by Bruce | July 21, 2005 | Articles, Compensation, Finance, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy, Technology strategy
Can you say what an incremental dollar of revenue will contribute to profit at your firm? Does it matter if that marginal dollar comes from an existing client or a new client, or which practice group generates it? More pointedly, not all business is good...
by Bruce | July 20, 2005 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
"Equilibrium" is a term that has special meaning in economics, although its definition can seem somewhat tautological: It’s the state of affairs where there is no impetus or force for change. The textbook example is where the price in a...
by Bruce | July 15, 2005 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
Aren’t you relieved that you don’t have wolfpacks of Wall Street analysts and the multimedia, 24/7 business press breathing down your neck to deliver "the numbers" every quarter? Isn’t it great living in private-firm land and having...
by Bruce | July 12, 2005 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
Dick Tyler, managing partner of CMS Cameron McKenna (with the coolest law-firm URL I’ve yet encountered), sounds a defense of the firm’s reversion from its foray into merit-based partnership compensation to its lockstep roots, combined with an all-equity...
by Bruce | July 11, 2005 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures
“As a profession, if we are to be taken seriously, we need to move to a sensible reporting regime that is based on real figures, and not on those stage statistics that appear.” The words of an impractical academic? A frustrated journalist...
by Bruce | June 28, 2005 | Articles, Compensation, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, M&A, Strategy
As promised, here’s the AmLaw 100 for 2005. I’ll have some substantive commentary later today, but for now I’ll primarily limit my gloss to that provided by my friends at American Lawyer Media: "Five Am Law 200 firms posted gross revenue...