I know the 4 themes that Ron mentions below-vocation,intellectual capital, adventure and legacy-will not find a category in any professional firm’s targets nor in your own personal KPI’s for the next financial year, yet I find it impossible to argue that these themes are not incredibly powerful human traits and goals that goes to the heart of most human endeavour.

As a business when planning for the financial year ahead, it might also just be worth taking a little time out and ask yourself  ”what is calling me?.

Oh and maybe, just maybe, professional firms would be better off if they did have a category for each of these themes.

What do you think?

You can read the original post on LinkedIn: Class of 2013: What Is Calling You?

Class of 2013: What Is Calling You?

Some say the purpose of life is happiness. Happiness is not a frivolous or selfish concern, but rather a serious moral subject, and a noble goal. It is also a uniquely human aim. Aristotle believed the ultimate end of being human was eudaimonia, which is sometimes translated as “happiness,” but is perhaps closer to “fulfillment,” “flourishing,” or “success.”

To contribute to your future eudaimonia, I’m going to focus on four themes: vocation, intellectual capital, adventure, and legacy.

Vocation

Most of you have career goals. A vocation, however, is something quite different, and is usually not discovered until later in life, after many paths have been followed. Vocation originates from the Latin vocare, meaning “to call.” It literally calls you to contribute your talent, energy, passion, enthusiasm, and desire to work you love and believe in.

Michael Novak wrote in his splendid book, Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life:

Business is a demanding vocation, and one is not good at it just by being in it or even by making piles of money. The bottom line of a calling is measured by pain, learning, and grace. Having a good year in financial terms is hard enough; having a good year in fulfilling one’s calling means passing tests that are a lot more rewarding. The difference is a little like being drafted into the army and, instead, volunteering for the Green Berets. Doing anything as a calling––especially doing something difficult––is a lot more fulfilling than merely drifting.”

The history of business is the history of dreamers and entrepreneurs, those rare individuals who cast aside the security of a paycheck, mortgage everything they have, and chase a dream that ends up creating our futures. The factories and technologies of tomorrow––that may be nothing more than a glimmer in the eyes of a garage tinkerer––will at some point rise up and supplant the old order, disrupting the status quo and making a mockery of static income distribution tables.

The tempo of business is not one of stability and order, but rather of disequilibrium and instability. Stability and balance are for ballerinas and tires. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” Mike Vance, former Dean of Disney University, tells this story of Walt Disney’s final hours in 1966 in his book, Think Out of the Box:

At Disney studios in Burbank, California, Mike could gaze out of his office window, across Buena Vista Street, to St. Joseph’s Hospital where Walt Disney died. The morning he died, Mike was talking on the telephone when he saw the flag being lowered over at the hospital around 8:20 a.m. His death was preceded by an amazing incident that reportedly took place the night before in Walt’s hospital room.

A journalist, knowing Walt was seriously ill, persisted in getting an interview with Walt and was frustrated on numerous occasions by the hospital staff. When he finally managed to get into the room, Walt couldn’t sit up in bed or talk above a whisper. Walt instructed the reporter to lie down on the bed, next to him, so he could whisper in the reporter’s ear. For the next 30 minutes, Walt and the journalist lay side by side as Walt referred to an imaginary map of Walt Disney World on the ceiling above the bed.

Walt pointed out where he planned to place various attractions and buildings. He talked about transportation, hotels, restaurants and many other parts of his vision for a property that wouldn’t open to the public for another six years.

We told this reporter’s moving experience…the story of how a man who lay dying in the hospital whispered in the reporter’s ear for 30 minutes describing his vision for the future and the role he would play in it for generations to come.

This is the way to live––believing so much in your vision that even when you’re dying, you whisper it into another person’s ear.”

Soon after the completion of Walt Disney World, someone said, “Isn’t it too bad Walt Disney didn’t live to see this?” Vance replied, “He did see it––that’s why it’s here.”

Bill O’Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance, sums it up well: “The fundamental problem with business is that they’re governed by mediocre ideas. Maximizing the return on invested capital is an example of a mediocre idea. Mediocre ideas don’t uplift people. They don’t give them something they can tell their children about. They don’t create much meaning.”

A higher purpose is measured by the renewed energy it gives us, even when it involves drudgery. There is no greater joy than watching someone engage in their true calling with their entire mind, body, spirit, and soul.

As you know, I would so love to believe that the billable hour is indeed dead-but I regret to report it is not- at least not yet. It is no doubt sick, but if it is dying its death throes are still reverberating.

