Leadership news, updates and analysis | Page 6 of 53

The Covid-19 crisis is creating a lot of learning and insight across the legal sector and the wider communities in which we work and live. Much of this revolves around actions that organisations and their leaders are taking to navigate the crisis – including what leaders should do to manage uncertainty.

A key feature of law firms is that many people are leaders – not just those in formal senior leadership roles. A high degree of distributed management serves a range of teams. That is a real strength of our industry. Empowering those leaders to act in a way that helps their teams and drives the wider business forward is key. Continue reading “Leadership in a crisis (or how to build the ship while sailing it)”

Casting my mind back to the ancient history of mid-March when I penned my first piece assessing the impact that the coronavirus crisis would have on the profession, I was forced to rely on guess work and recent history as a guide. London was in semi-lockdown, the official death toll from the virus hovered around 10,000 globally – taking a view on how it would play out was a matter of gut, contacts and an anorak’s grounding in the business model of law.

My core case was that the profession would be one of the least-impacted major industries but would take a major hit in what was clearly going to be a deep recession. The other contention was that the pandemic would put the lofty values and soft issues that law firms have become increasingly inclined to promote to a brutal test, a benchmark many would fail. Continue reading “Comment: Gauging the profession’s Covid-19 response – Turns out five years of spouting values wasn’t just puff”