Session Highlights
During this regional conference, you heard from Peangpanor Boonklum about "How Allied Firms Can Serve A Client Together and Effectively." Takeaways include:
- Clients value honesty, integrity, the ability to identify and disclose conflicts of interest, and high quality when choosing a law firm to work with.
- Companies choose people, not firms. Fees are a factor, but they are not the definite factor, and often, companies are willing to pay more for the right person.
- Lack of honesty and integrity and unwillingness to disclose conflict of interest are incidents or characteristics that would disqualify a firm from representing many clients.
Yarman Vachha, a seasoned law firm leader and expert CPA, led a session on law firm economics, sharing the following takeaways:
- The foundation of firm economics strongly emphasizes maximizing the efficiency and profitability of the business. He shared which positions within the firm are most likely to be profitable and how to encourage improvement in maximization with structural mechanisms and incentives.
- Other interesting points discussed included the underestimation of weight on discounts and tactics to negotiate discounts with clients, underestimation of the overall value of a simple incremental increase of productivity and recording of time, the importance of time recording as a tool to measure a firm's real productivity and plan composition of a particular team for future projects, and other economic considerations.
Takeaways from the discussion "Non-Law Perspective for Operation of Law Firms" include:
- Yarman used examples from his career path to illustrate how non-law professionals in finance, management, and human resources can help firms operate smoothly as long as lawyers see their value. He emphasized the importance of seeing these professionals as an investment rather than costs and allowing them to do their jobs properly without undue interference.
- Many examples were given of how lawyers sometimes do not see the complete picture of a law firm's operation as a profit-generating economic unit and how non-law professionals can assist on this front. He also touched on firm management topics such as replacing people with AI.