1. Life balance versus performance ethic: Motivating young lawyers to perform at best practice levels is a function of engagement.

2. Generational skill sets: Partners wishing to maintain success need to learn and practise new leadership skills.

3. The boutique emerges as the norm: Clients want specialists, even in commodity areas. The boutique firms will out-perform the generalists in many areas, most critically in client quality and talent attraction.

4. Good firms combat commoditisation with client intimacy: Good firms know and like their clients and become experts in their client’s industry.

5. New ownership and wealth building opportunities: Many successful legal firms will have diverse ownership. The value placed on these firms will be a function of profitability, systems and management quality.

6. Knowledge management a major differentiator: Maintaining a high performance culture, quality and steep learning curves is all about the effective management of knowledge. Smaller and mid sized legal firms are starting to manage this better.

7. Flexible working arrangements retain talented individuals: trend toward women dominating the profession gains momentum.

8. Planned, orderly succession management while providing opportunities for all stakeholders.