by Bruce | June 9, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
At the end of installment #1, we promised you we’d discuss what happens if you apply Porter’s famous “five forces” to the Maroons and the Grays. Shall we? Insight from Porter’s “Five Forces” In 1979, Harvard Business School Professor Michael...
by Bruce | June 3, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Marketing, Partnership Structures, Strategy
We have never subscribed to the belief that law firms operate in a fundamentally undifferentiated industry—that each law firm competes with every other law firm—and that given the magic alignment of expertise, cost, and personal rapport, clients’ choice of law firms...
by Bruce | May 14, 2019 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Ineffable, Leadership, Partnership Structures
A week or two ago I picked up a copy of David Brooks’ latest, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, and while this is not a book review or anything like it (I confess that I’m just a few chapters into it so far), early on he offers a few...
by Bruce | May 9, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management
We have written before about the profession’s seeming disconnect between how people perceive the typical law firm, in terms of lawyer career-level distribution, and reality. The perception, from history, is that of a relatively small number of partners on top...
by Bruce | April 22, 2019 | Articles, Client Relationships, Cultural Considerations, Innovative Managing Partners, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Recruiting, Strategy
The following column is by Janet Stanton, Partner, Adam Smith, Esq. The reason we’ve never written about gender diversity before is that there was frankly not much to say; regurgitating dispiriting statistics without offering credible remedy is not what we do. But...
by Bruce | February 21, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Cultural Considerations, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Lurking in the wings, if not center-stage, in almost everything we do in our work with clients–and I imagine something similar holds true in the work of many of you, invaluable readers–is the nebulous and unclear, but mostly ominous-sounding, notion of...