Critical maths

My abilities at maths are a hard-won slog. Journalists are notoriously poor with numbers, so it’s been a constant struggle for me to avoid that label. Sadly, lawyers are often no better – worse, they (more than rarely) don’t appear to care about profits and costs. At least I know my publishing world is about making more cash than I spend.

In this issue we have heavyweights from the world of finance – and operations and finance systems – giving us their views on why getting far better at commerciality is vital to tomorrow’s great law firms.

POWER AND NUMBERS

Peter Hickman, Linklaters’ chief finance and operations officer, talks to Rupert White about handling a low-growth future, finding tomorrow’s more flexible workforce, the benefits of firm-wide enterprise IT and management information, and whether we’ll ever see a major law firm run by a finance chief

BIGGER BANGS, FEWER BUCKS

Succeeding in a low-growth, highly competitive future means everyone in a law firm must now understand finance. Declan Tan talks to finance chiefs, finance systems gurus and operations leaders to find out why everything from pricing to international best practice will have a finance edge in the future of legal business. You may take your calculators out now…

PROFITABILITY FROM COMPLEXITY

Briefing talks to Patrick Hurley, vice president of global implementations at Thomson Reuters Elite about using big data arguments to better understand data law firms already have but don’t use – and making sense of complex information to better serve clients