Welcome to LPM mag: everything SME law firm management

A forum for sharing ideas, problems and solutions for SME law firm management

This week, we launch a brand new magazine for law firm managers. It's not for big firms - Legal Practice Management magazine is for everyone else in the country. That means every firm from a small-office high street practice to a £10m regional business.

The small-to-medium-sized firms have many similar challenges and many similar opportunities, despite being enormously different. They are also, in my view, the firms with the most potential agility, because they've not thrown millions into massive IT projects, for example, and they can make decisions. That means they can take advantage of technologies and ideas that are really new, and they can change. They can be anything they want to be.

LPM magazine's central ideas will revolve around innovation, corporate structures (such as making up more non-lawyers as partners or directors, and bringing in more non-exec director capability), business nous (financial and commercial) and savvy (being a business, not just a law firm).

The reason we've created LPM magazine isn't some corporate media strategy - it's because I'm convinced that the UK's SME law firms need to learn from each other's successes and failures to produce an innovative future for the legal services that most Britons will use. The magazine, alongside our market-leading Legal Practice Management conference coming up on 19 May, will be a place for law firm management to showcase ideas, demonstrate innovation and share their problems.

In our first issue we've bagged Simon McCrum, managing partner of Darbys, a firm that went from near death to national aspiration inside five years - five years, I'd add, that saw most businesses take a battering, as they were the years of this recession. McCrum reformatted Darbys, and I think he represents what good management can do for tomorrow's SME law firm.

Whether you're in a firm making £8m a year with hundreds of people to worry about, or a small high street practice with a close-knit team, now is the time to make great changes and grasp the future. We've created LPM magazine to be the forum to share those ideas. It will only truly work if you learn and share as we grow.

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Want to tell us your perspective on the future of SME law firms? That journey starts in the comments section below...