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Where innovation is concerned, it’s rarely large, unwieldy institutions that lead the charge. In tech, for instance, start-ups drive new ideas while behemoths in the field rely on vast cash reserves to buy out innovation when it grows hot. Think Amazon snapping up Zappos in 2009, or Facebook purchasing Instagram in 2012. In the world of media, the same is true. Condé Nast bought Reddit in 2006. Axel Spring snagged Politico last year. In law, however, this doesn’t happen…and small firms ultimately pay the price. Nowhere is this more evident than where legal staffing is concerned.

If there were any lingering doubts about the role artificial intelligence (AI) is set to play in our futures, Facebook’s abrupt rebranding as “Meta” and subsequent promotion of the “metaverse” put them to rest. Anybody who’s been paying attention knows that AI is poised to revolutionize the world in the same way the internet did decades ago. Presumably, this means that soon you’ll be able to hire a literal clone of yourself to handle that never-shrinking backlog of undone work.

List-making is as much a part of the holidays as mistletoe or mandarins. People everywhere are busy making lists of gifts, lists of New Year’s resolutions, and lists of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice…so why not also make a list of all things your firm needs to do to level up in 2022? After all, the past year has not been easy on small firms, and the only way to avoid a repeat is to plan for strategic change.

If you’re a parent and have ever hosted a sleepover, you’re familiar with the childish competition to see who can stay up the latest. And if you were ever a teenager, you know about the myriad of dumb challenges teenagers use to size each other up. As adults, you’d think we’d have grown out of such juvenile behavior, and yet the number of professionals who measure their worth—and that of others—based on how busy they are says otherwise. But here’s the thing: being “too busy” is neither respectable, nor healthy. Work life balance, on the other hand, is both—and top talent knows this.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously stated that the only constant in life is change. This applies as much to the world of business as to anything else and one of the main changes businesses owners face is an evolution in the fundamental concepts that keep their enterprise ticking. Communication does not mean the same thing it did thirty years ago. Hiring today has nothing to do with bygone times when a person stayed with a company for life. Productivity is in flux as individual cultures grapple with new global norms. The most recent change of this sort involves employee engagement, which in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic does not mean what it used to.

You’ve read the news and you know workers are quitting their jobs in droves. The so-called “Great Resignation” is upon us, and it’s making employers’ jobs difficult at a time when life isn’t exactly easy. Law firms, with their culture of long hours and high stress, have been hit especially hard, which is why Big Law is responding with a tried and true strategy: money.