Unraveling the Failed Story?What's It All About?

• Author: Adam Newhouse
• Pages: 41-44

41

CHAPTER 5

Unraveling the Failed Story—

What’s It All About?

The signs of recovery are strong and managing partners are

cautiously optimistic about the future. What will be interesting

to see is whether law firms will now revert to their pre-crisis ways

of working, or whether the lessons learnt from the recession have

led to sustainable new ways of doing business. Things changed

irrevocably after the [Great Recession]. Will we look back on

this period as the [Great Recession] that changed the legal sector

forever?125

—Jill King

The story we have inherited from the days culminating with the Great

Recession strains existing client relationships and handicaps our efforts

to form new ones. The story keeps clients wary if not outright afraid of

us. Before we can respond, however, we need to know exactly what’s

wrong with our current story. Equally important, we need to defuse

popular myths about the legal profession that distract us from the truth

about what really ails us.

“Earn Less” Fallacy

In my research on this book, I found that some authors and commenta-

tors seemed to be telling me, “Earn less, and everyone will love me.”

“Be altruistic, and everything will be all right.” They bemoaned law-

yers’ alleged love affair with money, arguing that our single-minded

pursuit of profit was responsible for our sorrowful plight after the Great

Recession. But trying to instill in us a sense of guilt for practicing law

125. Jill King, Fast Forward: Lessons from the Recession for Law Firms; Are Law Firms

Sustaining the ‘New Normal” or Returning to Business as Usual?, Managing Partner, June

2014 (“Fast Forward”), http://www.managingpartner.com/feature/business-strategy

/fast- forward-lessons-recession-law-firms (visited Mar. 29, 2016).

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