms have started utilizing profitability as a metric for the firm itself , many are still hesitant to use this approach to calculate partner compensation. Aderant cites perceived lack of access to data and inherent differences in profitability between practice areas as two potential challenges to the adoption.
LegalTech News further quotes Ronesi as advising to “locate the profit that one’s generated instead of the revenue that one’s generated,” since revenue, if increased inefficiently, does not necessarily lead to increased profitability.
Ronesi identifies three future trends in firm operations: using better technology to track these metrics, looking at the numbers more frequently to create new opportunities, and increased use of profitability in the compensation models (as quoted by LegalTech News).
Professor Heidi Gardner of Harvard Law School presented her research at the 20th Annual Law Firm Leaders Forum in early October, where she discussed why law firms should encourage collaboration among firm partners in order to increase innovation and development.
Sean Doherty of Above the Law highlights the key points of her talk, noting two trends that lend themselves to partner collaboration: first, the increasing complexity of law, which requires lawyers to specialize and work in discrete practice groups, and also the engagement in the “volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) phenomena” that is often used to coordinate business spanning multiple disciplines.
As part of her research, Gardner interviewed law firm clients about the importance of partner collaboration within the firms, and found that clients believed that such collaboration increased the efficiency, cost-effectiveness, geographic reach, and innovation of the legal services, as well as led to a more complex understanding of the client’s enterprise.
Gardner posits that collaboration will be largely beneficial to firms over time, despite initial costs. Doherty reports Gardner’s list of benefits from collaboration to include “more successful business development, higher personal productivity, enhanced reputation, and ‘sticky’ (read: loyal) customers.”
Many observers believe Chicago’s startup and technology scene has reached a critical mass, enjoying a timely alignment of talent, capital and political will alongside an emerging infrastructure of incubators and accelerators. Moreover, its not just insiders – Silicon Valley is starting to recognize that something important is afoot in the Midwest as well.
Chicago’s startup and technology community has just taken a major step forward with the announcement that Howard Tullman, well-connected entrepreneur extraordinaire, will be taking the reigns at 1871. We expect this growing startup and technology scene to create exciting new opportunities for Chicago transactional attorneys and the local legal community at large.
Astor Professional Search President Bill Sugarman was recently quoted in Crain’s Chicago Business regarding one of the most vital decisions an attorney can make: Where are the best dining venues in Chicago?