Leigh Jones recently wrote an article in American Lawyer about how the current economic uncertainties have forced large law firms to tighten the reigns on bonuses. But does that mean firms should back off of bonuses completely? No. More and more, I am garnering interest from my clients to help make their incentive systems more contemporary, an example of which would be to reward newer partners and associates for bringing in new business.
 
Here is the magic of implementing such a system: associates, and seniors, and newer partners are motivated to further your firm’s business development and business generation efforts and as a result, the pipeline expands. A strong pipeline will help to offset the financial ebbs and flows of the economy in the future.
 
Relationships are the key into the Red Zone. Make training and bonuses in this arena part of your law firm’s culture, rather than an extraneous project. Rewards beget more effort in winning new business, which translates into a bigger bottom line, even in lean times such as these.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Generating New Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.