Ilene Ferenczy has long pushed all the right buttons to develop her practice in employee benefits. She speaks at conferences across the country, has written five books on the subject and edits the Journal of Pension Benefits. It is a measure of her dedication to client service that she was in the office the week following Christmas, fine-tuning a client’s benefit plan before the start of the new year.

Still, up until a few years ago, she felt that the then-modest success of her Atlanta firm—the Ferenczy Benefits Law Center—didn’t reflect her experience and knowledge of this complex area of the law. “It felt like we were walking around lost in the desert,” she recalls, adding that she wasn’t even sure what financial metrics she should use to define success.