IN THIS ISSUE:
 Cover Story  
Less Quiet in the Quiet Period
by Sandra Rubin

Initial public offerings are fraught with uncertainty about what can and can't be done during the “pre-marketing” quiet period. The Canadian Securities Administrators has tabled a series of proposals to liberalize and bring more certainty to the process

The pre-marketing of an initial public offering is a subject so seemingly dry, you'd be hard-pressed to think of it in the same sentence as Playboy magazine. And yet, there it is. What stands as the cautionary tale for what can and can't be done in the sensitive time before a company issues a prospectus played out between the covers of the popular men's magazine.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had given Playboy an interview that was published a week before the company was to file its registration statement with the US Securities & Exchange Commission. Yes, people do read Playboy for the articles — including people at the SEC. The interview nearly cratered Google's initial public offering.

The SEC informed Google the company was not only in violation of its quiet period, but the company founders had made inaccurate statements in the article. Lawyers ended up having to amend its IPO documents to correct the statements and took the unusual step of including the entire Playboy interview in the revised IPO statement.

 Feature Story  
Partner Compensation: The Real Score
by Marzena Czarnecka

It's one of the toughest jobs at a law firm: determining how partners are going to divvy up the pie. What compensation system works best?

This is the basic business model of the law firm: the lawyers, associates and partners bill clients. The associates get salaries — these are part of the general overhead of the firm, along with rent, IT systems, and other personnel. The partners – the equity partners, the owners of the firm – get a share of the profit.

How much of the share? This is where it gets complicated. There are a variety of models (see sidebar: Partner Compensation Systems: What's Yours?, p. 61), an infinite supply of formulas and approaches, and an intimidating body of literature on the subject. And in Canada, a dearth of information of how partner compensation really works: what it is that partners really get compensated for.

Why the sensitivity? “Call five of your closest friends and ask them how much money they make,” says one lawyer. “What will their response be?” But it's not just social resistance to discussing money. Canadian law firms are in general proprietary over their financial information; as a result, estimates of how profitable a firm is – or challenged – are notoriously unreliable. How they distribute those profits among their hungry partnership can be just as elusive.
From Rainmakers to RFPs
by Julius Melnitzer

Firms can no longer just rely on a few rainmakers to get work: lawyers now need to be skilled at formalized processes like RFPs

Are law firm rainmakers going the way of the dinosaur? Maybe not, but at the very least, some members of the profession are inclined to put them on the endangered species list. Perhaps not tomorrow, next month, next year or even next decade, but the trend, these lawyers believe, is clear.

What's driving this line of thinking is a growing belief among some lawyers and law firm marketers that systematic procurement processes — whether they are RFPs (Requests for Proposals), beauty contests, preferred supplier lists, expressions of interest and the like — are replacing positive personal relationships as the delivery trucks for legal work.