Insights

We are more than halfway through the first quarter of 2023, but the outlook — in the legal industry and across the broader economy — is still a bit hard to pin down. One way to try to understand what law firms may face in the remainder of the year is to glance back at 2022. Legal industry reports analyzing law firm performance last year can shed light on trends, but firm leaders should bear in mind that the past several years have been highly unusual, and a...

Succession planning has long been a sensitive issue in the legal industry, probably because it forces law firms to deal with topics they tend to avoid, such as “change” and “the future.” And because the building blocks of firm business are highly personal relationships, acknowledging that those relationships will one day need to transition and evolve can even feel threatening for the partners that currently hold them.

And yet...

In a cultural moment that shows little tolerance for neutral players beholden only to the interests of their clients, law leaders face uncomfortable conflicts and big decisions about what it means to be a moral actor in 2020. Here’s how to face them head-on. It’s an old American truism that “doing well” is incompatible with “doing good,” but, in 2020, that belief has been overturned by the movement toward greater corporate social responsibility and the expectation,...