by Bruce | December 17, 2024 | Articles, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy
This column is by Janet Stanton, Partner, Adam Smith, Esq. One of the most enduring and vexing problems we all face (almost all the time) is how to sort through the myriad competing (conflicting?), shifting priorities that arise minute-by-minute and pull us in all...
by Bruce | December 9, 2024 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Globalization, M&A, Strategy
‘We want to use this combination to forge a new global elite,’ Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) CEO Justin D’Agostino tells Legal Business as he discusses the firm’s ambitious merger plans with New York’s Kramer Levin. So opens LegalBusiness’ main article[1] late last...
by Bruce | November 28, 2024 | Articles, Just Plain Interesting
by Bruce | October 27, 2024 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Profiles of Individuals
The Nobel in Econ (a/k/a The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) for 2024 was awarded a few days ago to Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson of MIT and to James Robinson of the University of Chicago. Here at Adam Smith, Esq., we try to...
by Bruce | October 15, 2024 | Articles, Business Models, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management
Comes word that Cleary Gottlieb is abandoning its increasingly rarefied “single tier” status and will begin naming Non Equity Partners “with immediate effect.” The intrepid Roy Strom of Bloomberg Law has the story: Cleary recognizes the “innovation and adaptation”...
by Bruce | September 17, 2024 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Strategy, Technology strategy
A few weeks ago, we raised the topic with our friends at Thomson Reuters Legal Practice Management about what the consequences of a widespread deployment of Generative AI might portend for–you guessed it–the business of law firms, and in short order the...
by Bruce | September 8, 2024 | Articles, Branding, Business Models, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Strategy
Few brands are more prominent in our daily lives (well, at least if you’re a Western world urban dweller) than Starbucks. Its rise to prominence has become standard-issue corporate lore: From its single Seattle store founding in 1971 to Howard Schultz’s...
by Bruce | August 27, 2024 | Articles, Business Models, Cultural Considerations, Partnership Structures
This column is by Janet Stanton, Partner, Adam Smith, Esq. Let’s get something straight from the get-go: “Equity” as it is known in Law Land is a chimera. Unlike in the other 98% of the economy, equity in Law Land is an illusion. It has no intrinsic or market value...
by Bruce | August 13, 2024 | Articles, Finance
As we are all fellow members of the human race, I suspect you would join me in admitting that, yes, certain decisions and behaviors are indeed compelling (irresistible) and irrational (self-defeating from the perspective of the longer view). We may not, indeed should...
by Bruce | July 29, 2024 | About the Site, Articles, Book Reviews, Just Plain Interesting
In keeping with our tradition at Adam Smith, Esq. of publishing a summertime diversion in the form of a selective list of what we’ve been reading lately, herewith the 2024 installment. Two novels one collection of short stories, and two nonfiction volumes–one...