Email Will Never Be The Same – All Dressed Up and Everywhere To Go
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 […]
Enterprise 2.0 and Reinvention of the Firm
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 […]
Successful Transitions: The New Managing Partner’s First Days
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 […]
My Favorite Leadership Quotations
We often meet with firm leaders who are not really sure of what their precise role is, or how to accomplish what needs to be done at their firms to dramatically drive them forward. They often tell us that they have had little or no preparation for the role they have been thrust into. Certainly […]
Talking With Pete Kalis of K&L Gates
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 […]
Planning Your Law Firm Retreat
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 […]
Alumni as a Competitive Weapon
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?” […]
The Cuban Boy & IP Boutique
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 […]