The Nixon Peabody firm has appointed a “Chief Sustainability Officer.” The newly-minted “CSO” is a partner (Carolyn Kaplan) who will spend a quarter of her time, if not tilting at windmills, at least advocating their use as an alternative source of energy.

While I wouldn’t expect to see many more CSOs popping up, we do see quite a few law firm CEOs and COOs. While these are familiar roles in business, they are a bit of a departure for law firms, which have traditionally been run by managing partners (moonlighting on top of their legal jobs) or, in larger firms, lawyers stepping away from billing clients to run the enterprise full-time. Indeed, Avvo Advisory Board member Robert Hirshon serves as COO for the Stoel Rives law firm.

While the National Law Journal (subscription req’d) recently ran a piece on how law firm “CEOs” should be compensated (consensus: more like other senior rainmaking partners; less like the leaders of, say, Goldman Sachs), what about firms that have looked beyond their own ranks to find seasoned business professionals to run their operations? While non-lawyer law firm CEOs may be rare-to-non-existant, there seems to be an increasing awareness of the value of having someone with deep operational/finance expertise fill the COO role.

At last month’s ABA Law Firm Marketing Strategies conference, I met a number of non-lawyer COOs, all of whom seemed vested with considerable authority in the management of their firms’ operations. It hardly seems surprising that firms would conclude that their daily operations may be better guided by someone who has actually run a business, division or association. While at the conference, I was regaled with numerous stories of new COOs inheriting antiquated or unkempt business systems that had been run by attorneys with the best of intentions but little operational experience. But my anecdotal experience aside, I expect it is still more the exception than the rule for non-lawyers to fill senior law firm operations roles. We’d love to hear more examples, as well as learn more about how non-lawyers are navigating their law firm heirarchies and how their initiatives may differ from those a lawyer COO would pursue. Post a comment or send e-mail to josh@avvo.com.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 12:29 am by Josh King, VP of Business Development and General Counsel and is filed under Marketing for Lawyers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.