When your client is a law firm

If a cobbler (zapatero) starts with three employees and ten years later the payroll increases up to 300, the cobbler will certainly hire a finance director, a head of human resources and a quality control manager. Lawyers are far cleverer than that: they can split these responsibilities among the most capable partners and still ask them to invoice 2,000 hours a year.

In this post I will deal with the huge variety of services and products that law firms need to purchase from independent advisors. I believe law firms ranging from medium-sized to multinational occupy a very promising niche in the market of specialised consultancy, so here is a good set of tips.

Conferences on good management of law firms are frequent.



At a smaller scale (for Spain is not that big), regional conferences are also organised on good management of law firms in which the most relevant firms express their views about talent retention, lawyers’ careers, internationalisation, partner’s compensation, training and education, the balance between personal and professional lives and other hot topics in our profession. If there is one thing lawyers love, it is talking to lawyers about other lawyers, naturally in terms of mild or severe criticism. An example for this is Recoletos Conferencias’ course on “Gestión Empresarial de Despachos de Abogados”.

Law firms pay all kinds of specialised courses to lawyers eager to learn, for instance negotiation techniques for thugs, balance sheet analysis for fools and time management for workaholics. Seriously speaking, I must recommend the brilliant course Legal Communication Skills at the Instituto de Empresa http://colegio.juridico.ie.edu/programas/WF_Programa.aspx?id=90351. I asked three of my partners to attend it and (once having been skillfully interrogated) they confessed to have found it not only fruitful but also enjoyable (!).

In terms of high-tech advice, apart from the obvious IT/IP investments -a must if you wish to be in line with your competitors-, law firms also need assistance in web page design. I am proud of ours www.rodesysala.com. Likewise, we all have marketing directors, business development departments, press relations officers and others of the like.

No kidding, I have seen some firms retain consultants for such odd things as coaching a partner-to-be so that he could raise his profile, designing the partners’ compensation scheme and telling the firm what to do so that people could leave work earlier. I liked the latter very much.

All in all, it is human resources where law firms must learn more (and more quickly) from specialists. Our profession is suffering from high lawyer turnover, which is very harmful to our core business, i.e. providing quality services to clients and charging fees. I noticed the concentration has changed from invoicing as much as possible to making employees happier (thus, invoicing more). Sorry for quoting myself in “The Happiness Committees in Law Firms” http://juridical.blogs.ie.edu/2008/01/the_happiness_committee_at_law.html.

In conclusion, lawyers frequently make the mistake to try to arrange everything by themselves. While it is true that there are many things no-one can do better than us. You can just doublecheck this statement with the nearest attorney at hand ;-). I believe, though, for many other tasks we should rather stick to what we know and let the cobbler stick to his last (que, por cierto, significa “zapatero a tus zapatos”).