Announcing the Coalition of Professional Services Providers

We inhabit a competitive world. Dogs vs. Cats. Star Trek vs. Star Wars. Buyers vs. Sellers. Too often, however, this competitive nature prevents effective collaboration. The newly launched Coalition of Professional Services Providers is a step in the direction of establishing a mutually beneficial relationship between those who offer services and products to professional services firms, and the professional services firms who buy them. In the legal segment, most of the professional associations are exclusive by nature, indeed almost combative. Only practicing lawyers can join this group. Only chief marketing officers can join that group. Only buyers of a specific legal technology product are allowed to join a discussion of the product. And so on. Major conferences often have a bias for in-house professionals as presenters. "We must be protected from vendors trying to sell us something," they say, thereby eliminating input and advice from experts who may have seen 75 implementations of a specific tool or process, in lieu of an in-house practitioner who has deployed the tool only once, in only one organization, and is leveraging the speaking opportunity to find a better paying role. Of course not every in-house presenter has such limited experience and of course they're not all seeking a new job. But if you stipulate to that you must also stipulate that not every vendor is going to rashly use podium time to pitch a product that the audience doesn't need or want and instead will provide useful education and practical takeaways.

"For the low, low price of $10,000 you too can be in the same room with people who might someday influence a buying decision!" says the brochure for the local chapter of a professional legal association, promoting this opportunity to all vendors and service providers as some sort of exclusive benefit that can't be gained otherwise. "For $20,000 you can put your logo on napkins and the president of our association will nod curtly in your direction during the cocktail reception," they breathlessly exclaim. "But there may be no eye contact, and you're not allowed near the podium because of the potential risk that you might begin selling." And my favorite: "You may purchase an expensive advertisement on the back cover of our trade magazine to show your support, but you may not attend the workshop for buyers of your product, where the top agenda item 'If Only We Had a Better Understanding of How to Use the Product' is sure to provoke lively discussions."

While these are somewhat exaggerated, they ring true for many of us who have been on both sides of the buyer/seller equation. What's missing in some cases is a sense of collaboration, an understanding not just that we need each other, but how best to utilize each other. Clients can be great catalysts for new and innovative ideas, features, and functions, just as vendors and consultants can share time-tested best practices with clients who are behind the learning curve. A service provider that doesn't heed client input is no more absurd than a client needlessly pursuing a long, lonely learning curve on some new technology without any guidance whatsoever.

And so several of us put our heads together and decided to launch a new initiative. The Coalition of Professional Services Providers is designed to jump start this dialog. The in-house practitioners have several professional associations through which they can collaborate, communicate, network, and learn. And while some of these associations warmly embrace consultants and service providers as members, most don't. CoPSP serves as a platform for those providing services and products to come together and communicate on what's working and what can be improved, to collaborate on best practices, to work with other associations to develop mutually beneficial sponsorships, to help newcomers to the field learn how to market and sell to the professional services segment, and to provide resources and training.

The Coalition of Professional Services Providers (CoPSP) is an organization dedicated to advancing the interests of solution providers that work with the legal and professional services communities. It is governed by members, for members, all of whom stand in alignment around the following principles:

• Passionate about continuous improvement – for ourselves and our ability to serve clients and customers – and for our clients and colleagues
• Committed to transparency in the way business is transacted
• Access to quality and relevant education that advances personal and professional development for members
• A community of peers is critical for success
• Advocacy on important issues gives us a collective presence, stronger voice, and greater influence

We hope you join for the ride.

More information here. Apply here. Facebook here. Join the LinkedIn Group here. Follow on LinkedIn here. Twitter here.

Timothy B. Corcoran was the 2014 President of the Legal Marketing Association and is an elected Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management. He delivers keynote presentations, conducts workshops, and advises leaders of law firms, in-house legal departments and legal service providers on how to profit in a time of great change. For more information, contact him at +1.609.557.7311 or at tim@corcoranconsultinggroup.com.

Compensation (Re)Design for Law Firms

Compensation (Re)Design for Law Firms

The good people at Ark Group recently published a new book, "Compensation (Re)Design for Law Firms," edited by Soo Darcy. I was invited to contribute a chapter, entitled "Incentivizing the New Normal." As regular readers know, I believe that many, if not most, and quite possibly all law firm compensation plans are in need of an overhaul. There are numerous opportunities for improvement: aligning incentives with client needs; recognizing that different types of contributions deserve different rewards; eliminating the competition between furthering firm strategy and partner rewards; addressing the huge looming issue of succession planning and treating it as a firm wide problem, not as the responsibility of a handful of retiring partners to graciously solve by acting against their self-interest; and much more. Above all, incentivizing the new normal means rewarding profits derived from efficiency. The primary reason law firms don't embrace alternative fees or project management/process improvement is that these novel approaches, despite being demanded by clients, will erode partner compensation... but only if we stick with outdated compensation models. The list of other contributors to this book is impressive: August Aquila; David Baca; Thomas Berman; Jim Cotterman; Arthur Greene; John Jeffcock; Joel Rose; Julious Smith; and Mike Roster. If you don't these names, click on the links to their impressive credentials. They each offer different insights into the philosophy and mechanics of rewarding behavior for maximum organizational effectiveness. I am pleased to be among such esteemed company.