I recently returned from the US attending some legal conferences and meeting with many lawyers, law firms, legal commentators, consultants, academics, legal authors and law students. Almost without exception (the exceptions primarily being legal consultants and software vendors who peddle time “capture” methodologies and who perpetuate the “lawyers sell time” myth) all agreed that the billable hour is pretty crook, is a sub optimal model and is no longer meeting the business needs of either the law firms or their clients (let alone the social and cultural needs of those who work in law firms).

What then has largely been the response from the profession to this sickness?

Apart from the innovative and courageous outliers- whose numbers I hasten to add are increasing all the time- and who have put the billable hour out of its misery by completely changing their business model- most firms apply a bandaid approach and continue to work within, and therefore prop up, the existing leveraged based business model.

Some firms have come up with all sorts of ingenious ways to increase the billable hours of their lawyers especially by spending huge dollars on technology & training so lawyers can better (“more accurately”) record their time wherever they might be and whatever the day or night of the week. (Atticus Finch’s tombstone would these days read something along the lines of “Here lies Atticus-a heroic biller & time recorder”). Whilst it is true many firms have adopted Alternative Fee Arrangements (mostly in response to client demands, rarely of their own volition), most of those AFA’s look to me to be billable hours in drag (“if it walks like a duck, quacks ……”) based around fixed fees, capped fees, blended rates, etc- all calculated on the time x rates x people model.

Is it any wonder good people are increasingly looking for better alternatives than working in a private legal practice; clients are looking to other providers to add value to their businesses; and that external disruptors will continue to flock to the legal profession in droves to exploit law firms’ soft underbelly-our lack of flexibility, failure to innovate, unwillingness to collaborate, our short term greed for the almighty dollar, our 19th century governance structures, absence of diversification-and most of all our cultural desert.

I think you will find this video clip of Jay’s presentation at ABA Tech Show inspiring and it should give you something to seriously ponder as you go about another work week.

The most common career advice is “do what you’re good at.” But do you ever wonder, “Is this it? What happened to putting a dent in the universe, and all that? Why aren’t I happier? Why does it feel so much like work?”

It turns out that “do what you’re good at” maybe bad advice. In this brilliant 6 minute video, Jay gives you five steps to be happier, disrupt your marketplace, and maybe even change the world.

Perhaps after viewing this clip you might ask yourself what “outstandingness” do I pursue- or what “outstandingness” could I pursue?

Click here to view Jay Shepherd’s six-minute “LexThink .1″ presentation.

What am I going to be doing in the States?

Unfortunately I won’t be lucky enough to be joining my bro-in-law this week in Augusta at the US Masters-however I will be seeing a Rangers ice hockey game at Madison Square Garden and a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.

More importantly though, I will be catching up with some old & some new friends and colleagues, attending a couple of really good conferences and presenting & working with some firms-including some Firms of the Future. It will be interesting to find out on the ground how the professions are travelling, and in particular look at what is happening in some of the more innovative practices. There is still a fascination for several firms in the US about Australia and the wider Asia Pacific rim so that will make for some interesting exchanges.

The “Tour” starts off this Friday at Georgetown University Law School with a one day Symposium titled “The Shrinking Pyramid:Implications for Law Practice & the Legal Profession”. A good panel of speakers for what I am sure will be a very enlightening day.

Also attending this Symposium will be fellow value pricing devotee, lawyer extraordinaire to entrepreneurs, editor of the Venture lawyer and cycling fanatic from Richmond, Virginia, Thomas Bowden.

I am also looking forward to catching up with Ron Friedmann from Prism Legal a non practicing lawyer, strategic legal technology advisor, blogger & commentator, who I first met in 2009 at an AFA Conference in San Francisco, as well as one of the presenters Mitch Kowalski, innovative thinker, lawyer and author of “Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Legal Services for the 21st Century”.

Andrew Barnes, national board member & Treasurer of the Australasian Legal Practice Management Association and financial controller at Harwood Andrews Lawyers, together with Andrew Price, COO of Wotton &Kearney Lawyers, also arrive in Washington DC  on 13 April to attend the annual 3 day Association of Legal Administrators Conference .

Whilst in Washington will also meet with fellow Verasagi and owner of an Accounting and Advisory Firm of the Future, Adrian Simmons from Laurel, Maryland.

After the ALA Conference, the Andrews and I head to New York on 18 April for some meetings with firms including specialist whistleblower lawyer and long time friend Lesley Skillen.

