Market voices: Legal focus
Jamie Lawless Executive Director Baker McKenzie
Our focus will remain on our clients and people. There will be no shift in our relentless pursuit to provide business-focused solutions for our clients across all of our practices while at the same time prioritizing the health and safety of our people as we emerge from this pandemic. What our in-house People Deal — our employee value proposition — suggests is that our goal is to be passionately client-centric and one high-performing team, as well as great global citizens. Everything we do is part of that mantra. It is intended to capture what it takes to be successful at Baker McKenzie. It’s about the expectations we have for our people and our firm and what that means for someone’s career journey here. The key to our success is rooted in maintaining the quality and commitment of our people, from lawyers to business professionals.
Maintaining the quality of our legal representation while growing the firm will be our top priority over the next many months and years. This year we plan to hire five to 10 additional employees, acquire more office space, build our social media influence in our respective fields, increase our organic ranking across the various web platforms, and continue to build our critical infrastructure to support our growth. I think we will start hitting the inorganic expansion very hard as well, including advertising and marketing.
Drew McCulloch
Attorney & Partner McCulloch Carter, PLLC
Fred Schrils
Managing Shareholder – Tampa GrayRobinson
One of the foremost factors that we’re looking at as a firm is the question of office space requirements and how to balance that with our technological capabilities. I believe that people need to be together and young lawyers working remotely miss out on a lot of valuable training that might be available in the office. However, remote operation is the future and people will no longer need as much office and conference space. Many law firms are looking at downsizing. At GrayRobinson, we have implemented a lot of health-related processes, which has freed up substantial office space and might provide an opportunity to reduce the significant overhead that comes with renting first-class city center offices.
One of the most challenging situations has been to preserve the vital, constitutionally-protected and often liberty-saving due process through Zoom and the like, including a quirk in Florida law that many courts and public bodies are both protected and encumbered by Constitutional and statutory protections of citizens’ rights to appear and observe the demeanor of their opponents, not to mention their evidence, in a legible and dissectible form.
Ron Weaver
Of Counsel Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson, P.A.
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