Lawyers like to think they are different from other professionals. But when it comes to managing other lawyers, just how different are they, and is it time to tap more leaders from beyond the law?
Law firm leaders face many of the same pressures as all business leaders: rising global and local competition, demographic change, client pressure for greater efficiency and more transparent pricing, increasing threats of takeover and consolidation, and raging culture wars.
Overlaying, amplifying and accelerating these trends is the rapid spread of generative artificial intelligence.
Yet law firms continue, to a greater or lesser extent, to regard themselves as separate and distinct from other businesses. Or, as tech and media company Thomson Reuters put it in a recent report on the US market, adhering “to familiar management patterns drawn from earlier and simpler times”.
“I’ve never seen the intensity and degree of change in law firm management and structure in my career in the US as I’m seeing now,” says Bruce MacEwen, president of Adam Smith Esq, a boutique consultancy serving law firms.
