by Bruce | July 26, 2006 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Legal Week argues that "ensuring the best individuals make it up the partnership ladder has never been harder." They (properly) cite the landmark McKinsey study of nearly ten years ago, The War for Talent, which surveyed 6,000 executives from the "top...
by Bruce | July 12, 2006 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Does your firm seem to have one strategy in theory and another in practice? That is to say, does your intended strategy differ from the strategy that actually emerges based on people’s behavior? If so, you may not be alone. Indeed, Harvard...
by Bruce | July 5, 2006 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, M&A, Strategy
As regular readers know, I subscribe to the "people make the times" theory of history rather than the "times make the people" theory. Today’s lesson features Greg Jordan of Reed Smith, who recently engineered the merger of his firm with...
by Bruce | July 3, 2006 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Knowledge Management, Leadership, M&A, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy, Technology strategy
The Financial Times has a special report on "Innovative Lawyers 2006," which I commend to you essentially in its entirety. It’s thoroughly researched, involving soliciting submissions about "innovation" from the largest 200 firms in the...
by Bruce | June 11, 2006 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
Although this is really by way of an update to the immediately preceding post, I think it’s worthy of standing on its own because, while it raises essentially the same issue, it approaches it from a sufficiently different perspective that it deserves its own...
by Bruce | June 8, 2006 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
When both David Childs of Clifford Chance and Tony Angel of Linklaters say something’s a serious problem, I pay attention. The issue du jour (or should that be du decade?) is retaining associates who find the time demands and general stress of large law firm...