The Sherwood Business Blog is no longer being updated.  If you want to contact us or would like to find out more about what we do, please visit the main Sherwood web site.

After experimenting with this Blog and evaluating the results, we decided that more individual and personal methods of communication are better suited to our clients’ needs and to our own abilities and inclinations. If you would like to know more, ask one of us. As always, we are happy to share experiences.

Current Judicial Competitions

Once you have successfully completed the Qualifying Test for the current District Judge and Recorder competitions you will be asked to attend a Selection Day which will include an interview.  

PartnerShift – New Partner Programme

From 15 to 17 September, we will be running PartnerShift – New Partner Programme. This is our two-day residential course for new partners. It is designed to help recent partners make the transition quickly and effectively.

This course will be of particular interest to firms that recognise the importance of the transition to partnership and want to accelerate the capability of their new partners, but may not regularly promote sufficient partners to consider providing an in-house development programme.

Motivating professionals: continuing in search of the Holy Grail

The war for talent is raging again. Firms are reviewing their ‘EVP’; Generation Y is providing a source of bewilderment or frustration, depending on your position and perspective; and most firms are struggling to attract and retain the ‘right’, or even enough, decent people.

There may well be a need for new and creative solutions to systemic issues such as ‘work/life balance’ and ‘alternative career paths’; and yes it may take some form of meltdown before all parties (including clients) are prepared to contemplate new paradigms of working; and yet, I can’t help thinking that a lot of the current wringing of hands fails to confront an inconvenient truth.

Ready, Steady . . . Stop!

When it comes to putting your plans into action, it’s not the new thing you start doing but the old thing you stop doing that really makes all the difference.

It’s a truism that the hard part about business strategy in a law firm is actually getting it implemented. The same applies to departmental business plans, initiatives to improve know-how and drives to improve financial performance. Whatever you are planning, however hard it seems at the time to work out and get agreement on what to do, the really hard part is making it happen. The same applies to individual development plans and even those great ideas about what we all want to do with our lives.

Great implementers have discovered a secret.

Questions to help you win work

The average lawyer talks too much in what you might call selling situations. The art to winning work as a professional is to build credibility, rapport and trust in client relationships. And the best way to do that is primarily through asking questions and demonstrating that you are listening and tuning in to what the client is saying. Easy to say. Harder to do.

So, here are some tips on the art of asking the right kind of questions.

Winning work from your competitors

When clients give you instructions, they have gone through a process of evaluating you and your firm against some criteria. Often this is done unconsciously and some clients might even deny that they do it, but they do. The sorts of questions clients consider are:

• Can we do this ourselves, or do we need an outside firm to help us?
• Do you have the expertise?
• Will you be too expensive?
• Will my boss think I’m an idiot for appointing you?

The more important the work, the more rigorous this process usually is.

But who should do the coaching?

Everybody seems to accept that coaching can help make breakthroughs in people’s performance. What is less clear is where do you find people with the skill or will to actually do the coaching?

The tensions between Tops, Middles, Bottoms & Customers in law firms

Tony Reiss writes: I’ve recently attended an amazing workshop run by Barry Oshry, a US pioneer in researching patterns of thinking and behaviour in organisations. He has put his finger on some of the systemic issues that cause so many of the tensions in firms and cause Customers to be disappointed in the service they get. If you’d like the whole story, read Barry’s latest book Seeing Systems (see the end of this article for details). If you’d like a synopsis of Barry’s thinking, read on.

The new levers of profitability – part 2

This is the second of two articles on fixed and capped fees. In this one, we will look at some of the steps firms need to take to improve their financial performance in the fixed fee world.