by Bruce | January 15, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Having discussed the Citi/Hildebrandt annual client advisory, we now turn to the Thomson-Reuters/Georgetown Report on the State of the Legal Market for 2018. If Citi’s editorial tone tends to be rather celebratory of good news, Thomson-Reuters’ tends in...
by Bruce | January 10, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Strategy
Two of the Big Three Annual Reports on the state of Law Land are now out and it’s time for a survey of the horizon and some perspective. (The Big Three are the Altman-Weil “Law Firms in Transition” report [not yet released], the Citi/Hildebrandt annual client...
by Bruce | January 7, 2019 | Articles, Compensation, Finance, M&A, Question of the Month
This column is by Janet Stanton, Partner, Adam Smith, Esq. Why doesn’t $$ change hands when law firms merge or when one takes over another? (We’re not talking about solo or tiny practitioners selling their practices to a successor; that’s like buying...
by Bruce | November 29, 2018 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Leadership, M&A, Strategy
According to the self-assured analysis of McKinsey, there are only six types of successful acquisitions. Cutting directly to the chase, they are: Improving the target firm’s performance; Removing industry excess capacity; Creating market access for services;...
by Bruce | October 7, 2018 | Articles, Client Relationships, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Recent conversation with a veteran friend in the industry. He had correctly deduced from a recent column in these pages that I’m (re-)reading the all-time strategy classic Playing to Win by A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin (Harvard Business Review Press: 2013) and...
by Bruce | October 1, 2018 | Articles, Branding, Business Models, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Strategy, Technology strategy
By “only two strategies,” I mean what if there are only two general ways of creating a sustainable competitive advantage? I’ve read a lot of the business and management literature on strategy (believe me…) and this thought first surfaced when I...