Next stop on 21 April is Boston, not only visiting more firms, but also fellow Verasage Senior Fellows Jay Shepherd, recovering lawyer, speaker & author, and pocket dynamo entrepeneur turned lawyer Chris Marston CEO and founder of the Examplar Group.

From 24 April I get to spend a few days in LA with our youngest daughter Erin (to help her move apartments she tells me today- what are Dad’s for?). Between shifting boxes, I will also spend time with co founder of The Verasage Institute, business consultant and “not just another CPA” Dan Morris,  young Firm of the Future entrepeneur Michael Hsu, The Last Honest Lawyer’s Mike Ayotte  and hopefully the man himself Ron Baker.

If anyone else is in the general proximity of those places around the same time, please give me a shout out so we can catch up.

In the meantime you can keep up to date with articles, news and opinions by following me on:

Twitter: @ChisConsult

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/JohnChisholmConsulting

LinkedIn: au.linkedin.com/in/chisholmjohn/

I will of course be online via email and all the other social media communication channels save via my mobile (thanks to the incredibly high charges our Australian communication providers impose) and will be writing about some of my US experiences on my return.

Meanwhile as my late friend and mentor Paul O’Byrne would always say

Carpe Diem

John

Time Billing has DLA counting the cost

The financial incentives of racking up billable hours are behind what has been described as “perverse behaviours” by DLA Piper lawyers in the US who have been accused of overbilling, a legal consultant has claimed.

The billing practices of DLA Piper’s New York office are under scrutiny after internal emails between firm lawyers emerged in a court filing this month. One email indicated that a lawyer was creating unnecessary billable work, with his approach described as “churn that bill, baby! mode”.

John Chisholm (pictured) of Chisholm Consulting told Lawyers Weekly that time-based billing creates incentives for lawyers to drive up a client’s bill.

“Incentives do matter,” he said. “If I am primarily measured and rewarded by billable time, then you can expect some perverse behaviours … nothing startling there, [it’s] basic human nature.”

The correspondence between the DLA Piper lawyers was disclosed in a fee dispute brought by Adam Victor, chief executive of TransGas Development Systems. After DLA Piper sued Victor for US$675,000 in unpaid legal bills, Victor filed a counterclaim, alleging the firm engaged in a “sweeping practice of overbilling”, reported the New York Times.

Casual emails between DLA Piper lawyers working on the bankruptcy filing revealed that the bill was US$200,000 over the estimate provided to the client. “That’s Team DLA Piper!” wrote Erich P. Eisenegger, a lawyer at the firm.

A colleague, Christopher Thomson, wrote: “That bill shall know no limits” in reference to a third lawyer who had “random people working full time on random research projects”.

In a memo to its lawyers, DLA Piper described the language in the emails as “unprofessional”, but denied allegations of improper billing practices.

“These emails reflect an unfortunate attempt at humour by three former lawyers of the firm, but did not result in overbilling to the client,” stated the memo, which was published by the New York Times.

The emails have come to light at a time when in-house lawyers are increasingly demanding alternatives to time-based billing to control external legal spend.

Paul Rogerson, the head of legal at NRMA, told Lawyers Weekly last month that firms should consider task-based billing and provide a menu of standard legal tasks, which would give in-house counsel the price certainty they seek.

NRMA currently requests estimates from its external legal counsel, all of which use time-based billing. Rogerson said firms must consult him before exceeding an estimate and provide an explanation for the failure to remain within the budgeted amount.

While Rogerson admitted that the arrangement is not ideal, he accused firms of being unreceptive to his requests for alternative fee arrangements (AFAs).

Maria Polczynski, the head of group legal at the Adelaide & Bendigo Bank, has spoken on a number of occasions about the failure of firms to embrace AFAs.

In an interview with Lawyers Weekly in February, Polczynski said she was outraged at what some firms expect organisations to pay for legal services. She also expressed her frustration at firms that say they will adopt AFAs but then simply calculate fixed fees based on their hourly rates.

“Firms are never going to suggest anything other than hourly rates because it suits their current systems,” she said. “It’s infuriating when you can’t get them out of that psychology.”

Firm fees set to rise

Almost half of Australian firms plan to charge higher fees this year, the Lawyers Weekly Managing Partner Survey 2013 has revealed.

Of the 20 managing partners interviewed for the survey, nine said they would increase their rates in 2013.

Melbourne-based consultant John Chisholm (pictured) said he was surprised by the result. He told Lawyers Weekly that it is an inopportune time for a fee hike given the sluggish state of the legal market.

