Lawyers Weekly in Australia recently polled over 500 lawyers and nearly 75 per cent of those polled said “their firm doesn’t care about or allow for work-life balance” and drew the conclusion it was the firms’ culture not their policies that were the blame.

The battle for market leadership will never end. Trying to match every move made by our competitors and then upping the ante a bit will not work. In the end we will offer no more than the next firm and therefore be no better off. Our services will become commodity-like, resulting in lower, longer-term profitability.

For the past four years, with a steady ramping up to the “sky is falling” theme of articles and blogs of late, parties inside and outside the legal profession have been actively diagnosing its woes. The remedies offered have ranged from self-serving to a genuine interest in being part of the solution.

T. S. Elliot once unknowingly demonstrated insight into the legal profession when he wrote: “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice. . . .”

I think we should change the names of folks in their 50s and 60s to Baby Doomers from Baby Boomers. My basis for this is the simple premise that we have drilled into our children’s head that they can do anything they want if they just try.

A law firm leadership boot camp workshop was held as a precursor to the CBA’s Law Firm Leadership Conference in Calgary last month. I had the good fortune to participate as a co-presenter with Karen MacKay and Lorie Peters and in preparing for it Karen circulated a survey, titled “The Leadership Imperative,” to a cross section of people involved in law firm leadership in Canadian firms.

We talk about leadership a lot! In fact lots of people talk about it a lot!

This column will deal with some of the key results of the 2012 Canadian KPI Survey conducted by Law Firm KPI Inc., a for-profit company co-founded by Karen MacKay of Phoenix Legal Inc. and me in 2010 to specifically undertake surveys of key performance indicators for law firms with up to 100 lawyers. The purpose of the survey is to provide Canadian law firms with industry information in order to benchmark their own performance against the performance of other firms of reasonably comparable size.

While never having actually timed it with a stopwatch, it is fairly quickly after two lawyers begin chatting that the topic of compensation comes to the forefront. Rarely is it about what they are being compensated for, but rather about their contributions that are not being compensated by their firm.