Clarity

The Legal Executive Institute, in conjunction with the broader Thomson Reuters Institute, is pleased to announce that we are launching our new podcast channel, Thomson Reuters Market Insights. Featuring podcasts aimed at tax, compliance, and legal professionals, this new channel will focus on bringing listeners engaging interviews and content from thought leaders across a variety of disciplines.

A new podcast discusses the role of volunteer leadership for professional women of color, how such leadership roles can separate them from their peers, and the value of taking ownership of your career and development and the initiative to find unique opportunities that align to career goals.

In this podcast, Conway Ekpo, an in-house lawyer at a Wall Street bank, and Erika Stallings, an entertainment lawyer, discuss how they and 20 other seasoned black lawyers — consisting of partners, mid-level and senior associates, and in-house attorneys — realized they needed to use their knowledge and expertise to address the dearth of black lawyers in the legal industry.

To address this gap, Ekpo and Stallings and a few others founded the Black BigLaw Pipeline (BBP) to provide younger attorneys with the skills and training needed to navigate Big Law and develop meaningful relationships that will benefit them in the long-term.

Niki Khoshzamir, CEO of Practice Pro, and David Morrow, start-up adviser for emerging industries, both transitioned from practicing lawyers into business roles within the last few years. During the recent Next Gen Leadership: Advancing Lawyers of Color Ask-a-Mentor session, the pair sat down with participants from the community of lawyers of color to share their stories of how they made the transition.

In this podcast episode, Khoshzamir and Morrow discuss details of the actions they took before, during, and after they made switch to their business roles. They also highlight how they prepared mentally to deal with the lean years of going from making a good salary as a practicing lawyer to making barely enough money to pay their bills.

They also share their strategies for how they paid back some or all of their student loans before they left their full-time jobs.

NEW YORK — At the recent COO/CFO Forum, we had the chance to sit down with Dr. Evan Parker, founder of Parker Analytics, and a true pioneer in the art and science of using data analytics to help law firms make more informed decisions.

Dr. Parker shared with us how he and some fellow researchers analyzed law firm data to determine where the strength of a particular firm lies. The project we discussed looked at profitability as an indicator of law firms that are better at running their organizations. In particular, the researchers looked at practice concentration as a driver of profitability. What they found was that firms with a greater focus on a smaller number of practice areas, other factors being equal, tended to be more profitable than firms with a disparate focus on a wider number of practices.

This past Spring, Melanie Bragg, author and solo practicing lawyer at Bragg Law PC, published her third book, Defining Moments: Insights into the Lawyers Soul. In this podcast, Natalie Runyon, Director of Enterprise Content for Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, chats with Bragg about the impetus for the book and some of the nuggets of wisdom from those she interviewed.

As part of the World Bank's Law, Justice and Development Week 2019: Rights, Technology & Development in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 4-7, Joe Raczynski, legal technologist and futurist for Thomson Reuters, conducted an interview with Sandie Okoro, Senior Vice President and General Counsel at the World Bank.

What are the skills that the legal industry needs to develop and integrate in an era of rapid technological and business model transformation?

In a new podcast, Mark Cohen, CEO of Legal Mosaic, a legal business consultancy; and Daniel Rodriguez, the Harold Washington Professor at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law, discussed this issue at length.

With one representative from the academia and one more focused on the business side of law, Rodriguez and Cohen somehow manage to find common ground on the need to transform the legal workforce to accommodate the many new skill sets that are required today.

The pair agreed that legal education needs to move beyond just training in legal doctrine and needs to expand to include skills related to the business side of legal practice (including the application of technology) and personal effectiveness skills such as emotional intelligence, entrepreneurial mindset, and communication. While there was agreement that those skills represent the new, broader skill set that today's industry requires, there's still room for discussion about how those skills are delivered, including the role of law schools and the need for lifetime learning in a rapidly changing industry.

The approach of Rodriguez and Cohen has much in common with the new Delta Lawyer Competency Model, which was recently published by the Legal Executive Institute and authored by Natalie Runyon, Director of Enterprise Content Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute; and Alyson Carrel, Clinical Associate Professor of Law and Assistant Director for the Center on Negotiation and Mediation at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law (with input from many partners across the industry).

The Legal Executive Institute, in collaboration with the Association of Legal Administrators (ALA) and the Georgetown Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession recently conducted a survey of law firm leaders of primarily U.S.-based law firms in the midsize to large law firm market to examine where those leaders saw the greatest potential threats to their law firms, how they plan to confront those threats, and how their law firms are approaching institutional change.

We spoke with Jim Jones from Georgetown and Oliver Yandle from the ALA to hear their take on the initial findings in this section of the report. They shared insights from their many years of experience to help interpret the significance of the findings and advice for how law firms can begin to position themselves to work through partners resistance.

Here are a few key insights they shared:

• While strategies for dealing with partnership resistance will vary from firm to firm, it is vital that firms not stand still on driving change while waiting for the firms to draw near enough to the precipice of calamity that the partners finally feel compelled to act;
• Start with younger partners to build a culture that accepts change and the younger partners and future leaders of the firm will feel empowered to drive it forward;
• Compensation can play a key role in how effective change efforts will be at a given firm because lawyers, by and large, will do what their compensation system tells them is important.

The full audio of our interview with Jim and Oliver is available below. The full report on the findings from this survey will be available through our website on October 24. Please consider subscribing to the weekly Legal Executive Institute Newsletter to be sure you don't miss out on the report when it's released.

Recently, the Legal Executive Institute's Next Gen Leadership: Advancing Lawyers of Color initiative released its second white paper, titled 5 Marketing Strategies for Attorneys of Color in Big Law [insert link], by Ann Jenrette-Thomas, Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer at Stinson LLP.

In a new podcast announcing the white paper, Natalie Runyon, Director of Enterprise Content for Thomson Reuters, speaks with Jenrette-Thomas about the white paper and what was behind its creation.

In addition, the pair discusses why attorneys of color typically generate business differently from traditional business development methods and why it is important for firm leadership and marketing teams to invest in these approaches.

Finally, Jenrette-Thomas talks about how law firms should be making investments in future black male partners, given the amount of media attention the topic recently has received within the legal industry.