Walker Clark
Worldview Archives
Is one year enough?
Should your law firm move to a “rolling” two-year business plan?
Engagement Letters and First Impressions
By reframing engagement letters as a strategic communication tool, law firms can strengthen relationships from day one.
Here are three often-overlooked opportunities that can transform engagement letters into instruments of lasting client engagement and satisfaction.
Integrating Business Planning, Compensation, and Career Advancement
The competition for legal talent has never been fiercer.
One strategy stands out for its clarity, simplicity, and effectiveness, especially for small and midsize law firms: integrating business planning, performance-based compensation, and career advancement into a unified career management path for senior associates and partners.
This post explores the structure and benefits of such an integrated system, how each component can be tailored to your firm’s unique needs, and why it is a transformative force for law firm performance and long-term lawyer retention.
Five Ideas for Better Partners Meetings
Better partners meetings build better partnerships.
Law firms make a big mistake when they avoid partners meetings or minimize their importance to being little more than an occasionally required ceremony.
Such an approach, although perhaps understandable in some law firms, is a short-sighted mistake, because it denies the firm access to one of its most important assets: the collective experience, insights, and wisdom of the partnership.
Here are five suggestions that Walker Clark clients have used to make their partners meetings more productive.
Assessing Risk: A Law Firm’s Best Strategy for Managing Regulatory Fluctuation
A centralized strategy for assessing your current practices, gathering information about the effectiveness of those processes, and integrating credible source information into your processes is the most reliable way to assure the most protection for your firm.
Regulatory Analysis for Law Firms
Regulatory analysis is a perfect example of how regular, intentional analysis can yield immediate, sustainable improvements to profitability through greater protection from risk.
Commonwealth Lawyers Association's Declaration on AI: A Commitment to Ethical Governance
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the global landscape, offering transformative possibilities while posing significant challenges. Recognizing its dual potential, the Commonwealth Lawyers Association (CLA) has issued a comprehensive Declaration on AI, emphasizing ethical governance, human rights, and sustainability. This statement, released on April 9, 2025, outlines seven guiding principles to ensure AI's responsible development and deployment.
“Trump-Proofing” Your Law Firm
As we at Walker Clark have been meeting since January 2025 with clients and professional friends worldwide to discuss their priorities and concerns for the next 12 to 24 months, many of them – across the world and the political spectrum – have used the same phrase to describe their anxiety about the uncertainties that lie ahead: “How can we Trump-proof our firm?”
Wisdom in Law Firm Management: The Middle Way Through Impermanence and Change
This is the third installment of an advance serialization of a ground-breaking new book by Norman K. Clark and Lisa M. Walker Johnson, Wisdom in Law Firm Management, to be published in December 2025.
Wisdom in Law Firm Management: Harmony, Balance, and Law Firm Strategy
This is the second installment of an advance serialization of a ground-breaking new book by Norman K. Clark and Lisa M. Walker Johnson, Wisdom in Law Firm Management, to be published in December 2025.
Wisdom in Law Firm Management: Bridging East and West
Walker Clark LLC begins an advance serialization of a ground-breaking new book by Norman K. Clark and Lisa M. Walker Johnson, Wisdom in Law Firm Management, to be published in December 2025.
How can ancient Eastern wisdom transform the management and performance of modern law firms worldwide?
Get Ready for an Expanded BABA
What is BABA, and why is it important to law firms everywhere?
What a Transatlantic Tariff War Means for Law Firms
The second Trump presidency has started with a flurry of activity characteristic of Donald Trump's management style. With the rapid movement over the last two weeks, it comes as no surprise that the EU is bracing for potential changes the US might try to force in the areas of economics, global security, and climate policy.
Is your law firm prepared for a Canada-US tariff war?
China is not the only country the Trump administration has in its tariff crosshairs. President Trump has already announced that we can expect to see a 25% tariff placed on all goods imported into the US from Canada, as early as February of this year. Why has Canada drawn this attention from the Trump administration? How can you support your clients that might be impacted by these new tariffs against Canada?
Great Power Competition and How to Manage it in the 21st Century
What are the implications that international geopolitical events have for law firms in the mid-2020s?
Guest contributor Gerald J. Kirkpatrick examines post-World-War-II diplomacy by the great powers and what its disruption or continuity might mean for the world in 2025 and beyond.
This is part of an ongoing series of informed commentaries on world events and the risks and opportunities they might present to law firms everywhere and their clients.
How could Trump Administration trade policy with China affect law firms and their clients?
Sarah Max continues her discussion of the financial implications of a second Trump administration. In this post, she unpacks some of Trump’s economic policies with respect to China and how those impacts are expected to affect the international financial industry.
What impacts should law firms expect from proposed Trump Administration tax policies?
This is the second of a series of articles about how the demand for legal services might change over the next two years under the Trump Administration. This article focuses on the effects of proposed changes to taxation.
What should law firms (and their clients) anticipate from the incoming Trump Administration?
With an impending administration change in the U.S. on January 20, 2025, many of our clients and professional friend have asked us the same question: What will the second Trump administration mean for my firm?
This is the first of a series of articles about how the demand for legal services might change over the next two years.
The Antidote to Fear
In recent confidential discussions with law firm leaders around the world, the author has noticed a very interesting apprehension that seems to be emerging as they consider the business prospects for their firm in for the next two to five years.
How then, can a law firm navigate through the strategic fears about the rest of the decade -- even the rest of 2025 -- with a reasonable degree of confidence?
“But it’s not my job…”
...or is it?
The inability to answer this question can be costing your law firm significant losses in terms of efficiency, operating expenses, morale, and lost opportunities.
