Tag: Lawyer

  • Top 5 sales FAILS (for lawyers)

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    Intelligent Challenge
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    In a fit of New Year’s good intentions (see last week’s post on resolutions) I’ve been scouring the Internet to find out how to be a better blogger. All for your benefit my friendly reader… Anyway, one of the suggestions I found (which I liked), was “write a list post”. I wondered what an earth…

  • The bad ones (tales from tenders part II)

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    Last week’s post on law firm responses to RFPs (requests for proposal) drew good numbers and prompted some interesting discussion (it’s here if you missed it). I promised I’d follow up the horror stories with some thoughts on what makes both a good and a bad response. Moving from the terrible to the merely unimpressive,…

  • The insidious side of hourly rate billing

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    Much has been written about the demise of hourly rate billing by some excellent writers, and rightly so, much of the focus is on why hourly rate billing doesn’t work for clients. Encourages inefficiency, doesn’t relate to value delivered or market rate for work, makes bill auditing onerous etc etc. These criticisms are absolutely valid…

  • Are you high quality? Really?

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    The topic of quality of legal advice seems to come up a lot more frequently these days. Perhaps that’s a sign of a more competitive marketplace. Maybe it’s down to more discerning purchasers of legal services. Either way, the days when law firms could talk in general terms about providing a “quality service”, without any…

  • What’s your agenda?

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    My friend Ross, an in-house attorney in the U.S., is known for his personal crusade against unproductive meetings. We’ve all been in them: the time-devouring, pointless meetings that swallow time and achieve little (if anything). The book “Rework” by Fried and Hienemeier Hansson gives a great explanation of why there are so many meetings of…

  • You do what?

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    Reading another interesting discussion on the Interweb last week, which was urging lawyers to ask their clients the simple question “so what do you do?”. The basis of the article was that this would give a client or a prospect the opportunity to talk about their business, and thus provide a deeper level of insight…

  • The curse of knowledge?

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    But knowledge is power, right? How can it be a curse? The answer, is when it prevents simplicity, which is key for lawyers in both their professional practice and their business development. The inspiration for this post came from an intriguing little book called “Made to stick” by Chip and Dan Heath. The book is…

  • When fear stops you going forward

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    Thinking about new product development in law firms, the word innovation pops up. That market is one that’s getting more and more competitive, and law firms need to be different to succeed. The problem (as I see it), is that for many firms, as innovation become increasingly important, firms will run up against the widely…