The Perfect Legal Business

What if a law firm’s sustained success isn’t about billing more and more hours, but shaping its structure, approach, and attitude differently?

In The Perfect Legal Business, former Managing Partner and law firm management consultant Simon McCrum unlocks a fresh framework for the modern legal firm, built around a number of key pillars including: intelligent client selection, proactive client care, purposeful senior and middle management, higher pricing for a higher level of service, lawyer inputs (not outputs), and the importance of cash to the business – all brought together into a powerful force by the glue that is leadership.

This book invites you to dig deep into law firm management as a constant and fluid problem-solving enterprise – one driven by lawyers at all levels – that seeks to change the fortunes and destinies of law firms, their owners, their people, and their clients.

Whether you are part of a small legal firm or a large Top 50 organisation, the themes explored in The Perfect Legal Business arm you with the outlook, examples, and reasoning that lead to smarter decisions and wide-ranging law firm growth. These things work, as has been proven repeatedly in law firms of all sizes with which Simon has worked.

Note: This book is the updated edition of The Perfect Legal Business, originally published in 2020. It is the sister book to The Perfect Lawyer and contains extensive material that crosses both titles. If you already have a copy of The Perfect Lawyer or, indeed, the first edition of The Perfect Legal Business, you will not need this one.

The first edition has sold thousands of copies in over 50 countries, and this edition includes Simon’s very latest thinking on how to best secure fast and sustainable profit-rich and cash-rich growth in law firms, borne from the further experience he gains each year as he works with law firms around the world.

About Simon McCrum: Simon McCrum qualified as a commercial lawyer in 1990 at Pannone in Manchester, and during his time at the firm, his role evolved from fee-earner into wider positions including Head of various teams, Marketing Partner, Director of Business Development, Equity Partner, and part of the Management Team at the 1,000 person firm. In 2007, Simon became Managing Partner at a full-service Top 200 law firm in Oxford, Darbys Solicitors. The firm made a trading loss in 2007, but after going a long way backwards – and experiencing the 2008 Credit Crunch – the firm emerged to be the country’s fastest-growing law firm and was acquired by Knights in 2016. Simon subsequently exited to form McCrum Consulting and the McCrum Training Academy to help the business performance and growth of law firms, teams, and lawyers. Simon helps partners, teams, and firms to secure ongoing growth in a safe, sustainable way.

Simon is the author of the Law Firm Management and Leadership Trilogy of which this book forms part, along with The Perfect Lawyer and The Perfect Partner.