by Bruce | March 15, 2013 | Articles, Compensation, Profiles of Individuals
As most readers know, one of the irregular—but always popular—kinds of columns we publish are in the form of interviews with people who pass our rigorous 10-point test are intrinsically interesting. Recently I had the luck to get to know Herb Thomas, who immediately...
by Bruce | January 22, 2013 | Articles, Branding, Business Models, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Marketing
Permit me to paraphrase, and hopefully not mutilate, the lead from a recent article on strategy + business, the Booz & Co. (nee Booz Allen & Hamilton) online magazine: It’s a tough world …. New technologies … have permanently changed the [law firm...
by Bruce | November 16, 2012 | Articles, Business Models, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
As we come to the final installment of the Growth is Dead series, I hope the challenge I’ve laid out for us is clear. Excess capacity Stagnant demand Cut-throat or “suicidal” discounting Unprecedented pressure on prices, from all directions,...
by Bruce | November 5, 2012 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Marketing, Practice Group Management, Strategy
In Part 8 in this series, we talked about “Now What?” in terms of three particular approaches you could take that were all, essentially, inward-focused and things you can pretty much control inside the firm’s four walls: acknowledge you have...
by Bruce | October 12, 2012 | Articles, Compensation, Finance, Strategy
Lee Pacchia of Bloomberg Law recently interviewed me about some of the implications of “Growth is Dead.” Here it is: It’s 12 or 13 minutes but if you don’t have time for that we’ll be trying to cut it into bite-size snippets in the...
by Bruce | September 16, 2012 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
Our third installment in this series addresses partner expectations. Here’s the problem: There’s about to be a collision with reality. Let’s start with some data. In the quarter century since the The American Lawyer first published the AmLaw 100,...
