by Bruce | July 27, 2025 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Strategy
A few weeks ago a law land journalist asked us if we had any insights to offer about the above-average rate of expansion of law firms in a particular US metro market—which itself had been expanding at an above-market rate in business investment and population. This...
by Bruce | March 17, 2025 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
Here at Adam Smith, Esq. our robust, and for 20+ years inviolate, policy has been never to comment on current affairs. That ends today. We value no civic principle more highly than the primacy of the Rule of Law. And we have long had the luxury of being able to take...
by Bruce | February 16, 2025 | Articles, Business Models, Compensation, Finance, Strategy
We’re in the thick of BigLaw’s year-end earnings season, where firms left and right are reporting their FY2024 financial results. The numbers of greatest interest from a macro-industry perspective–setting aside the perennial gossip-intensive zero...
by Bruce | December 9, 2024 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Globalization, M&A, Strategy
‘We want to use this combination to forge a new global elite,’ Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) CEO Justin D’Agostino tells Legal Business as he discusses the firm’s ambitious merger plans with New York’s Kramer Levin. So opens LegalBusiness’ main article[1] late last...
by Bruce | October 15, 2024 | Articles, Business Models, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management
Comes word that Cleary Gottlieb is abandoning its increasingly rarefied “single tier” status and will begin naming Non Equity Partners “with immediate effect.” The intrepid Roy Strom of Bloomberg Law has the story: Cleary recognizes the “innovation and adaptation”...
by Bruce | September 17, 2024 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Strategy, Technology strategy
A few weeks ago, we raised the topic with our friends at Thomson Reuters Legal Practice Management about what the consequences of a widespread deployment of Generative AI might portend for–you guessed it–the business of law firms, and in short order the...