How a GC Selects a Law Firm
February 1, 2007 | Filed Under Law Firm Trends, Selling the GC
This is an issue near and dear to the hearts of engaged managing partners.
One answer is given in an interview in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly with former Cognex GC Michael Steir. To him, it’s all about the lawyers:
Q. Does your company look for a law firm or a particular lawyer?
A. I don’t seek out law firms; I seek out lawyers within law firms. What I tend to do is interview several law firms for a project. If it’s [for] major patent litigation, I would go and talk with two, three or maybe four law firms and decide, based not on the managing partner but on the people who would actually be working on the project, trying to judge their willingness to work in other than a legal mode and, most importantly, their willingness to work with the client as a team.
So, when seeking to build a firm, is it better to merge with another or just pick some of these?
Update: Hmmm, certain minds think alike…
Live From New York: The Wired GC Unmasked!
January 31, 2007 | Filed Under Selling the GC, In the News
It wasn’t Saturday Night Live, more like Sunday Night at the Improv.
As promised last month on the occasion of the second birthday of The Wired GC, the mask is getting to be more of a burden than a benefit. I am definitely not the greatest american lawyer, but I’m not a fiction, either.
Last Sunday, I attended a pre-launch party for BlawgWorld 2007 in New York City. By some sort of administrative error, The Wired GC was invited.
I had intended to spend the evening with a bag over my head, but that made it hard to get through security at a certain Gotham City nightspot.
I stopped Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith, Esq., as he was about to leave with a very attractive woman to attend a private party thrown by Bono (or Madonna, I forget which). Suddenly the dreaded legal paparazzi jumped out from behind a phalanx of bloggers and snapped this picture:
I’m on the left; legal insiders know that Bruce is on the right.
I enjoyed finally meeting Bruce, whose work was not only featured in BlawgWorld 2006, it was the exemplar. It was also great to see many other lawyer-bloggers at the event, including Matt Homann, Ron Friedmann, Tom Mighell, and Arnie Herz.
So that’s all for now; the modest venture alluded to here will be unveiled next month. It’s colder than a well digger’s @** in the Midwest, and a trip to Florida stands between yours truly and the final end of anonymity in late February.
Enough of the inside baseball; back to work tomorrow.
The 1% Solution
March 14, 2006 | Filed Under Managing, Selling the GC, In the News
Just when the tide seems to be breaking offshore, there’s a reminder that some people swim against the current.
UK publication The Lawyer just served up an interview with Tim Morris, group GC of Carphone Warehouse, a fast-growing UK telecom firm.
Mr. Morris apparently likes to see the legal work up close:
Since Morris’s arrival at Carphone Warehouse, he has taken the in-house legal function from one extreme to the other. Carphone Warehouse used to outsource 99 per cent of its legal work but now outsources just 1 per cent.
“We’ve brought most of the legal work in-house,” Morris says. “A lot of the work is corporate and it was work that I knew we could do in-house.”
And for those doing the remaining 1%, don’t think it will be easy to cross-sell services to Carphone Warehouse:
Morris doesn’t deal with law firms so much as he deals with people. He has maintained close working relationships with Ashurst corporate partner Stephen Fox and Olswang corporate head Adrian Bott since they were drafted in to advise on Carphone Warehouse’s flotation on the London Stock Exchange in 2000.
I guess the much touted one-stop shop law firm model may not work in all cases.
So another competitor for law firms emerges: the client itself. And those lawyers who can both find work and mind clients, well they are worth their weight in gold.
You Fall Out of Your Chair…
February 15, 2006 | Filed Under Managing, Selling the GC
…Is the legal Jeopardy answer to “What happens when a leader speaks directly and with conviction?”
David Maister, the leading mangement advisor to professional service firms, has written a great speech for a new law firm managing partner. The entire work is worth reading (it would be great to hear Mr. Maister deliver it on a podcast). This part pushed me off balance:
ON CLIENTS AND WHAT THEY WANT
I believe that clients can make few distinctions on the technical capabilities of the best firms, and place great emphasis on the ability of the individual partner to enter their world, relate to them in their language, talk to them about their business. We will never succeed by being technicians alone, no matter how high our level of technical skill. Clients want us to know their business. They want us to be interested in them.
The best part of this is that it serves to shake a lawyers out of a central comfort zone: their qualifications, their firm (or legal department) attributes, and their reasons why what they know is complex and boy should people pay dearly for it.
Sometimes law firms are urged to avoid getting direct client feedback. This attitude I will never understand.
One thing about the inhouse practice is that you hear how you are doing in real time. Not always pleasant; but definitely always instructive as to what is important to the client.
David Maister entered the blogging race just this year. It looks to me like he may soon lap the field.
Staying Flush When A Rainmaker Dries Up
January 13, 2006 | Filed Under Managing, Selling the GC
Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail gives a rare view into what happens to a law firm when a key rainmaker departs.
The more publicized case is when a lawyer leaves with a “book of business” and goes to hopefully greener pastures with another firm. Gnashing of teeth (and sometimes litigation) results. Clients are often caught in the middle of a tug-of-war, which doesn’t do much to foster long-term loyalty.
Recently for leading Canadian firm Osler Hoskin & Harcourt, things were different. Late last year, longtime partner Peter Dey departed to become chairman of Paradigm Capital Inc., an institutional investment dealer.
As the paper notes:
So when it came time last year to wrap up business with his law firm clients once again, Mr. Dey had the drill all worked out. Namely, he started bringing in other partners to transfer work within the firm.
It’s what he did with the Royal Canadian Mint, for example, which last year retained him to offer advice on executive compensation matters. While the government agency was content to deal with Mr. Dey, despite his impending departure, the corporate governance expert took the added initiative to bring a younger Osler colleague, Robert Yalden in the firm’s Montreal office, to shadow him on the file.
Then this caught my attention as it is something many people don’t consider at the time:
Relationships between law firms and clients are fragile at the best of times, and when a lawyer retires, the loss can trigger wandering eyes.
If retirement can cause “wandering eyes,” what does “bolting for a bigger draw” cause?
The pressures to hit billing targets can cause some law firm partners to zealously control access to clients. But if a firm is truly a firm–and not a confederacy of rainmakers and assorted hangers-on–it is essential to treat clients like the relationship matters. In this case, Osler and Mr. Dey appear to have brought the clients to the table.
Which makes it more likely that they will stay for dessert and pick up the check.
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