Can anything really prepare you for those initial days in your new role as managing partner? Just when you feel you’ve reached the peak of your career by building a successful practice, you may realize that you still have some things to learn. You also may face some real challenges settling into your new role.

If you read many articles or books on the desired qualities of a CEO or a managing partner, you can get very confused. The list of desirable character traits, attitudes, skills, and philosophies seems endless.

As firms implemented national or firm-wide practice groups, they discovered that they can attract national and international clients, achieve much greater profitability, create more consistent client service across their firm, increase lawyer retention, and more.

As the chief marketing officer in a big-four accounting firm for many years, I was aware of the challenges related to retention of talent in law firm management – as judged by the number of c.v.s I received from law firm marketers. While turnover in the non-revenue-producing areas of all professional services firms is high, law firm turnover provided the greatest candidate supply.

The key to minimizing (and sometimes managing) conflicts is to develop and use a good conflicts checking system.

For the last three years, the American Corporate Counsel Association has sponsored conference sessions dealing with Uniform Task-Based Management Systems (UTBMS) more often referred to as Task-Based Billing.

Limited scope retainers may be good for the client, but is there anything to recommend them to the lawyer who is unbundling services? And what about mission creep – when you sign on for one thing and all of a sudden find yourself doing another?