As featured in Law.com on August 25, 2021 For the last several years, there is one recurring question lawyers have been asking me: “What is the secret behind rainmaking?” After having served two long-term tenures as a chief marketing officer, first for Debevoise & Plimpton and more recently for 14 years at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, I left to write…
As featured in Forbes on August 20, 2021. Several studies demonstrate that those who write down their goals are more likely to achieve them. Perhaps the most famous of these studies was conducted by psychology professor Dr. Gail Matthews at the Dominican University of California. In 2007, Matthews led a study on goal-setting. The results were telling: Those who wrote…
As featured in PLI’s Chronicle on May 10, 2021. In the U.S., we seem to be turning a corner on Covid and talking more about returning to a post-pandemic work life (at the very least, many of us are wearing real shoes again). We are reading reports of people around the world getting jabbed with vaccines and hearing increased…
As featured in “Forbes” on November 30, 2020. For the last two centuries, for most young lawyers, legal training in the United States has meant studying at law school and taking courses in civil procedure and constitutional law. What it hasn’t provided, until very recently, are lessons in how to operate a business, how to innovate or how to think…
As featured in “Forbes” on July 13, 2020. Professional service firms generally produce a strategic plan every three to five years. And many had just completed new ones as 2019 came to a close. Who would have expected that those documents, just recently spell-checked and newly polished, would be tossed away once Covid-19 hit in the first quarter of the…
As featured in the March 17, 2020 edition of “The American Lawyer.” What can we as a profession do to grow or, at the very least hold onto, business during the time of COVID-19? It sounds like a riddle someone in an old movie tells a group at a cocktail party: Imagine being in a world where personal contact is…
As featured in the November 2019 edition of the European journal, “The 500.” Deborah Brightman Farone, founder of Farone Advisors LLC and former Cravath, Swaine & Moore CMO, highlights the importance of partner collaboration in law firm business development and marketing initiatives. A law firm leader recently asked me what it is that separates successful firms from the uber-successful, superstar…
