by Bruce | March 7, 2005 | About the Site, Articles
"Adam Smith, Esq." has been invited to join American Lawyer Media’s "Legal Blog Network," and I have accepted. The other half-dozen-plus members of the network are all people I know personally or through email and the quality of their...
by Bruce | March 6, 2005 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
To risk stating the obvious, a major downside of acquiring powerful lateral partners or small groups thereof is that they will not stay. Now The American Lawyer has a piece covering the story of same over the past five years or so, complete with a helpful and...
by Bruce | March 4, 2005 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, M&A, Strategy
I believe this is a first, but I’m about to quote an astute and interested UK reader’s unsolicited, over-the-transom "letter to ‘Adam Smith, Esq.’" in its entirety. At first I thought I could edit it gracefully for concision,...
by Bruce | March 2, 2005 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Yesterday’s post about the Hildebrandt/Citigroup annual 2004 recap said nothing about a topic they dwelt on which I deemed sufficiently distinct and newsworthy in itself to merit separate commentary. Specifically, they cited four developments in firm structure...
by Bruce | March 1, 2005 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Knowledge Management, Leadership, M&A, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy, Technology strategy
Hildebrandt and The Law Firm Group of the Citigroup Private Bank, with help from Baker-Robbins, are out with their 2004 year-in-review together with some prognostications for 2005. The New York Times, in its wisdom, headlined the story, "Partnerships More...
by Bruce | February 25, 2005 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy, Technology strategy
Now that we all have religion about organizing firms by practice groups (well, most of us, anyway), the next logical question is, to paraphrase Ed Koch, "How are we doin’?" In other words, which practice groups are the strong economic engines...