Bradley Chairman of the Board and Managing Partner Jon Skeeters Featured in Law360's "Law Firm Leaders" Series.

Bradley Chairman of the Board and Managing Partner Jon Skeeters was featured in Law360's "Law Firm Leaders" series discussing the firm's future, how the firm is working to make use of technology to benefit clients, and the qualities he looks for in a lateral partner hire. 

Law360: What are your goals for the law firm over the next five years? 

Skeeters: We just finished a new strategic plan this summer. We had a big partner meeting, partner retreat, in April of this year and put a bunch of things on the table to talk about: law firm growth, innovation, the associate-to-partner track. We put all that on the table and talked about it candidly. We got a lot of good feedback and the board took that and finalized a plan July 1.

One of the things we’re doing that is different, we were already doing a lot of this, but now we’re trying to be more intentional about the industries that we service. We’re trying to do more of an industry focus instead of a subject matter or practice group focus. We boiled it down to a few industries that our top 250 clients are associated with and that we feel we have brand recognition regionally and nationally in already. They were banking and financial services, construction and infrastructure,
health care. Those are probably the biggest three. We also do a lot of pharmaceutical work, a lot of mass-tort-type litigation. That’s another area we feel like we can play in more on that regional and national scale from our footprint as a mostly Southern-facing law firm. 

Was the Dallas office your first outside of the South?

Back in 2009, Bradley Arant Rose & White firm and Boult Cummings Conners & Berry firms merged. Boult’s only office was in Nashville with around 100 lawyers, and the Bradley Arant side of the family was in Birmingham, Montgomery and Huntsville in Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Washington, D.C. What we’ve done, since then the firm has opened a Tampa office, a Houston office and a Dallas office, in that order. 

The original article, "Law Firm Leaders: Bradley Arant's Jonathan Skeeters," appeared in Law360 on December 18, 2019.