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WHAT WE’RE WATCHING
LEAD GENERATION - Law firms are packed with good lawyers—so why are good leaders in such short supply? As Law.com’s Patrick Smith reports, the current leaders of major law firms are in fact some of the most successful, intelligent and ambitious professionals in the world, but a top-flight legal education and a healthy book of business alone don’t qualify a person to guide an organization into the future. The risk aversion taught in law school and in practice can be a hindrance when making business decisions, and the process for developing future leaders internally is murky at best in most firms. But the answer to the question of how law firms can improve their leadership ranks moving forward is deceptively simple: make more leaders. It’s the execution that’s complicated. “Firms need to be able to say, from a policy point of view, that people have a given number of hours each year to go through coaching and leadership training,” Mark Beese, president of legal consulting firm Leadership for Lawyers, told Smith. “There isn’t more of this because of the pressure of the hour. And we don’t have a lot of champions for the cause right now. We don’t have a lot of examples.”
