by Bruce | March 15, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
AT&T’s long-delayed acquisition of Time Warner finally closed some days ago, and within about a week The Wall Street Journal put out a front-page story “It was once ‘game of thrones’ inside Time Warner: AT&T said, enough.” What...
by Bruce | January 30, 2019 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Ineffable, Just Plain Interesting, Leadership, Strategy
My title for today steals literally from Ronald Coase’s legendary 1937 paper of the same name, which gained Coase the Nobel in Economics in 1991. The paper, barely over a dozen pages long, asks the question, childlike in its simplicity, “why do firms...
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;...
