Above the Law is reporting on another big layoff of BigLaw staff, asking the question: Has the Great Associate Pay Raise of 2016 ushered in the Not-So-Great Staff Layoffs of 2017?

David Lat writes that “approximately 60 staffers at Dentons were informed that [March 10] would be the last day at the firm. We heard from a number of the affected individuals, and some of them speculated that the layoffs were caused in part by the need to trim expenses in the wake of increased costs for associate compensation.”

Lat’s reporting found that the cuts appear to be centered on support staff. Also, bonuses and raises expected for remaining staff on April 1 will be delayed.

Read the Above the Law article.

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Successful law firm marketing in today’s electronic environment can include everything from online banner ads to Twitter feeds to Facebook pages and more, writes Bruce Vincent in a blog post for Muse Communications.

Amid the many available options, one of the most effective tools for attracting the attention of referral sources can be found in a well-orchestrated email campaign, he says.

In a question-and-answer format, Vincent’s post recounts a discussion he had with Dennis Weber , founder of General Counsel News.

Some of the questions they discussed included: What makes email marketing effective fo the legal industry? Aren’t people so buried in email that they might simply tune out? What are the key elements of a solid email marketing campaign?

Read the Muse Communications article.

The New York Times is reporting that two large law firms said on Tuesday that they would combine to form a global firm amid continuing consolidation in the legal industry.

The combination of Norton Rose Fulbright and Chadbourne & Parke will create a single entity with more than 4,000 lawyers and expected annual revenue almost $2 billion. The combined firm will be known as Norton Rose Fulbright, reports Elizabeth Olson.

“Rumors had swirled recently that Chadbourne was looking for a combination, especially after some partners left the firm, including corporate and project finance partner Margarita Oliva Sainz de Aja, who joined Baker McKenzie last month, and bankruptcy partner Douglas Deutsch, who joined Clifford Chance last summer,” Olson writes.

Read the NYT article.

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By Amy Boardman Hunt
Muse Communications

If you’re a small law firm looking to grow your business, you may have encountered the phrase “content marketing” while exploring your marketing options. You may be asking yourself, “What the heck is that?”

This blog post will explain some of the main concepts of content marketing and discuss how it can be a potent tool for solos and small law firms with limited marketing budgets.

Content marketing is an umbrella term that incorporates the following elements (among others):

• Blogs
• Website text
• Social media
• Email marketing
• Search engine optimization for website text and other online content (i.e. making your content easily findable by online)
• Online profiles
• News releases
• White papers
• Ebooks

Become a Source of Genuine Value

The essence of content marketing is that you’re promoting your subject matter expertise (whether it’s labor law, family law, or any other practice area) by providing consistent, relevant content of interest to your clients and prospective clients. That could be answers to FAQ-legal inquiries, updates on new regulations, pending legislation that could affect your industry, interesting trends your clients need to know about, or just your “hot take” on a news story that intersects with your practice area.

Content marketing is primarily about two things:

• Building a reputation as a source of genuine value in your practice area; and
• Staying top-of-mind among your clients, prospective clients and referral sources.

It is not primarily about self-promotion, though that can play a part in your overall communications strategy.

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The general counsel of HP has informed its outside law firms that the company may withhold up to 10 percent of invoiced fees for failure to meet its diversity standards, reports the ABA Journal.

HP Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel Kim M. Rivera put law firms on notice of her “diversity holdback” mandate in a Feb. 8 letter.

The Journal‘s Debra Cassens Weiss writes, “HP says its definition of a diverse lawyer ‘is limited to race/ethnicity, gender, LGBT status, and disability status.’ A lawyer who is both a woman and who is racially/ethnically diverse and performs or manages at least 10 percent of the billable hours worked on HP matters satisfies the minimal diversity staffing requirement.”

Read the ABA Journal article.

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Above the Law has fleshed out earlier reporting about significant staff layoffs at K&L Gates, this time with fairly specific numbers of people who have lost their jobs with the big law firm.

Quoting one of his sources, David Lat reported: “The firm let go nearly 200 staff across the firm, including director levels in Human Resources and Marketing. IT was the hardest hit, but other departments, including Human Resources, Business Development, the paralegal group, and marketing, also saw large numbers let go.”

Another source confirmed that the number of staffers affected was in triple digits.

That source also said he or she knew of no attorneys who were included in the layoffs.

Read the Above the Law article.

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Cornell ranked first in a recent report that looked at salaries of recent law graduates, according to a Bloomberg Law article.

Online loan refinancing company Social Finance, Inc. ranked law schools according to which touted the highest salaried graduates.

“Cornell Law School ranked No. 1 for graduates with the highest salaries, averaging $183,377 in salary, with an average debt load of $148,443,” Bloomberg reported.

Two New York university law schools rounded out the top three: Columbia and New York University.

Read the Bloomberg Law article.

Women promoting their careers or their law practices need to understand that they’re marketing their skillset, and everything they do is marketing, advises Andrea S. Kramer, co-author of Breaking Through Bias: Communication Techniques for Women to Succeed at Work.

She co-authored the book with her husband, Alton B. Harris.

