by Bruce | December 3, 2004 | Articles, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, M&A, Strategy
The American Lawyer is out with its annual survey of AmLaw 200 leaders and they are, as Aric Press succinctly puts it, "a confident bunch." And why shouldn’t they be? The heck with 9/11 and the heck with the 2000 bubble melt-down: 88%...
by Bruce | December 1, 2004 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures
I’ve said it before, but it appears to be a source of chronic pain, so I will re-state my firm belief that, like pregnancy, you cannot be "half" lockstep and half not. The logical universe of choices is: Pure Lockstep: Fabulous if you can...
by Bruce | November 29, 2004 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
Rees Morrison, a longstanding observer of all matters law and business, opines that vis-a-vis in-house law departments, at least, there is no such thing as management by following "best practices," because they simply do not exist. To buttress his thesis, he...
by Bruce | November 26, 2004 | Articles, Knowledge Management, Leadership, Technology strategy
InfoWorld’s cover story is "The Top 20 IT Mistakes," and it’s a rogues’ gallery indeed. Amusingly, many are the converse of another: For example, "botching your outsourcing strategy" vs. "offshoring with blinders...
by Bruce | November 19, 2004 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
It has long seemed to me that the corporate-land debate over whether the CEO and the Chairman should be one person or two mirrors the law-land debate over the relationship between the Executive Director (or equivalent) and the Managing Partner. On the premise...
by Bruce | November 17, 2004 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Strategy, Technology strategy
A trend emerging, I believe, from the competitive landscape is that the AmLaw 100 are "pulling away," competitively, from the AmLaw 101-200. So when a star among the "second 100," like Boies-Schiller, misses a calendar deadline that goes all...