Larry Bodine has an interesting podcast on his site, Professional Services Marketing Blog that describes what one firm is doing to “encourage” its lawyers to get a business plan in place and enact it. (I was using the term “encourage” ironically—the plan sounds quite Draconian in practice.) The way it works: The firm requires partners to formulate a business plan. Failure to complete the plan in a year results in a $30,000 to $40,000 pay deduction. Failure to complete the plan in two years results in a $100,000 pay cut. The next step is … well, you can see where this is going.
Bob Ambrogi and Carolyn Elefant of Inside Opinion: Legal Blogs and others have considered Bodine’s report on this new type of “accountability” for business development, and seem to feel as we do. Something is missing. BTW, we will be looking at several other models of lawyers developing business plans in the new issue of ALM Research NewsLine (the newsletter will be out next week).
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