by Bruce | June 9, 2009 | Articles, Compensation, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
Doubtless over the weekend many of you read the NYT’s longish story, “A Study in Why Major Law Firms Are Shrinking.” Truth in labeling would have changed the headline to “A Profile of White & Case So Far This Year,” but perhaps that...
by Bruce | May 5, 2009 | Articles, Compensation, Finance, Marketing, Practice Group Management, Strategy
From the famous annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, “Woodstock for capitalists,” comes news a couple of days ago from the WSJ that Warren Buffett, long an investor in newspapers, sees “unending losses” for the industry. He then makes even...
by Bruce | April 29, 2009 | Articles, Compensation, Finance, Partnership Structures
On the balance sheet of essentially every corporation of any size or degree of profitability appears the line, “Retained Earnings.” I have never seen such a line on the balance sheet of any law firm. Why not? More importantly, what should the capital...
by Bruce | March 17, 2009 | Articles, Compensation, Finance, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
The news out of Dewey & LeBoeuf–that 66 partners, or about one in five of their 350 partners, have seen their compensation cut over the past 15 months by up to 80%–begs for an explanation, or at least some commmentary. First, what’s going on in...
by Bruce | March 13, 2009 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Well, that’ll teach me… The volume of commentary following my publication earlier this week of “The Great De-Leveraging” has been unprecedented. Depending on your attitude, that is either deeply gratifying or almost overwhelming. As one who...
by Bruce | March 8, 2009 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
Just as I was thinking it was about time to publish a column on the topic of "leverage" at law firms (roughly speaking, the associate to partner ratio, although there’s more than one way to calculate something that people will call...