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WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

LEAD GENERATION - Law firms are packed with good lawyers—so why are good leaders in such short supply? As Law.com's Patrick Smith reports, the current leaders of major law firms are in fact some of the most successful, intelligent and ambitious professionals in the world, but a top-flight legal education and a healthy book of business alone don't qualify a person to guide an organization into the future. The risk aversion taught in law school and in practice can be a hindrance when making business decisions, and the process for developing future leaders internally is murky at best in most firms. But the answer to the question of how law firms can improve their leadership ranks moving forward is deceptively simple: make more leaders. It's the execution that's complicated. "Firms need to be able to say, from a policy point of view, that people have a given number of hours each year to go through coaching and leadership training," Mark Beese, president of legal consulting firm Leadership for Lawyers, told Smith. "There isn't more of this because of the pressure of the hour. And we don't have a lot of champions for the cause right now. We don't have a lot of examples."

LINGERING EFFECTS - The pandemic may have panned out unexpectedly well for a lot of large firms, but small shops and solo lawyers have lived a much different experience over the past year, Law.com's Charles Toutant reports in the first installment of a series for ALM's Small Business Guidance program. Newark-based immigration lawyer Cesar Estela, for example, has been forced to rethink the entire focus of his legal practice thanks to backlogs and administrative problems in Newark's immigration court that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. What's more, Estela is still trying to recover after a bout with COVID-19 himself in the fall of 2020. Although he is recovered, Estela has impairments in his sense of smell and taste, and has difficulty breathing. "I'm always operating at about 80%. If you're operating at 80% and you need to be at 100%, it takes a toll mentally," he said. "You're drained. You get sad. You get depressed. You get to wondering, why did I become a lawyer? And all lawyers have that conversation but it becomes more frequent, because the victories are so infrequent."

DEMANDING A RECOUNT - Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit Friday in Texas Northern District Court on behalf of Buckthorn Wind Project, a wind farm located southwest of Dallas. The complaint pursues claims against JPMorgan Chase in connection with the bank's demand for a $28 million payment under an Energy Hedge Agreement. According to the suit, the winter storm that drove up the price of electricity in February exposed an error in JPMorgan's calculations. Counsel have not yet appeared for the defendant. The case is 4:21-cv-00562, Buckthorn Wind Project, LLC v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA. Stay up on the latest deals and litigation with the new Law.com Radar.

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