In a question-and-answer exchange with Amy Boardman Hunt of Muse Communications, Kramer talked about challenges women lawyers face when developing business.

Kramer, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery LLP, answered such questions as:

• What challenges do women lawyers face when it comes to business development?
• How can we combat bias, particularly unconscious bias?
• What’s the best way for women to develop relationships with male clients? What’s the gender-neutral version of a hunting trip or a suite at the football game?
• What’s the key to schmoozing male clients or prospective clients when you don’t want to suggest it’s something other than business?

Read the interview.

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Up to 90 percent of law firm work is done outside of the traditional billable hour model, according to the 2017 Report on the State of the Legal Market.

The ABA Journal reports on a study released by Georgetown Law’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession and Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute.

“One of the most potentially significant, though rarely acknowledged, changes of the past decade has been the effective death of the traditional billable hour pricing model in most law firms,” the report says. “Plainly, the imposition of budget discipline on law firm matters forces firms to a very different pricing model than the traditional approach of simply recording time and passing the associated ‘costs’ through to the client on a billable-hour basis.”

Read the ABA Journal article.

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BigLaw firm Latham & Watkins spends between $30,000 and $70,000 making client presentations to potential clients, reports Bloomberg Law.

Bloomberg pulled the information out of a New York Times article on the state of the legal industry going into 2017.

Quoting the Times‘ original report:

[Latham & Watkins, according to managing partner William H. Voge] routinely competes for big-ticket legal work, with partners often flying from different parts of the world to showcase Latham’s skills against those of five or six competing firms. The cost is not cheap; the firm pays $30,000 to $70,000 per presentation.

And it works, he said, because most of the firm’s existing clients last year each paid over $1 million in legal fees. Over all, the firm had profit of $1.6 billion in 2016, Mr. Voge noted.

Read the Bloomberg article.

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Legal profession guru Brad Hildebrandt, CEO at Hildebrandt Consulting, says law firm associates shouldn’t be overly worried by their firms’ lackluster revenue growth in 2016, even though revenue growth could stay modest in 2017.

Hildebrandt shared his thoughts with Bloomberg Law following the release of a report from in Citi Private Bank Law Firm Group and Hildebrandt Consulting, which analyzed a Citi survey of about 200 U.S. law firms about their revenue growth and demand this year.

“With capital markets starting to pick up, and a change in the presidential administration, ‘depending how it all sets up,’ there could be a flood of initial public offerings and transactions that spur an increase in demand for law firms’ services,” writes Bloomberg’s Gabe Friedman.

Read the Bloomberg article.

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Wells Fargo Private Bank’s Specialty Group released a report on how law firms performed in the first nine months of 2016, with the report’s authors finding a decline in demand across all timekeepers, according to an article published by Bloomberg Law.

Lawyers’ rates increased by 3.6 percent, with an expected hike of another 4.4 percent coming the following year.

In an interview, Joe Mendola, senior director of sales at Wells Fargo Legal Specialty Group, drilled down into what the catch was for the industry.

Among the findings:

• The richest firms are also the busiest, with partners are projected to log an extra 100 hours this year compared to everyone else.

• There has been a decline in productivity this year.

• With demand flat or declining, law firms are raising rates to keep growth strong — and to pay for higher associate salaries.

Read the Bloomberg article.

The $100 million discrimination lawsuit filed against the New York-based international law firm Chadbourne & Parke over claims that female partners are paid less than their male counterparts is less about gender than employment status, according to Sarah Bradbury, senior counsel at Dallas litigation boutique Estes Thorne & Carr PLLC.

An article published by Androvett Legal Media & Marketing quotes Bradbury:

“While it is becoming increasingly easy to create an employment relationship and characterize an independent contractor as an employee, an equity partner cannot be categorized as an ‘employee,’ making it very difficult to prevail in this case. However, if a similar lawsuit were brought by income level partners, it becomes a very different case.

“Gender pay disparity may be real at this particular firm specifically or within the legal profession generally. However, even if the disparity exists, in this instance, because the attorneys are not employees of the firm, they simply have no employment discrimination route to pursue,” adds Ms. Bradbury, who is Board Certified in Labor & Employment Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization.

In the months since Cravath Swaine & Moore hiked starting salaries for first year associates by 11 percent to $180,000, law firms across the country raised their associate compensation scale to match — and now those pay increases are showing up as profit growth slows at some law firms, according to a new report on the first three quarters of 2016 compiled by Citi Private Bank.

“This is the first quarter we have an opportunity to see that,” David Altuna, a senior vice president and client adviser in the Citi Law Firm group, told Bloomberg Law.

“Altuna said that the associate salary hikes, which started in July and continued to spread during the summer, are causing expenses to grow faster across the industry,” writes Gabe Friedman. “While the most elite firms have been able to grow revenues faster than expenses, all other firms felt the strain of high lawyer compensation expenses.”

Friedman provides a transcript of his interview with Altuna.

Read the Bloomberg article.

Two prominent law firms, Arnold & Porter and Kaye Scholer, winding up months of talks, announced on Thursday that they would combine to become a firm with more than 1,000 lawyers effective Jan. 1, The New York Times is reporting.