“I’m surprised given the decline in legal work; increasing competition; huge discounts on rack rates; clients complaining about legal fees and doing all they can to reduce their legal spend, more fixed and capped fees etc…” he said.

Chisholm speculated that these firms may have based their decision on the ability of lawyers who have moved up the ranks (e.g. from senior associate to partner) to charge more but, he warned, this reasoning may not cut it with clients.

“Most sophisticated clients … do not automatically accept [the] same,” he said. “Most firms will need to get used to operating with lesser fees and working harder and smarter to increase the margins they get from the lesser fees.”

Chisholm also singled out firms that have recently implemented new pricing structures as likely candidates to increase fees. He claimed these firms may have realised they were undervaluing their services or can now prove they provide better value to clients.

The survey also found that 60 per cent of managing partners plan to introduce alternative fee arrangements (AFA) in the coming year. Chisholm is sceptical, however, that the firms in question plan to introduce what he describes as “true AFAs”, which are not based on time, such as fixed fees or value-based billing.

“Many firms purport to offer AFAs and include in their definition things like capped fees, blended hourly rates and the like, which to me are not AFAs but merely time-based fees in drag,” he said.

“True AFAs … are being used by very few firms to date and only the more innovative ones.”

Even though Chisholm predicts the demise of the billable hour in the not-too-distant future, most managing partners still see its value, with 70 per cent of respondents claiming that between five and seven hours is the most effective number of billable hours per lawyer.

None of the managing partners surveyed believed billable hours should be less than five hours, while 15 per cent claimed between seven and nine hours was preferable.

While five to seven billable hours per day (or 1200 to 1400 billable hours per annum) is still well below US expectations of around 1700 to 2000 billable hours per annum, Chisholm maintained that there “are much better ways to measure someone’s performance than how many billable hours they recorded per day”.

The economic outlook is grim and many Victorian firms are struggling, but the Garden State is proving that tough market conditions can’t keep an innovative lawyer down. Leanne Mezrani reports.

Down and out … of the box

When Victorian firms set their budgets in May last year, there were whispers that the start of 2013 would signal an upturn in the legal market.

Managing partners were “cautiously optimistic” that the worst of their firm’s troubles were over. With the promise of good times ahead, corporate lawyers, who had been anxiously watching deals dry up, breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Hope can be so cruel.

Melbourne-based consultant John Chisholm says enthusiasm for the year ahead began to wane when firms received their financial figures for the first half of FY 2012-13. Now, two months into the second half, optimism that growth is imminent has all but been extinguished.

“Many will have said January is traditionally quiet anyway, but this year there are not a lot of signs of a pick-up in February,” he says.

“Commercial activity has remained patchy at best and, in some firms, corporate lawyers are still idle or doing ‘other tasks’.”

While Chisholm admits that markets are about as predictable as Melbourne’s weather, the word about town is that Victorian firms have readjusted their profit forecasts and are now looking to 2014 for any meaningful growth.

“I was speaking to a managing partner last week and they said they just want 2012-13 to end,” he says.

“It’s a tough legal market … in real estate terms it is a buyer’s market — even if some of the buyers don’t know it.”

The Hays Legal Quarterly Report for Q1 of 2013 confirms that Victorian firms will have to tread water for a little while longer. The survey referred to areas of growth in the Brisbane and Perth legal market, with no practice groups selected for growth in Melbourne.

The result also reflects the trend in the M&A league tables released in January this year, which revealed a decline in the global and Asia-Pacific M&A market in 2012.

Chisholm reminds managing partners who may be putting a positive spin on the figures in front of them, focusing on the peaks rather than the troughs, that most growth over the past six months has generally been the result of firms increasing their fees. “Real growth in legal work in Victoria has not occurred for a while now.”

Consequently, Chisholm predicts redundancies at some firms before the financial year is out. Both Clayton Utz and Ashurst rolled out redundancies before the end of 2012, which Lawyers Weekly understands included a number of positions in Melbourne.

Opportunities in adversity

For lawyers who are still hoping an economic recovery will solve their problems, Chisholm has this warning: firms at all levels, particularly full-service firms, must search out opportunities, efficiencies and innovations or risk becoming irrelevant.

Firms can do little about the state of the economy but they can better differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive market, he adds. Adversity, it seems, breeds innovation.

He nominates gender diversity, alternative fee arrangements and flexible work practices as areas where Victorian firms are making positive strides, adding that the big firms can learn a thing or two from some of the progressive boutiques.

