Opening Argument

With legal industry management consulting on the rise, even as other industries look to reign in the influence of outside consultants, managing partners are asking themselves, “What’s the smartest way to engage outside expertise?”

Though it might come as a surprise to any midlevel associate working through the weekend for the third time in a row, law firm culture is reputedly at a moment of “peak empathy.” Certainly the pandemic, combined with shifting generational and cultural norms, has driven firms to make some once-unthinkable changes to the way legal work gets done. Are innovations like remote offices and hybrid schedules here to stay? Or will firm leaders inevitably regress to the profession’s traditional churn-and-burn style of management?

Where shying away from representing a controversial client was once considered a sign of weakness — what client would want to hire a lawyer who wouldn’t stand by them on their worst day? — such moral stands are now considered a sign of strength, highly valued by both socially conscious young professionals and consumer-facing businesses in the global marketplace. Here are some times when it might make sense to end a client relationship.

If August is for vacation and rooftop happy hours and December is for holiday parties and collections, you’ve basically got three months left to hit your 2022 business development goals. Here’s how to make the most of September, October and November.

Even as managing partners have sharpened their focus on their firms’ diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, the hard work of actually making change has mostly fallen to women and members of underrepresented or marginalized groups themselves, rather than to the still overwhelmingly white male leaders who are best positioned to remove those barriers.

There has long been a disconnect between how people are trained to be lawyers and what it actually takes to be a successful lawyer. That gap has only grown in recent years as the practice of law is being continually reshaped by ever-faster developments in technology, business and culture.

February signals the start of solicitations and submissions for an ever-expanding set of directories and recognition programs for lawyers. The sheer volume of possible awards and superlatives can make it seem nearly impossible to be planful or strategic about which ones are worth pursuing.