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Summer Reading List 2025
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 2025 installment: Fiction, nonfiction, and one millennia-old classic. Our hope is that you might find... read more +Introducing the Maroons & the Grays: Part 1
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...
Is Software Going to Eat Your World?
Eight years ago, Marc Andreessen wrote that "software is eating the world." Notably, he wasn't specific about what geographies it had already consumed and where it was going next. Today I'd like to suggest that whether this software feast is going to be good for you...
Memorial Day
Our Culture of Individualism
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 observations on our...
Is Your Firm a Pyramid or a Diamond?
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 of a...