Featured Article
Is the American Legal Profession a Guild?
This is one in our occasional series of excerpts from my yet-to-be-published new book, treating, among other things, the historic roots of our profession tracing back to medieval guilds. I hope you enjoy, and, more importantly, that you provide any feedback,... read more +A Summer Diversion (Adam Smith included)
From the wide-ranging and customarily sane Virginia Postrel over at Reason comes a summer bijou: Gadgets and gizmos from Adam Smith's time. Let's start with what the self-respecting man about town might have carried with him as he set out for the day. First and all...
Summer Reading List
In keeping with our custom 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 2023 installment: two novels and two nonfiction volumes that have had a prominent places on our...
The Maroons & The Grays: The Next Chapter
It has been four years since we initially published our series laying out a law firm market segmentation model we called the “Maroons & The Grays,”[1] and four years on is none too soon for an update. No model is, or should be, static, and as we have worked with...
July 4th
America! America! God mend thine every flaw, confirm they soul in self-control, thy liberty in law. O Beautiful for Spacious Skies, Materna, composed by Katharine Lee Bates, 1893 (second verse, third and fourth stanzas)
Our Brave New Lateral World
Something that feels structurally different seems to have developed in the lateral market. The ambition of this essay is to describe what we think it is, why it has developed, and what it portends for the future of BigLaw. Plus, with any luck, some ideas or at least...