Law Career Development is an essential part of every lawyer’s practice. Law careers develop in successive stages coinciding with levels of experience, exposure to benchmarks, and most importantly, the identification and effective use of mentors and coaching to advance from one stage to the next.

At each stage, the lawyer is personally responsible for his or her own law career development, including successively greater lawyering skills, practice development (including image, business and client management,) and personal control over quality of life and stress management.

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Forward thinking management teams at our best law firm clients demonstrate significant foresight by adopting a proactive approach to getting merger candidates and lateral hires integrated into the firm as quickly and efficiently as possible. Properly managed, lateral lawyers can add profits to the bottom line, boost department morale, and be the assets the firm envisioned when the lateral lawyers were hired. Improperly handled, lateral lawyers can become terrorists within your firm, causing more chaos.

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Small firms and large ones, too, often have difficulties collecting legal fees, particularly in tough economic times. If the client files for bankruptcy protection, fees will be mired in the bankruptcy estate and may never be collected.  Worse, the fees cannot be written off as bad debts. What’s the best strategy for dealing with clients who won’t pay when the lawyer has done everything right?

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There has never been a better time to be a woman lawyer than now. Recently completed bar association member surveys show no “Gender Gap” at the entry level for woman lawyers. New lawyers of both sexes with similar credentials were hired at similar jobs, work similar hours, and are paid similarly. Good law schools, strong academic backgrounds, and first jobs in a larger law firm means higher income and prestige throughout a long legal career.

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“We need to figure out how to hire more Karens and Robs,” a hiring partner of a major law firm told us. “They are our superstars!” He was chagrined by our answer when we told him that superstars are made, not born.

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Even in a tough economy, the well-publicized glut of lawyers is small consolation when one of the practices’s best performers decides to leave. Make no mistake: the best lawyers are more likely to leave first because they have more options than the marginal performers. But the loss of every lawyer impacts the practice and the profession.

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This is the time of year when lawyers are operating at warp speed. Year-end anxiety is high, the economy is struggling, and harried legal teams are especially overburdened with client responsibilitiesas well as management issues. All of which is why now is the perfect time to make sure that you’re getting the most out of the activities and policies you already have in place.

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Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? Does your firm focus on retention? Most practices don’t. Do you know what your retention rates are? Most don’t. Do you know how much it costs you when lawyers leave your firm? Most are afraid to find out. Have you tried to reduce the number of departures?

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It’s no secret that traditional business environments, including most law firms, are not places where women thrive. At the same time, women owned businesses are the fastest growing segment of the economy. Thus, women are thriving in business, just not in traditional business settings.

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Good lawyers stay with good firms and remain productive throughout their careers for one reason: Because they have become and stayed fully engaged with the practice. Good firms know that engagement is the key to keeping lawyers and make the effort to engage them. Everyone wins. Lawyer engagement is primarily about trust in leadership and pursuit of a common goal in a pleasant work environment over which the lawyer has significant control. In short, if your practice is not a great place to work, you’ll soon find that no one works there.

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