by Bruce | June 16, 2013 | Articles, Business Models, Leadership, Strategy
For reasons that remain unclear to me to this day, back in college when I was majoring in economics, one of the fields I became fascinated with was that of industrial structure. Antitrust lawyers swim in the sea of industrial structure, whether or not they think of it...
by Bruce | June 13, 2013 | Articles, Business Models, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Boutiques are next up in our law firm taxonomy, and first a word about what I mean when I say “Boutiques,” because I may be using it a bit differently than you might assume in common parlance. In my nomenclature for purposes of this taxonomy, boutiques are...
by Bruce | June 10, 2013 | Articles, Business Models, Strategy
We continue our taxonomy of law firms with a term I’ve borrowed shamelessly from the retail industry, “Category Killers.” In retail, these have traditionally been Big Box stores with exhaustive inventory and wickedly competitive prices on one deep...
by Bruce | June 4, 2013 | Articles, Business Models, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
Our third installment in the “Law Firm Taxonomy” series addresses corporate-centric firms. With malice towards none and candor towards all, I must confess that I find this species the most problematic of all seven in our taxonomy. I’ll explain why in...
by Bruce | May 31, 2013 | Articles, Business Models, Globalization, Leadership, Strategy
Next in our series on a taxonomy of law firms are the capital-markets centric firms. If you think this moniker roughly translates to the classic New York white shoe elite, move to the head of the class. But, as much in our world at the start of the 21st Century,...
by Bruce | May 21, 2013 | Articles, Branding, Business Models, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
We humans like to put things in categories. And while we can get it plain wrong, or mix up two categories benignly or malignly, there’s no question our propensity for categorization—from friend or foe and food to poison, to Linnaeus, to the periodic table, to...
