by Bruce | March 28, 2017 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures
One of the things we do a lot of here—and seemingly more of in the past 24 months or so—is helping firms sort out, reform, amend, optimize, throw-away-and-start-fresh, their partnership compensation systems. And in every engagement of that sort, we try to keep two...
by Bruce | March 17, 2017 | Articles, Business Models, Compensation, Finance, Partnership Structures
This is a guest column by a very good friend of Adam Smith, Esq., Richard Rapp, who was President and CEO of NERA Economic Consulting for 18 years (1988-2005), during which time the firm grew to global scale. Richard now co-heads Veltro Advisors, a law firm...
by Bruce | January 18, 2017 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
From the foregoing analyses, it is apparent that the financial performance of law firms over the past 10 years has been driven by only one factor: rate increases. As we have seen, demand gowth for law firm services has been essentially flat, productivity has been...
by Bruce | October 28, 2016 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership
As regular readers know is my custom, when I return from a trip to London I typically endeavo(u)r to distill my reactions in a brief report. As my trip this week was especially brief (shy of 72 hours), this report will be too. By way of background, I had 10 meetings...
by Bruce | October 17, 2016 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Just Plain Interesting, Strategy
In connection with an ongoing research/whitepaper project, further about which affiant sayeth not, I had occasion to look at the Original AmLaw 50 from 1985. Here are the first three columns: Rank, firm, and gross revenue: Aside from the historic time warp we...
by Bruce | September 11, 2016 | Articles, Compensation, Finance
And now we come to the main event, the poisoned chalice bequeathed to us by Steven Brill. Let us proceed from the specific to the general, or if you prefer the structural to the symbolic. Are the reported numbers accurate? Silly question. We all know the answer to...
