Marketing
Casualties of Discounting
Permit me to paraphrase, and hopefully not mutilate, the lead from a recent article on strategy + business, the Booz & Co. (nee Booz Allen & Hamilton) online magazine: It’s a tough world …. New technologies … have permanently changed the [law firm selection ]experience. Meanwhile, a sluggish economy and rising competition are testing brand loyalty.
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Growth is Dead: Part 10-Clients
In Part 8 in this series, we talked about “Now What?” in terms of three particular approaches you could take that were all, essentially, inward-focused and things you can pretty much control inside the firm’s four walls: acknowledge you have competition; hire the best professional “C-suite” staff you can find; and articulate a non-generic strategy—and
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Growth is Dead: Part 8-Now What?
If you’ve traveled this far in this series, you may be wondering what I think you actually ought to do. Recognizing that diagnosis is eaiser than prescription, the remaininig installments—starting with this one—will try to address that. One other caveat: Not all of what I’m going to suggest will be advisable, or even appliable, to all
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Allen & Overy’s Annual Review: Compared to Yours?
From Allen & Overy’s 2011 Annual Review, which I happened to pick up in a visit to one of their offices last week, come some thoughtful essays you wouldn’t expect to find were it the usual firm’s “higher, faster, bigger, stronger, better, wider, longer, lower” sort of exercise in self-congratulatory high-gloss prose. A sampling. From Professor
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Invitation to Take Law Firm Business Practices Survey
Adam Smith, Esq. and David Freeman Consulting Group are teaming up to conduct a unique survey of the legal profession’s business practices that you might find extremely valuable. If you’re reading Adam Smith, Esq., we don’t need to tell you that law firms today are navigating uncharted waters. Fees are under intense pressure, the lateral
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Business Strategy & Client Development Seminar in Sao Paulo
Attentive readers will know that I’m in Sao Paulo this week, where the talk of the town (well, at least the talk of The Bar) is this story which was reported yesterday morning in The Latin Lawyer: Any affiliations between international and Brazilian law firms have been judged outside the limits of local regulations by
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A Brand Is a Promise
A perennial question, not susceptible to any definitive resolution, is the classic, “Do you hire the lawyer or the law firm?” I actually think this is one of those too-cute-by-half semantic tricks designed to inveigle the unwary into Talmudic debates where only the person who originally posed the preposterous query can possibly come out ahead.
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The Great Newspaper Meltdown, and What It Means For Our Pricing
From the famous annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, “Woodstock for capitalists,” comes news a couple of days ago from the WSJ that Warren Buffett, long an investor in newspapers, sees “unending losses” for the industry. He then makes even more pessimistic remarks: The current environment is accentuating the problem in newspapers -but it’s not the
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Who’s On Your “Red Team?”
According to a McKinsey study, in the corporate world, for every five attempts to enter a new market, four fail and only one succeeds. And this isn’t limited to startups or novice businesses; it includes very sophisticated firms. For example? Anheuser-Busch tried to diversify into snack foods. Not, you might think, such a stretch. Distribution
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But What Do Clients Really Think?
This past Thursday morning at the offices of White & Case, I had the opportunity to participate in presenting the results of a survey of how professional service firms (primarily law firms) set strategy. Held under the auspices of the Managing Partners’ Forum, of which I am now the New York regional director, the 8:00
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