09 | 20 | 2007 Posted By Rob Millard

The World and the Legal Profession in the 21st Century

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I am presenting a two day multi-session workshop next week at the ALA Regions 2 & 3 Educational Conference in Nashville Tennessee, on trends and best practices in law firm management. The ALA emailed me a couple of days ago to advise that 130 people (wow!) had already signed up for my opening session which is a presentation titled "The World and the Legal Profession in the 21st Century." This will be followed by a panel discussion about the macro-trends, bringing the topic right down home into law firms and what to do about these issues. Hopefully much audience interaction will be provoked, too. Panel members include Tom Grella, managing partner of McGuire Woods & Bissette in Asheville, immediate past president of the ABA Law Practice Management Section and author of The Lawyer's Guide to Strategic Planning; Dick Nigon of Robins Kaplan Miller & Ciresi LLP and Immediate Past President of the ALA; and Jessica Thomas, regional administrator in Florida for Roetzel & Andress. Should be fascinating!

For those that would like to start thinking about this before next Friday, hopefully so that they can participate more robustly in the debate, I have saved the presentation slides as a Quicktime movie (to preserve the animations.) Click here to download the movie (8.3 MB.) If you don't have Quicktime on your computer, the movie can also be played using RealPlayer.

The movie is silent and is created in 'interactive' mode, so you'll need to point you cursor at it and click it along. This will give you as long as you want to study each slide. Essentially, the presentation has three components:

1.  Global trends and how they are driving the markets that US law firms (in particular) operate in
2.  Trends in law firms, once again especially in the USA
3.  How this impacts on how law firms view strategy, and how that view is evolving, with a fair amount of input from the results of the August 2007 Managing Partners' Forum global survey on professional service firm strategy.

Enjoy!

As always, I'd LOVE any feedback that you may have, especially pointers to similar information elsewhere that is specifically relevant to the legal profession particularly, or professional services in general.