If you serve in a law firm management or leadership role, do yourself, and your firm, a huge favor and purchase the book. Partner compensation has been considered by some to be the "third rail" of law firm management consulting. You can mess with anything else in this changing profession and industry, so long as you don't impact the partners' livelihoods. But here's the thing: the incentives as currently modeled in many plans are specifically designed to lead to the law firm's failure. The cost of doing nothing has never been greater. But lest the theme of "adapt or die" not be enough of an catalyst, think of it this way: your lawyers want to do the right thing for the clients; your clients want to continue to retain top lawyers; yet your compensation plan inevitably forces some unfortunate and awkward choices. The lawyers have to choose between their own self-interest or their clients' needs; or the clients have to choose between excellent lawyers they know well but can no longer trust in lieu of unknown lawyers who demonstrably place client needs front and center. The law firms that figure this out have a window of opportunity to capture market share.

When an organization's incentives are mis-aligned, and the highly compensated are rewarded for acting in ways that are contrary to the best interests of the firm, this is, undoubtedly, a bad situation and one can rightly assign some responsibility to bad actors. But the lion's share of the responsibility belongs to firm management. If you know the incentives are misaligned, and if you allow the perpetuation of highly-compensated individuals to pursue their own self-interest to the detriment of the organization, then you have utterly failed as a manager and a leader. There is nothing especially surprising about law firm incentives. Every other business on the planet has dealt with similar issues. Isn't it about time you step up?

Timothy B. Corcoran was the 2014 President of the Legal Marketing Association and is an elected Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management. He delivers keynote presentations, conducts workshops, and advises leaders of law firms, in-house legal departments and legal service providers on how to profit in a time of great change. For more information, contact him at +1.609.557.7311 or at tim@corcoranconsultinggroup.com.

More Project Management & Process Improvement Courses Added

Due to increasing demand, we are now offering additional dates to attend the Legal Lean Sigma Institute instructional courses in Process Improvement and Project Management. The highly interactive, experiential-learning courses combined lecture with hands-on experience to illustrate the effectiveness of the tools and methodologies. Our past attendees have cited the practicality of the course, the benefit of collaborating with others facing similar challenges, and the variety of perspectives we and other participants share -- these courses are ideal for law firm partners, law firm associates, finance professionals, marketing & business development professionals, corporate General Counsel, in-house counsel, procurement professionals, and both novice and experienced practitioners of either project management or process improvement. While most of our work is customized and delivered privately to law departments and law firms, these pubic open-enrollment courses provide a great opportunity to see the ideas in action, to interact with similarly situated colleagues facing the same resistance and catalysts to change, and to gain a better understanding of how and at what pace to roll out such an initiative in your organization.

Our next open enrollment white belt certification course is a one-day workshop, held in Los Angeles on May 24, 2016, and hosted by the law firm of Greenberg Glusker.

Our next open enrollment yellow belt certification is a two-day workshop, held in Boston on July 26-27, 2016, and hosted by Suffolk Law School.

For more details on costs and registration, click here. For more information on process improvement and project management, click here and here and here.

Timothy B. Corcoran was the 2014 President of the Legal Marketing Association and is an elected Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management. He delivers keynote presentations, conducts workshops, and advises leaders of law firms, in-house legal departments and legal service providers on how to profit in a time of great change. For more information, contact him at +1.609.557.7311 or at tim@corcoranconsultinggroup.com.

Legal Marketing Association Releases "Body of Knowledge"

I'm pleased to have been chair of the Legal Marketing Association's inaugural Education Advisory Council in 2015. We combined input from numerous market leaders with our own insights to develop the first official LMA Body of Knowledge. This tool reflects the skills and competencies expected of different roles and levels of the various members of the Legal Marketing Association. It will guide leaders and managers in assessing team member strengths and areas of improvement, and it will help individuals plot their career paths. Many thanks to the numerous contributors who helped shape this inaugural effort. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOH3JwP4aQg[/embed]

The Evolution of Law Firm Compensation

Intersection

Law firm compensation plans are by and large unsophisticated, hard to administer, too subjective, opaque, and reward the wrong behaviors. As someone wise once said, "If your compensation plan is in conflict with your strategy, your compensation plan is your strategy." To generate maximum financial performance in a law firm, and achieve the highest level of client satisfaction, we need to re-align the incentives. I've said a great deal about the deficiencies of law firm compensation plans (here and here and here). A good plan should further the firm's strategy, be easy to administer, and both drive and reward the desired behaviors. Many miss the mark on one or more of these dimensions. Here are the typical challenges I observe:

No alignment with strategy. Our strategy establishes one set of goals; the compensation plan rewards other, often entirely opposing, activities. We're a full-service law firm for our clients, but we don't track or reward cross-selling. In fact, we create internal competition and ill-will by forcing partners to take a pay cut when they bring others into their relationships. We wish to expand into new practice areas and geographies, but we punish the partners brave enough to lead an expansion because their short-term economic contribution suffers. We want everyone to get out of the office and become a rainmaker, but we pay partners primarily to stay in the office and bill time. We promise clients seamless transitions when partners retire or depart, but we punish partners who introduce younger colleagues into key relationships by requiring them to split credit. We promote our client focus, but we pay for hours, not efficiency.