“Some of the smaller firms, while not having the good and bad baggage that goes with the big firms, are more flexible, nimble and more open to change, and some are making serious inroads into what has traditionally been big firm markets.”

Lander & Rogers is one mid tier that claims its size allows it to seize new opportunities more swiftly than the larger firms.

The firm’s managing partner, Andrew Willder, believes there’s plenty of money to be made in the Melbourne market if you know where to look. “The entry of the international firms has changed the nature of the domestic legal market and created a number of distinct competitive channels.”

Willder points to new insurance, litigation and retail work, which is being discarded by the newly-merged global firms, as having significantly contributed to Landers’ 15 per cent growth rate last year.

He adds that the firm’s Sydney office, which is now outperforming Melbourne, is further proof that mid tiers can carve out a lucrative piece of the legal market in cities dominated by global firms.

“We’ve continued to grow strongly even though there has been a raft of international mergers,” he says. “We’ve moved into larger premises [in Sydney] to accommodate an increased number of people and provide for expansion.”

But clients haven’t landed in partners’ laps, he stresses; the firm has worked hard to differentiate itself in the market as being unrestrained by the “financial push” of the larger firms and, therefore, flexible in changing market conditions.

Beyond borders

As Landers focuses on local growth, the Law Institute of Victoria (LIV) is encouraging firms to explore opportunities beyond Australia’s borders. Asia has obvious potential, says LIV president Reynah Tang. But to successfully capitalise on growth in this market he believes the legal profession must first develop its cultural diversity and understanding.

“Victoria is a multicultural state and we need to make sure lawyers of diverse cultural backgrounds are working their way up through the legal fraternity and are ultimately reflected in our partnerships, the Bar and the judiciary, so we get that diversity across the legal profession,” he says.

“We’re becoming a global legal profession and to participate in that we need to have the cultural understanding to be able to engage and export our legal services.”

The LIV is itself looking at overseas opportunities, continues Tang. He reveals the body is taking steps to develop a mediation and arbitration centre in Melbourne that he hopes will become part of a “world-class network of centres throughout Australia”. LIV already has the support of the state government for the centre and will also be hosting a conference in 2014 for the National Alternative Dispute Resolution Advisory Council (NADRAC).

Tang says seeking out global opportunities is one of a number of focus areas for the year ahead that form part of the LIV’s strategy: Embracing change and diversity in a dynamic and evolving legal profession.

Another is promoting flexible work practices. Greater awareness of the benefits of working remotely and flexible work arrangements is needed, claims Tang. Bringing these options into the mainstream will reduce the attrition rate of lawyers and keep valuable skills and acumen in the profession, he adds.

“It’s a challenging time for the legal profession and that’s why we need to look for new opportunities and new ways of working that improve the profession.”

While Tang did not nominate the attrition rate of female lawyers as a specific focus area, the Law Council of Australia (LCA) is set to embark on a major female attrition and engagement study, with Victorian barrister Fiona McLeod SC at the helm.

Planning to succeed

McLeod has helped to frame the parameters surrounding the study. with the first part of an extensive report due to be released in June. She reveals that the LCA has engaged a consultant to conduct preliminary interviews with a focus group of women on issues expected to be covered in the study.

Meanwhile, in her role as chair of the Victorian Bar Council, she pipped other states to the post in January by launching the first Bar association Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) in the country.

The plan is to attract and retain indigenous barristers through mentoring and work experience programs, scholarships and financial support for practitioners.

“The RAP is about doing what we can to address the low numbers of indigenous lawyers at our Bar and keeping them there.”

The Victorian Bar joins the LCA, the LIV and a growing number of firms in the state that have adopted plans to promote indigenous equality.

As diversity and reconciliation initiatives gather steam, McLeod says Victoria’s track record in other areas is poor. She points to the state government’s recent cuts to legal aid as a “massive step backward”.

McLeod was among the 160 barristers and solicitors who attended a protest meeting in December that condemned the move by Victoria Legal Aid (VLA) to cut staff levels by four per cent. She says demand for legal aid is on the rise, driven by the Baillieu Government’s greater focus on preventing family violence. But the expanding workload has not been matched by an increase in funding.

“Government assistance at state level has been eroded significantly over the past 16 years and legal aid slashed by millions,” she says.

Since 1997 the Federal Government’s percentage of funding to the VLA has dropped from more than half to around one third. McLeod is concerned that both the state and federal funding cuts will deny Victoria’s most vulnerable citizen’s access to justice, while the courts struggle to handle a growing number of cases that involve unrepresented litigants.

