While you were sleeping, redux. The world keeps getting smaller.

The rapid march of BigLaw globalization continues. Most of the activity is, understandably, focused on China, the "fastest growing legal market in the world."

• Baker & McKenzie opens in Qatar (just ten months after opening in Luxembourg)
• Blank Rome opens an office in Shanghai
• Chadbourne & Parke announces plans to set up shop in Istanbul
• DLA Piper merges with its 700-lawyer Australian affiliate, DLA Phillips Fox (making DLA Piper the world's largest firm, with approximately 4,200 lawyers worldwide)
• Gibson Dunn opens an office in Hong Kong
• King & Spalding opens a Moscow office
• Locke Lord opens an office in Hong Kong
• Nixon Peabody announces a Global Strategies initiative, which will likely include more expansion along the lines of its recent Hong Kong opening
• Paul Weiss opens in Toronto
• Simpson Thacher launches a Hong Kong law practice
• Wilson Sonsini opens an office in Hong Kong

What are you waiting for?

Go West, young man. And East. And North. And South.

What's BigLaw doing in this "down" economy? Getting bigger. Looking for opportunities to add greater value. Opening offices, merging, forming alliances. Gobalizing:

• SNR Denton barely lets the ink dry on its own merger before forming alliances with 10 firms across Africa
• Norton Rose ties up with Ogilvy Renault in Canada and Deneys Reitz in South Africa, then opens in Hamburg and links up in Indonesia 
• Jones Day decides to open offices in Sao Paolo, Boston, and in Riyadh, Jeddah and Alkhobar
• Clifford Chance moves into Australia with mergers in Sydney and Perth
• DLA Piper opens Miami office and forms alliance with firm in Caracas
• Squire Sanders and Hammonds complete their global merger

What do these firms (and others) know that you don't? They read the same news, see the same signs, talk to the same clients and bankers and accountants. Are they getting secret information? Playing insider baseball? Or are they just taking a longer-term view of the crisis, the evolution of the global practice of law, the opportunities to survive and succeed in what promises to be a radically different future?

Maybe it's time you started looking beyond your borders. Go west, east, north and south. It's a big world, full of big opportunities.

Are you talking the talk? Walking the walk?

Or just sitting at home, watching the world go by from the comfort of your office? When was the last time you traveled outside the country? What languages do you speak? Can you carry on a conversation in a foreign tongue? Have you ever tried? Can you find your way through a crowded Japanese city, negotiate a contract in Columbia, interview a client in Paris? In Japanese, Spanish or French?

On a flight to Asia a few years ago, I struck up a conversation with my seat-mate. Like me, he spent a lot of time on planes and as often happens, our conversation turned to the mileage elite threshold of our favorite airline. I told him that I'd made the 100,000-mile mark over the past two years, but I didn't think I'd reach it for a third year in a row. He told me he already had. It was February.

The world keeps getting smaller. Clients, from corporate executives circling the globe to retirees on vacation to entrepreneurs looking for ideas, are spending more and more time outside the United States. They're seeing the world through different eyes, discovering unknown cultures and traditions, meeting new people and eating new foods and getting new ideas about the way things are done. Shouldn't you be doing the same?

Have you made your resolutions for the New Year?

I was interviewed Friday by Chelsey Lambert at Total Attorneys for their Total Expert Radio broadcasts. I'm not used to sitting on the interviewee side of the table, and it was a lot of fun. Chelsey did a great job keeping me on topic. Thanks too to Kevin Chern and Kate Battle, who made the interview possible.

Chelsey and I talk about new year's resolutions for lawyers in three areas: growing their business, communicating their message, and managing their practice. We cover a lot of ground, especially with respect to business development, communications and practice management trends in 2010 and how those trends will translate into 2011. You can listen to the interview below, but if you don't have time right now, here's the summary of my new year's resolutions for lawyers and law firms:

Growing your business

1. Make a plan, a road map, that contemplates what you want to achieve in your practice, the people that will help you get there, and they ways in which you are going to connect with those people.
2. Set priorities. Time is not unlimited. Decide what's most important, and focus your efforts on that. And don’t make grandiose projects that will never come to fruition. Baby steps are fine.
3. Talk to your clients more. Go through the list of your clients, not just the ones easy to talk to, and start connecting with them. Talk about service, about value, about their problems, about solutions.

Communicating your message

1. Revamp your marketing materials. Practice descriptions, biographies, boilerplates, etc. They get stale quickly. Try to tell more -- and more meaningful -- stories.
2. Write where your clients read. If they read blogs, write a blog. If they read trade publications, do what you can to publish in the trades. How do you find out what they read? Ask them.
3. Draft a communications plan but don't get hung up on the process. Write down what you want to say, who you want to say it to, what you want to achieve from saying it, and where you should say it.

Managing your practice

1. Set objectives for your practice beyond just practicing law. If you don’t plan your route you may end up somewhere you don’t want to be.
2. Embrace alternative billing. Develop some meaningful alternatives to the billable hour that you can offer clients without hesitation.
3. Explore new technology. Cloud computing, client extranets, mobile technologies, etc. Figure out how you can use technology to provide better service, and start doing it. 

Listen to internet radio with Total Attorneys on Blog Talk Radio

Happy New Year!

Best wishes to all for a healthy and happy 2011!