This Business Planning Toolkit is designed to help practitioners to understand how to draft and implement business plans, including plans for individuals, teams and the firm, and through all stages including securing buy-in and reviewing the plan following initial implementation. The toolkit is written by Nick Jarrett-Kerr with additional case studies by managing partners at three Section member firms.

This White Paper suggests some essential steps which law firms should take to establish promotion criteria to equity partnership/membership and suggests a framework for promotions.

The ‘First 100 Days’ for any managing partner may be challenging but life tends to get even harder during ensuing periods in office. Managing partners often find that they have been selected or elected with a mandate to deal with short term problems which need no more than competent administrative skills to solve. After their initial honeymoon period, they then need to develop leadership skills to succeed in taking the firm further forward and to deal with resurfacing longer term issues. This article helps leaders to focus on leadership skills for the long haul and to convert from well-paid administrators into true leaders.

An important feature of law firm leadership is to try to understand what it is that inspires and interests your people. This White Paper suggests that partners can be bracketed according to their orientation towards performance and their attitudes towards altruism.

As a law firm grows, many of the governance and management systems need to change as well. Firms can find that their management and decision-making can become stifled either by the need for consensus in a growing partnership or where the founder partners just get too busy to make decisions quickly. In this article, Nick examines the stifling points in law firm governance and decision-making.

This White paper sets out to introduce some suggested methodologies for a firm to follow in order first to clarify what the firm expects of its partners and then to define what roles and responsibilities it needs them to perform.

The development of partners requires them to have an advanced set of life & business skills in order to be owners and managers of their law firms and at the same time to become trusted and valued legal advisers to their clients. This article (October 2010) first appeared in the New Law Journal and sets out how partners should develop additional skills.

Most law firms find that they are quite different now in the way they do things, from what they were five or ten years ago. In this article, Nick examines the impact of changing conditions on culture and considers whether leaders can control culture as the firm grows. Practical suggestions and steps are summarised to ensure that fine rhetoric is matched by partner behaviour.

Effective leadership can help a law firm to thrive, but it relies on not only suitable management structures, but also appropriate management styles, and aligning the two to achieve results.  In this article Nick shows you how to get the balance right in law firms.

In this article Nick suggests 20 objectives for Equity Structures in law firms.

No governance structure can entirely prevent disasters occurring but a coherent and balanced management structure clearly helps if aligned to the strategic and business needs of the firm and which contains the appropriate provisions for mature and sensible accountability. This article (2007) examines the issue of governance in the growing law firm and suggests some possible management models.