- Jubilee offer: spend £10 or more on any product sold by Amazon.co.uk on or before June 6 and you can buy The Diamond Jubilee A Classical Celebration Album for just £2.50 Here's how (terms and conditions apply)
Managing the Modern Law Firm
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £10.65
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Managing the Modern Law Firm: New Challenges, New Perspectives for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £10.65, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
Product Description
Review
This book, edited by Laura Empson, provides a rich blend of historical perspective, scholarly analysis, and practical insight by an impressive group of professionals and academicians. It gives firm leaders plenty to think about. (Managing Partner Forum (US) )
Product Description
The last ten years have been a period of extraordinary change for law firms. The rapid growth of corporate law firms and the emergence of global mega-firms have strained the traditional partnership model of management. Some managers of law firms are appalled at the creeping 'corporatism' that they fear may result. However a growing number believe that it is time to move on and adopt more contemporary forms of structure and management. In Managing the Modern Law Firm scholars and legal practitioners examine the latest insights from management research, to enable law firms successfully to meet the challenges of this new business environment.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Editor Laura Empson has collected papers that present the latest research on the evolution of the modern law practice. Although the writers here are academics, their papers are not overly technical. In straightforward language, they discuss the various challenges new international, corporate structures present to legal traditions, from public service to the "partnership ethos" to billing. getAbstract recommends this book to strategically minded legal executives who want to map out new directions while retaining the best of the old values and ethics.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
When the "Partnership Ethos" Encounters the Corporate Model
20 Jun 2007
Format:Hardcover
This valuable and multi-faceted collection of essays jointly comprises one of the most sophisticated and nuanced views of how 21st Century law firms are trying to cope with growing pressure on the "partnership ethos" which largely sustained them for a century or more.
The primary source of that pressure is simple: Today's global US- and UK-based law firms have become substantial enterprises in their own right. (Nearly 20 have gross revenues in excess of US$1-billion/year.) Firms such as these can no longer be managed by untutored amateurs, nor can they be governed as Athenian democracies. But if the "Quaker town meeting" style of consensus governance is no longer feasible, firms are equally loathe--rightly so--to turn to pure command-and-control corporate models.
The struggle to reconcile the high-minded and intrinsically precious values embodied in the partnership ethos, with the need to be supple and economically powerful global institutions, is what this book is all about.
While many of the contributors are academics, the approach is by no means "academic." And the final chapter, by Tony Angel, global managing partner of the UK "Magic Circle" firm, Linklaters, is alone worth the price of the book.
Finally, Dr. Empson herself is aware that not all aspects of the partnership ethos are per se good.
* While partnership can form cohesive bonds, it can also work to exclude those outside the blessed fold, such as non-equity partners and extremely high-quality C-level executives.
* Are partners who view themselves as owners entitled to exercise "extreme and inappropriate behaviors"?
* Do clients and potential recruits (your firm's two key aspirational constituencies) understand and value the partnership ethos?
* If the "socialization process" that indoctrinates one for membership in the partnership is too effective, it can "represent a potentially serious block to change more generally...[the] partnership risks becoming a self-perpetuating collection of clones."
* Finally, the partnership ethos can be strengthened not just by preferentially selecting those candidates who embody it but by dealing decisively with those who belong to the partnership but who, for whatever reason, no longer embody its principles.
Incidentally, Dr. Empson just moved (mid-June 2007) from the Said Centre at the University of Oxford to a newly created chair as Professor in the Management of Professional Service Firms at Cass Business School in the City of London.
The primary source of that pressure is simple: Today's global US- and UK-based law firms have become substantial enterprises in their own right. (Nearly 20 have gross revenues in excess of US$1-billion/year.) Firms such as these can no longer be managed by untutored amateurs, nor can they be governed as Athenian democracies. But if the "Quaker town meeting" style of consensus governance is no longer feasible, firms are equally loathe--rightly so--to turn to pure command-and-control corporate models.
The struggle to reconcile the high-minded and intrinsically precious values embodied in the partnership ethos, with the need to be supple and economically powerful global institutions, is what this book is all about.
While many of the contributors are academics, the approach is by no means "academic." And the final chapter, by Tony Angel, global managing partner of the UK "Magic Circle" firm, Linklaters, is alone worth the price of the book.
Finally, Dr. Empson herself is aware that not all aspects of the partnership ethos are per se good.
