There are a lot of changes happening in the personal injury sector right now, with many people wondering what the landscape will look like a year down the road. The relationship between law firms and claims management companies has never been without its challenges, and the Civil Liability Bill might make this even more complex. But how much is scaremongering, and what should solicitors be on the look out for?

“Our solicitors put lots of content on our website, but we don’t get much business from it”, the managing partner of a law firm said to me recently. Indeed, there was plenty of legal text on the website but there were several reasons why it was not yielding results. Of course, all lawyers can write, so it might seem logical to think that they can write content for a website. The question that you need to ask is, how well can they write? In particular, how well can they write for the internet?

If you are going to balance the demands of work and childcare, and stay sane, you need to adapt, and with any luck your firm will adapt with you. In doing so you will both win, and your respective productivity will soar. When I had my son, I realised just how lucky I was. Not only did I have the incredible support of my, and my husband’s, family through this life-changing time, but I had a firm that offered me complete flexibility and control over my return to business life.

Spring is in the air, and our New Year resolutions should have formed learned behaviour by now, so where to focus our vision next? Making sure we help our firms have a future-focused toolkit has been top of my list over recent months and, talking with the law firm leaders in our network, it’s interesting to see what they are prioritising. While some of the usual regulatory suspects remain on their radar, they are focusing their energies on many less conventional aspects of leadership, embracing psychology and communication in ways that would have been unimaginable in a law firm of yesterday.

“If we were running real businesses, we would be identifying future leaders in their 20s and 30s and fast-tracking them – whereas in most law firms people first have to prove themselves as a lawyer, and earn high fees, and only then, when they are probably in their 40s or 50s might we think about whether they have what it takes to lead the business.” This was a casual, almost throw-away comment from a colleague co-facilitating a managing partner retreat with me back in February, but it set the scene for the next 24 hours – how should law firms identify and then develop their future leaders?