by Bruce | July 18, 2006 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Strategy
My friend Professor Bill Henderson of Indiana University Law School/Bloomington continues his fascinating empirical research into the legal profession with a new piece which analyzes, over the past 20 years, the geographic migration of large law firms and their...
by Bruce | July 12, 2006 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Does your firm seem to have one strategy in theory and another in practice? That is to say, does your intended strategy differ from the strategy that actually emerges based on people’s behavior? If so, you may not be alone. Indeed, Harvard...
by Bruce | July 7, 2006 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy, Technology strategy
Have you been struck by how frequently the first question lawyers will ask, when exposed to a new suggestion about how they might run things at the firm (from the smallest to the largest issues) is: "Well, what other firms are doing that?" On one...
by Bruce | July 5, 2006 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, M&A, Strategy
As regular readers know, I subscribe to the "people make the times" theory of history rather than the "times make the people" theory. Today’s lesson features Greg Jordan of Reed Smith, who recently engineered the merger of his firm with...
by Bruce | July 3, 2006 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Knowledge Management, Leadership, M&A, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy, Technology strategy
The Financial Times has a special report on "Innovative Lawyers 2006," which I commend to you essentially in its entirety. It’s thoroughly researched, involving soliciting submissions about "innovation" from the largest 200 firms in the...
by Bruce | June 30, 2006 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, M&A, Partnership Structures, Strategy
Guess the speaker (hint: London-based Managing Partner of a firm you’ve heard of): "Over a 10-year period the impact of rationalisation by industry sector has been dramatic. In the banking sector, 28 major institutions reduced to eight, in...