* While partnership can form cohesive bonds, it can also work to exclude those outside the blessed fold, such as non-equity partners and extremely high-quality C-level executives.
* Are partners who view themselves as owners entitled to exercise "extreme and inappropriate behaviors"?
* Do clients and potential recruits (your firm's two key aspirational constituencies) understand and value the partnership ethos?
* If the "socialization process" that indoctrinates one for membership in the partnership is too effective, it can "represent a potentially serious block to change more generally...[the] partnership risks becoming a self-perpetuating collection of clones."
* Finally, the partnership ethos can be strengthened not just by preferentially selecting those candidates who embody it but by dealing decisively with those who belong to the partnership but who, for whatever reason, no longer embody its principles.
Incidentally, Dr. Empson just moved (mid-June 2007) from the Said Centre at the University of Oxford to a newly created chair as Professor in the Management of Professional Service Firms at Cass Business School in the City of London.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
academic book with outdated data
28 Dec 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The style of the book is too academic and definitely is not a practical book for lawyers who wanted to know the real thing. Moreover, the data and examples cited and researches conducted were completely outdated, most of them were in 1980s and 1990s and some of them in early 2000s. Not a useful book for learning the fast changing legal practice.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
A general survey of some law firm management topics
24 Mar 2011
Format:Paperback
In recent years the competitive landscape for law firms has changed irrevocably, and models of law firm management developed last century are no longer applicable in the modern world, according to Laura Empson in this book. The book consists of essays contributed primarily by a range of academics, relating particularly to business models for large US and British domestic and international law firms. Contributions include:
Laura Empson: Why partnership is a good business structure for law firms, and the systems, structures and processes needed to make it thrive.
David Wilkins: Why diversity has not worked well for US law firms and remains a challenging issue.
Gardner, Morris and Anand: New practices can be developed within a firm with the right balance of turf, expertise and support.
Uzzi, Lancaster and Dunlap: There is a relationship between the strength of firm-client ties and the prices which firms change.
Huseyin Leblebici: There are various different methods of determining charges for providing legal services, although time costing remains the most popular.
Stephen Mayson: The value of a law firm depends on its financial, human, physical, social and organizational capital.
Peter Sherer: Analysis of the profits per partner, firm size and percentage of international offices of various different clusters of US law firms.
Royston Greenwood: The effect on professional behaviour of the increasing size, complexity and competitiveness of law firms.
Tony Angel: Achieving strategic alignment in a large international law firm.
While many of the topics listed in the book's table of contents are likely to be of considerable interest to practitioners, I found the discussion in most chapters to be too general to be useful, and the topics covered represent only a tiny fraction of what is involved in actually managing a modern law firm. I was disappointed to get to the end of the book without having found any particularly challenging or surprising insights. It is interesting to look at financial data for US law firms (chapter 8), but the data used is available elsewhere and several years out of date. Issues relating to diversity (chapter 3), developing new practices (chapter 4), client relationships (chapter 5) and billing practices (chapter 6) will already be well known to law firm managers and this book has little new to add.
Laura Empson: Why partnership is a good business structure for law firms, and the systems, structures and processes needed to make it thrive.
David Wilkins: Why diversity has not worked well for US law firms and remains a challenging issue.
Gardner, Morris and Anand: New practices can be developed within a firm with the right balance of turf, expertise and support.
Uzzi, Lancaster and Dunlap: There is a relationship between the strength of firm-client ties and the prices which firms change.
Huseyin Leblebici: There are various different methods of determining charges for providing legal services, although time costing remains the most popular.
Stephen Mayson: The value of a law firm depends on its financial, human, physical, social and organizational capital.
Peter Sherer: Analysis of the profits per partner, firm size and percentage of international offices of various different clusters of US law firms.
Royston Greenwood: The effect on professional behaviour of the increasing size, complexity and competitiveness of law firms.
Tony Angel: Achieving strategic alignment in a large international law firm.
While many of the topics listed in the book's table of contents are likely to be of considerable interest to practitioners, I found the discussion in most chapters to be too general to be useful, and the topics covered represent only a tiny fraction of what is involved in actually managing a modern law firm. I was disappointed to get to the end of the book without having found any particularly challenging or surprising insights. It is interesting to look at financial data for US law firms (chapter 8), but the data used is available elsewhere and several years out of date. Issues relating to diversity (chapter 3), developing new practices (chapter 4), client relationships (chapter 5) and billing practices (chapter 6) will already be well known to law firm managers and this book has little new to add.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
