10 legal services marketing trends to watch this year

10 legal services marketing trends to watch this year by Heather Suttie is my choice of the many 2019 watch lists on BigLaw. It’s a compelling, commonsense synthesis.

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Law Firm IPOs: Pricing on a Wing and a Prayer

Back in June 2017 I wrote about the views of Jon Molot, Chief Investment Officer at Burford Capital on BigLaw partnerships, their (lack of) capital structure and the deleterious effects of short-termism.

At Validatum, we usually begin our Partners Pricing Masterclasses with one of the most evocative of Warren Buffet’s quotes, “The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business.”

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NewLaw is in the news

NewLaw is in the news again thanks to an excellent op-ed on the Australian scene by Lachlan McKnight, CEO of Legal Vision in Lawyers Weekly on December 28, 2018: Observations on NewLaw in Australia in 2018. 

These are my thoughts in response to Lachlan.

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25 years ago David Maister published Managing the Professional Service Firm

It’s 25 years since David Maister published Managing the Professional Service Firm (1993). I count myself fortunate to have a copy inscribed by David on my bookshelf. 

Recently, while preparing a presentation to professional services CMOs, I dipped into chapter 2, The Professional Firm Lifecycle and was reminded of the depth of David’s prescience on how meeting the range of clients’ needs profitably requires different business models.

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For what are law schools training students?

Today from the redoubtable Mark A. Cohen Dialogue on Remaking Law Firms posts For what are law schools training students? This is part of our recent series on law schools and their role in the legal services ecosystem.

The legal profession and the trillion-dollar global industry are undergoing a transformation. The seminal elements of legal practice—differentiated expertise, experience, skills, and judgment—remain largely unchanged. The delivery of legal services is a different story altogether.

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