Reporter Elizabeth Olson writes that the new firm will be called Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer.

“The combination was not a surprise. Each firm brings complementary expertise — Arnold & Porter is a litigation and regulatory issues powerhouse in Washington, and Kaye Scholer, based in New York, which is almost half the size of Arnold & Porter, is best known for its financial services and life sciences work. At each firm, however, the revenue and profit per partner has been buffeted in the changing legal landscape,” Olson reports.

Read the article on The New York Times.

Some women who filed gender discrimination claims against their law firms all said they were alienated to varying degrees for speaking out and taking action about what they experienced, according to a report by Bloomberg Big Law Business.

One of those interviewed, Kamee Verdrager, was an associate at Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris & Popeo when she sued the firm on claims of gender bias in 2009.

“Verdrager said Mintz Levin made specific efforts to discredit her after she filed her suit accusing them of demoting and then firing her because of her gender,” writes Stephanie Russell-Kraft. “Among other things, Verdrager alleges a male partner made sexually explicit comments toward her, and that she later received negative performance reviews because of a pregnancy.”

After firing her, Mintz Levin reported Verdrager to the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers for allegedly downloading private firm documents, but the board unanimously cleared her.

The article discusses the cases of other women who had similar experiences.

Read the article.

Practical Law and competitive intelligence platform Peer Monitor will present a free webinar titled “Dollars and Sense: A Real-Time Look at the Financial Performance of the Legal Industry in 2016.”

The 60-minute webinar will be Wednesday, Sept. 21, at 1 p.m. Eastern time. A brief question-and answer session will follow.

Peer Monitor will discuss key performance indicators including:

• Demand
• Practice performance
• Rates
• Realization
• Staffing
• Expenses

Presenters will be Cory Branden, Account Executive, Peer Monitor, Thomson Reuters.

Register for the webinar.

George Dunn, president of CRE8 Independent Consultants, writes in a white paper posted on his company’s website, “One clear message from general legal counsel is, ‘law firms must lower fees and follow increasingly restrictive guidelines.’ In addition, law firms are now being asked what type of process improvement framework the firm is deploying.”

In the paper, he starts by posing the question: “What are the signs that your firm needs process improvement?”

He discusses the external signs, such as clients consolidating the roster of firms they engage,  client guidelines becoming increasingly restrictive as to who and what can be billed, and  clients asking for holdbacks, discounts, write-offs, alternative fee arrangements, or fixed fees.

Internal signs can include the firm writing off fees or costs billed to clients,  processes not fully mapped out and measured, and  processes not being not fully automated with up-to-date templates.

Answering “yes” to those question indicates the need for the firm to look into process improvement, Dunn writes.

He then poses questions and offers questions and offers approaches to follow. Those questions include: What type of process improvement methodologies exist for law firms? Where can process improvement be deployed in a law firm, such as transactional, litigation and operations? and What is the next step?

Dunn is an independent consultant, speaker, instructor, and author on process improvement (Total Quality Improvement, Continuous Process Improvement, Business Process Management, Re-engineering, LEAN and Six Sigma); Paperless technology planning (electronic forms, electronic content management, digital signatures, workflow, and electronic records management), and Computer System planning.

Download the white paper.

Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016
New York

Bloomberg BNA and Bentham IMF will hold an executive briefing and reception that explores how firms are integrating financing into their litigation practices.

The event will be Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, at Bloomberg LP, 120 Park Ave., New York, from 4:30 p.m. until 6:30 p.m., with a networking reception to follow.

Law firms face increasing pressure to help clients gain affordable access to the courts as skyrocketing legal costs and other factors make litigation more expensive. Financing provided by litigation funders is helping firms meet this demand while also accomplishing strategic objectives, Bloomberg says on its website.

Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of University of California Irvine School of Law and author of the forthcoming book,Closing the Courthouse Doors, will deliver a keynote speech on how the upcoming election can change the course of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions and create a new era of wider access to civil justice.

Following Dean Chemerinsky, a panel of top legal and funding professionals will discuss the impact of funding on the U.S. legal system, and how law firms are taking measured risk to increase profits and accomplish growth objectives. Finally, the panel will look at the benefits to corporate clients, as well as plaintiffs.

Register for the event.

A Texas-based legal recruiter is seeking up to $1 million in damages from a Holland & Knight partner, saying the lawyer broke his promise and used another headhunter to place him at the firm after the recruiter discussed the opportunity with him.

Legal recruiter Sean Cassidy’s suit against Dean Schaner alleges breach of contract, fraud and negligent misrepresentation.

“The [law firm] that we contacted you about… I would just ask that… since we contacted you about it, I always ask two things Dean,” said Cassidy, according to a recording played for Bloomberg Law. “One, I ask that if it’s something you ultimately decide to pursue, I just ask that you work through me on it.”

The Bloomberg article by Casey Sullivan reports:

“When contacted about Cassidy’s recording and overall litigation, Schaner wrote in an email Tuesday that the sound clip was a ‘misleading partial conversation,’ that he ‘never agreed to pursue the opportunity through Cassidy’ and furthermore, ‘never disclosed [Holland & Knight] to anyone.’ ”

Read the article.