Limited transparency. Some firms share compensation amounts among all equity partners. Others share nothing. Some firms have lengthy compensation plan documents. Others make all decisions in a closed-door session involving a select few. Some offer helpful scenarios to guide partner behavior in matters such as fee-splitting. Others trust partners to figure it out. What most miss is that transparency is not the same as having an open or closed system (sharing, respectively, all or no compensation details). Transparency is about establishing clear direction as to which behaviors we reward, and in what proportion, and doing so well in advance of the desired behavior. More than one managing partner has been shocked to discover that many, if not most, partners are unclear on the firm's primary compensation drivers. This is management shortcoming, not a result of dim bulb partners.

Poor or insufficient metrics. Some financial metrics are easy to come by, such as billed hours or collected receipts. Others are more elusive, such as timekeeper or client profitability. Still other metrics are more directional in nature, such as cross-selling (we may know the client worked with another practice group, but we don't necessarily know whether the relationship partner drove that). Some behaviors have only subjective metrics: serving as a good mentor? community involvement? acting in the best interests of the firm? A solid plan has specific metrics tied to the desired behaviors, and a clear and sustainable methodology for measuring performance in more subjective areas.

Inconsistent or incomplete reporting. When the compensation drivers are established, they should be published and then periodically the metrics tracking performance should also be published. Why not monthly? It serves little purpose to provide no metrics until year end, or provide vague or incomplete metrics at uncertain intervals during the year. It's hard make a course correction if we have neither a map of our destination nor our current coordinates.

Failure to acknowledge self-interest. We all want to earn a healthy living. But just as partners are loath to discuss budgets with clients, many avoid compensation discussions until required to do so by executive or compensation committee fiat. There's nothing wrong with wanting to know what specifically I can do to increase my compensation -- especially if the management committee has aligned the comp plan to strategy, so maximizing compensation furthers the strategy! Also, far too often top rainmakers or management or comp committee members prevent meaningful discussions of compensation plan changes because they fear losing income. While a revised plan may indeed result in changes to some partners' compensation, if the outcome is improved financial performance for all (and improved client satisfaction), then it's bad form and quite possibly a breach of fiduciary duty for those at the top of the pay scale to refuse to review alternatives.

Pursuing a disruptive implementation. If we identify a better compensation approach that serves the partners' and the clients' interests, it's statistically improbable that everyone will make the same. The change may be good. Some partners who are more comfortable billing time might be quite pleased with a plan that offers more certainty but less potential. Rainmakers may enjoy growing their books of business without being tethered to the billable hour. But some change may be troubling: some may see a compensation decrease commensurate with a declining trend in economic contribution. But we don't have to make these changes all at once. We can establish the end-state and then migrate to it over several years, providing training or transition support to those who might be significantly disrupted by a new plan.

Incomplete modeling. By nature, any forecast is speculative. To change a compensation plan means applying numerous "what if" scenarios to current performance, with no guarantee that we will sustain our current level of performance. We also don't know if, or how quickly, an adjustment to, say, origination credit will grow the pie. We don't know for sure how many partners will defect if their compensation will decrease, because the market dictates whether their economic contribution is more valuable elsewhere than here. They may already have the greenest grass they'll ever see. So we must model numerous factors, using realistic variables, and then create a few versions of the future. Failure to do this may result in significant disruption and unrest, and risk-averse lawyers tend to become flight risks during times of uncertainty.

Big dog accommodations. Every firm has one, if not many, partners who are the top of the food chain and who are somewhat blasé or even outright hostile to firm policies. Nothing creates organizational turmoil than when senior leaders or big dogs are allowed to break rules that little people must follow. When a top rainmaker threatens to leave, sometimes the best response is to say goodbye. When new compensation policies are put in place, it may be reasonable to make certain accommodations for those who feed others. But there's a limit. The behavior we desire should be incorporated into the compensation plan, and there's no room for unwritten rules.

A compensation assessment or redesign can be an extraordinarily effective tool to improve financial performance, foster a client-focused and collaborative culture, reduce unnecessary distractions, and provide a roadmap for career success. Expecting smart people to somehow "figure it out" is lazy management. Build the future you want in your law firm. Start today.

Timothy B. Corcoran is principal of Corcoran Consulting Group, with offices in New York, Charlottesville, and Sydney, and a global client base. He’s a Trustee and Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management, an American Lawyer Research Fellow, a Teaching Fellow at the Australia College of Law, and past president and a member of the Hall of Fame of the Legal Marketing Association. A former CEO, Tim guides law firm and law department leaders through the profitable disruption of outdated business models. Tim can be reached at Tim@BringInTim.com and +1.609.557.7311.