Legal Gets a Mulligan

OK, I have to admit when I first read Heather’s post Legal Gets a Mulligan I had to ask Google “What’s a Mulligan?”.  

I found this helpful explanation in Wikipedia, “A mulligan is a second chance to perform an action, usually after the first chance went wrong through bad luck or a blunder. Its best-known meaning is in golf, whereby a player is informally allowed to replay a stroke, even though this is against the formal rules of golf.”

Read on and decide for yourself about the power of Heather’s Mulligan metaphor.

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Posted by on May 2, 2019 in Business models, Small law firms | 0 comments

Remaking news of the week: No consolidation

Today Remaking the news of the week celebrates some of the American Lawyer’s best writing in years.

On May 22, Hugh Simons and Nicholas Bruch opened their article with “A mistaken and dangerous belief pervades much thinking about the US legal market: that it is consolidating as larger firms grow more quickly than the market by taking share from their smaller rivals. A thoughtful look at the numbers reveals that no such consolidation is happening.”

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Posted by on Jun 7, 2018 in BigLaw firms, Remaking News of the Week, Small law firms | 1 comment

Small firms: Take your size and own it

At the end of March, George Beaton posted an article in his Remaking Law Firms blog entitled ‘Mid-market law firm brouhaha’ in which he challenges the automatic attribution of law firm woes outside the BigLaw firmament. George references my previous article on ‘The Strength of Small Law Firms’ and advocates for a move away from the “small equals struggling” narrative. “To my knowledge”, he says, “there isn’t a skerrick of systematic evidence that all/most clients of these mid-market firms are saying “It’s desirable that your services are delivered by you in a firm with a bigger/international footprint/greater scale/wider range of services”.

Beaton argues that the “small-equals-struggling” narrative attributes certain challenges to the mid-market, which are, in fact, challenges faced by all law firms. In this scenario, he argues, it’s not the size of the firm that matters but the way it delivers its services.

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Posted by on May 8, 2018 in Clients, Small law firms | 1 comment

Mid-market law firm brouhaha

Mid-market law firm brouhaha is my stream of consciousness arguing the illogicality of the concerns about the thinning ranks of mid-market firms.

Dictionaries define brouhaha as a noisy and overexcited reaction to something. That, in my opinion, is exactly what happens every time a mid-size (aka mid-market) firm ‘merges’ with larger, often international, firm.

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Posted by on Apr 17, 2018 in Small law firms, Strategy | 1 comment

The strength of small

Peter George writes about the strength of small law firms from first-hand experience, reflecting on his journey from in-house counsel to a large national firm to CIE Legal – and the benefits that small firms bring to clients, partners, staff and families. 

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Posted by on Feb 21, 2018 in Clients, Small law firms | 0 comments