RJon Robins has been helping smaller law firms with the business end of the legal profession for over 25 years. His company, appropriately named How To Manage a Small Law Firm, puts smaller shops in touch with business professionals schooled in how to make boutique firms profitable. He works with over a thousand firms. He also wrote a book on the subject called “Profit First for Lawyers: Transform Your Law Firm from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine.”

Robins and Legal Speak’s Patrick Smith discuss the concept of the ‘law firms as a business’, or, when the profession turned into a business. But maybe it always was.

Robins and Smith discuss the history of the law firm apparatus, and in Robins contention, that successful law firms have always been run as a business, not a club.