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International Edition

Managing a Law Firm: Tough strategy

Open any book about strategy and you will read how product-focused companies have succeeded. You can learn, for example, about how Japanese cars beat the US giant auto manufacturers at their own game or how Microsoft came to dominate the market for PC software. The trouble is, though, most of the economy is driven by service businesses, which are almost always harder to manage than the sorts of organisations described in strategy books. It is particularly difficult to develop strategy in a law firm where everyone is intelligent, articulate and where, all too often, people have conflicting ideas about where the firm should be heading.
9 minute read

International Edition

Managing a Law Firm: A networked world

Five key factors are driving today's economy: client sophistication; connection; transparency; governance; and modularisation. These forces are steering the professional services sector towards commoditisation, where clients perceive minimal differences between most offerings and often squeeze their suppliers on fees. Only legal services suppliers that actively engage their clients in deep, collaborative relationships are able to differentiate themselves.
5 minute read

International Edition

Hanging on the telephone

Conference calling has become an integral part of the legal world. Lawyers routinely schedule calls for everything, from new client consultations to transaction negotiations to arbitration hearings with a judge in attendance.
4 minute read

International Edition

Desktop decisions

Desktop automation has been around for years. Ghost was written in 1996 to enable IT support people to clone a computer. ZENworks was introduced by NetWare in 1998 to help manage server and desktop configurations across the network: it is very far from being a new idea. What is interesting about it, however, is that it never stops evolving.
7 minute read

International Edition

Keep your cool

In today's legal services market it is important to keep abreast of the changing needs and concerns of companies involved in disputes. In this way we can develop the supportive role that both in-house and external legal advisers play in guiding clients towards the resolution of disputes.
6 minute read

International Edition

Equal Opportunities, Employment and Diversity: Trust in me

"We aim to become a trusted adviser". A hackneyed phrase, much used in the mission statements of professional services firms, but there is often little real understanding of what it really means. Like "putting clients first", it sounds good and is designed to make clients feel they are at the centre of things.
7 minute read

International Edition

Consolidating communications

What started out as a necessary upgrade to our business-critical telephony systems soon became an opportunity to achieve much more. In the past two years we have achieved 50% organic growth and, with similar ambitions for the future, our key business goals are improving customer experience and productivity while managing costs.
6 minute read

International Edition

Banking on experience

Outsourcing is one of the major trends in the legal industry at the moment. Whether it is moving peripheral administrative tasks to a third-party provider or moving your entire IT department to a subsidiary in India, accessing low-cost workforces is the flavour of the month for the legal manager.
7 minute read

International Edition

Code comfort

"Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; he who would search for pearls must dive below." So wrote John Dryden in 1678. And so, too, every solicitor makes minor mistakes in his day-to-day work - inconsequential errors and misjudgements. But so what, you may ask, if beneath the surface the client is getting the pearls of a first-rate job? And let us not forget that the standard is generally very high. Clients are, by and large, well served.
7 minute read

International Edition

Susskind predicts demise of lawyers in IT-led future

Top business lawyers have played down talk that increasing commoditisation and use of IT will bring about the death of the industry, following claims made by leading technology expert Richard Susskind. The predictions come in Susskind's new book, The End of Lawyers?, in which he says the legal profession needs to undergo a significant transformation to avoid extinction. He argues that lawyers need to ask themselves what elements of their workload could be undertaken more cheaply and efficiently as "the market is unlikely to tolerate expensive lawyers" for work that can be better done by "smart systems and processes"
4 minute read

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Legal Speak is a weekly podcast that makes sense of what’s happening in the legal industry.

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