Forward by Gerry Riskin of Edge International

Richard Upton is a savvy guru to the professions – he comes from the creative side but he understands and serves major law firms. In this piece, Richard helps us understand that an individual’s professional email has the potential to be more useful and friendly to the recipient and therefore a much more powerful tool to the firm that uses it. Somehow after seeing this, email simply seems undressed (or perhaps under- dressed). Give this some thought in your organization. If you want to explore this further, contact Richard directly (see his email address at the end of the piece).

Tell the truth. Has email improved your life? As a business leader, can you honestly say that you, your organization and your employees are more productive, or less, because you can send and receive instantaneous communications, day or night, from anywhere in the world? Do you have more time to devote to important matters, or less?

I know what the answer was supposed to be. Just a few years ago– when people were so ga-ga about email that they affixed happy-face icons to their messages-email was going to make everything in our workday lives easier, faster and more efficient. Instead, we find ourselves more “time-famished,” as I like to call it, than ever before.

Executives typically receive 100 or more emails per day. Some of us spend as much as four hours each day just managing the volume of email, with no let-up in sight. (Forty-one percent of Americans surveyed last year by America Online/Opinion Research said they check their email before going to work; 4 percent check their messages in the bathroom.)

Social networking tools like LinkedIn or Facebook and tools like wikis and blogs dramatically enhance the way that firms work. Major corporations like Morgan Stanley, Pfizer and Reuters are not alone in having discovered this. So have prominent law firms including Allen & Overy, Linklaters, Kilpatrick Stockton and Fenwick & West.

These tools are driving emergence of a new model of business some call “Enterprise 2.0. ” Less bound by restrictions of geography or time, they free people up to concentrate more on serving clients. Using a wiki to collaboratively produce a document significantly cuts down email traffic. (Some report savings of several days per person per year.) Instead of continually mailing updated iterations and having to track the latest version, everyone updates the one document ‘in situ, ‘and the system tracks who changed what. Email still has its place in “one-to-one” dialogue but “one-to-many” communication is more efficiently handled with Enterprise 2.0 tools, especially when multiple feedback is required.

Social networking also helps track the expertise needed for a particular matter and manage other information more effectively too. Deployed properly, these tools “connect the firm to itself, ” dissolving barriers between “silos” like practice groups and geographically dispersed offices. Firms can also share information externally (e. g. with clients) easier than before.

Edge International has partnered with Blogtronix (www.blogtronix.com,) a technology company from Colorado Springs, to offer a unique service to law firms. Blogtronix’s offering is the most comprehensive platform of its kind. It includes blogs, wikis, document management, social networking and RSS feed aggregation. The product is built on “CIO friendly” technology architected using Microsoft . NET and SQL Server, rather than open source components like PHP or MySQL. Compared to other similar platforms, it is also surprisingly inexpensive.

Can anything really prepare you for those initial days in your new role as managing partner? Just when you feel that you have reached the peak of your career by building a successful practice, you may realize that you still have some things to learn. You also may face some real challenges settling into your new role.

How can a new firm leader make the most of this important transition period and avoid the potential pitfalls that can affect their ability to be successful over the long term? To find out, we interviewed a collection of new or soon to become managing partners of firms from across the country.

We talked to them about the importance of those first days, their priorities and challenges, and the advice they would give to someone taking over just such responsibilities. We chose firm leaders from a variety of firm sizes but were surprised to learn that in each and every case these leaders were partners in their firms for a minimum of 17 years and had served in some prior management capacity (practice group leader, office managing partner, executive committee member) for at least 5 years.

At age 56, Pete believes he stands at the dividing line between the maturation of the profession into an industry: He describes himself and his peers as the “ultimate, or more probably, the penultimate generation of unintended managers,” people who are selected largely by process of elimination.

We had an opportunity to sit down with Pete Kalis, Chairman and Global Managing Partner of K&L Gates, which is the product of the January merger of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart with Preston Gates & Ellis, creating a firm of 1400 lawyers in 22 offices on three continents. Although that milestone was a spark for the meeting, we had long wanted to get his views on the current state and future trajectory of our industry, and our supposition that his thoughts would be nuanced, astute, and every so often contrarian, were borne out in spades. Pete has thought long, deeply, and hard, about the evolution of our profession–and our industry, a distinct, but equally apt, perspective–all the while with his hands under the hood, as it were, of an increasingly prominent firm. His thoughts demand attention, reflection, and ultimately, action.

A Generational Shift

Firms have a peculiar, unscientific and very time-and-place specific approach to choosing leaders. They must be: Not too young, not too old; must have the respect of the partners; equity not income partners, etc.; and at the end of the process there may be very few viable candidates left standing.

The rapid growth of law firms in the past decade has created some new and unique management difficulties. With firms’ size, and the complexity of global legal practices, coordinating the availability of partners to perform any management function beyond routine meeting attendance is increasingly difficult. The values of the partnership model to which many law firms aspire are becoming difficult to achieve in a modern professional service organization. The problem is further compounded in large multi-office firms where partners not only don’t know their fellow partners from other offices well, they may not have even met each other.

One solution to these issues for many law firms is a partner retreat. Typically held at a location away from the office, retreats offer law firm partners an opportunity to get to know one another and deal with some of the more complex issues of operating their firm, away from competing practice priorities.

The forms that firm retreats take are as varied as the firms themselves. Retreats can range from little more than tax-deductible vacations to cathartic events. One consistent fact is that the clarity of purpose for the retreat and the quality of planning dictate the value achieved and the level of partner satisfaction about the time devoted to their attendance.

At Edge, we have participated in planning, facilitating and speaking at literally hundreds of law firm retreats. This paper represents our formal attempt to debrief ourselves as to what makes for a successful retreat, what ideas work and which don’t and how firms can get the most from the time and money expended in conducting a retreat.

When partners leave a firm, the firm spokesperson traditionally trots out a “we wish them well” – whether through gritted teeth or not. But tradition is now making way for a wince-making new policy of depreciating departing partners. This usually takes the form of a statement along the lines of “Bothered? Do we look bothered?”

Up until now the best quote we ever saw was from a London firm who commented, “We have one of the biggest banking and finance practices in the City, with more than 30 partners working across 10 practice areas. We act for nine of the world’s top 10 banks, and two partners leaving aren’t going to have any meaningful impact on our business.”

This doesn’t exactly endear one to former partners, many of whom may be in a position to provide less than complimentary commentary to the legal press about your firm; may one day want to come back; or end up in an in-house counsel position and able to determine where massive legal dollars will be spent; or may be able to refer conflicts to your firm; or not!

As law firms, we often look at our brethren in the accounting field for ideas on how to better optimize our businesses. After all, the accountants were the first to develop practice groups which most law firms have now emulated. They were the first to develop client teams, which many of us now also imitate. That raises the question: Why have we been so slow to create alumni groups which the accountants have used for years?

Some years ago now, a little Cuban boy in Florida was ordered returned to Cuba. He would have to be “rescued” by force. One night soon after the order, US special forces extracted him from the house and his journey home was underway.

No shots were fired. No one was injured. According to the news reports, the extraction was surgical – no bleeding; no side effects.

At around the same time, an intellectual property boutique law firm located outside the USA decided to conduct an operation of its own. It would make contact with key individuals in intellectual property boutiques and intellectual property departments in larger firms in the USA and become known to these targets as the “go to firm” back in their own country should they ever require IP agents there.

What do the rescue of the Cuban boy and the law firm story have in common? EVERYTHING!