“People aren’t getting a fair hearing because they are not represented in large part,” she says. “Plus, there are delays and impacts on the system that affect the ability of judges to manage those cases.”

The result, she believes, will be a less efficient justice system. “When there are delays and cases are presented less efficiently, and are more likely to run to appeal”.

What isn’t being considered by the Government is the cost of not funding legal aid, says McLeod, who urges governments to inject more funds into the struggling sector.

Despite this setback, Chisholm maintains that Victoria is “genuinely looking at more innovative ways of doing things”. He applauds the state’s firms and lawyers for their out-of-box thinking, which, he claims, will ensure their survival when the legal market settles into the “new normal”.

OK, let’s get it all out on the table right from the outset.

Firstly, I don’t believe law firms should charge you by the time it takes them to work on a matter for you and I don’t believe you should purchase your legal services this way.

Secondly, I think you are not only doing yourselves a disservice by purchasing legal services this way, you are also doing a disservice to your external law firms.

The more benefits you receive compared to the price you pay, the more value you perceive you are getting. If the price paid exceeds or is close to the benefits, then you will perceive you have received little or no benefit. If I were a law firm and I wanted to provide increased value to my clients I can either reduce my price or increase the benefits I provide. I know what I would prefer to do and I think I know what you as in-house counsel would prefer to pay for.

I believe clients – especially in-house counsel – can do a lot to assist their external firms in the transition away from time-based billing. To do that I think it might be helpful if we looked at the main objection law firms often raise when asked to agree a fee in advance (no not an estimate, range or quote – a dinky di fixed fee). A typical response might be along the lines of…“I cannot agree a fee up front as I don’t know what is going to happen in this matter – I don’t have a crystal ball”… And that is true, no law firm is going to know exactly what will happen on a file (notwithstanding they might have experienced a similar file hundreds of times before and would have a fair idea of what is involved).

So why does that matter? Well it matters because what the law firm is really saying is “…I don’t know how long this is going to take me exactly and as I charge you by time (every six minutes) I cannot (will not) give you a price until I have incurred the time. To do otherwise would be unfair to you (and me).” And, if you dig a little deeper, what the lawyer means is “time is a cost to me”.

But here is the rub. Time is not an actual cost to a law firm in the same sense as rent, wages, printing, etc, is an expense. Nearly all of the costs in every law firm are fixed and can be predicted, and believe me law firms are painstakingly accurate when it comes to their expense forecasts. A firm’s actual costs/expenses do not vary depending on the amount of time a lawyer spends on your matter. Very few firms pay their employed lawyers by time so all the firm is simply doing is making a record of time and then arbitrarily allocating a dollar value to each six-minute unit of that time. There is no accounting or economic justification whatsoever to support time being classified as a cost so don’t let your law firm tell you otherwise. At best, the only cost that comes into play might be an opportunity cost i.e. instead of doing work on your file a firm could be working on another client’s file.

I say to the law firms I work with that they should stop being fixated on their inputs (their time) and focus much more on the outputs (the value) they create for their clients.

So here lies another rub. Just as law firms have got to stop focussing on inputs (time) so do you as clients. The only “time” you should be concerned about is turnaround time, so you need to get over calling for and examining firms timesheets or even worrying about how much profit a law firm makes from you. You should be focussing on the value – or otherwise – your law firm is providing to you and rewarding, not penalising, your law firms for quicker turnaround time.

The ACLA Corporate Counsel Day™ Victoria 2013 continues with the strong tradition of providing corporate counsel with everything you need to be an effective in-house lawyer.

The theme for the conference is Recipe for Success. We will be opening up the pantry to give you the ingredients for up to 6.5 CPD points, covering all 4 categories of your CPD training requirements.

First item on the menu will be our Keynote speaker, Damian Kristof who will speak on the Power of Food, and share his visionary approach to health, nutrition and lifestyle and their link to high performance.

View the program page of this website for a taste of the sessions on offer, including:

• Fresh from the Market – join John Chisholm to create a recipe to bring value-base pricing to your engagement with external law firms
• Organise your kitchen - project management for in-house lawyers
• Icing on the Cake - effective networking and branding strategies for in-house lawyers
• Food for Thought - ethics hypothetical including interactive SMS polling.

Network with colleagues to share your experiences and learn practical tips for success. The conference will conclude with post-conference networking drinks to be held at Hilton South Wharf, where great prizes will be drawn.

For more information go to:

www.conferenceworks.com.au/aclavic