by Bruce | August 1, 2006 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management
My friend Rich Gary has a valuable piece on Law Firm, Inc. about "managing the unmanageable"—managing lawyers, in other words. Rich’s piece, in turn, builds on David Maister’s famous (to my mind, anyway) April essay in The...
by Bruce | July 27, 2006 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
My friend Prof. William Henderson of Indiana University Law School/Bloomington has diligently worked on an analysis of the profits-per-partner of single-tier vs. two-tier law firms, which was just published in the North Carolina Law Review (Indiana Legal Studies...
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...
