To Big Law: Insights from American Experience

Author: Xu Yuefen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-01-01
Features: A lawyer should be a big-name lawyer. After China's entry into the WTO, society's demand for big-name lawyers has become even more urgent. For individual lawyers, whether to become a renowned big-name lawyer or a negligible small lawyer not only affects personal wealth accumulation but also relates to one's professional reputation and social status. However, unfortunately, the four words "big-name lawyer" are completely unfamiliar to 150,000 Chinese lawyers and 1.2 billion Chinese citizens. Despite China's 5,000-year history, lawyers only truly entered the lives of ordinary people in the past one or two decades. Under the long feudal system, Chinese society had no lawyers, let alone big-name lawyers. From the Beiyang Warlord era to the Nationalist period, while China had a legal system, it was merely a label for a rule-of-law society rather than a substantive existence. At that time, there were very few lawyers, and they were far removed from the lives of the general public. 99% of the population did not even know the word "lawyer," let alone what they did. During those nearly half a century, China did not actually produce modern "big-name lawyers" because there was no soil or conditions in China at that time to give rise to them. This book provides operational guidance for law firms on how to manage their own affairs from a new perspective and, through the introduction of the experiences of famous law firms in the UK and the US, offers help to Chinese lawyers on how to build themselves into renowned "big-name" lawyers. Starting from the aspects of management and marketing, this book provides a detailed introduction from a practical perspective on the strategies, techniques, methods, and specific operational steps for building big-name law firms. The first part is the Management section, which mainly introduces the management characteristics of big-name law firms, the setup of management institutions, practice management, administrative and financial management, human resource management, distribution management, mergers (consolidations), and establishing branch offices. The second part is the Marketing section, which mainly introduces several principles of lawyer marketing, marketing plans, marketing measures, and marketing management.