by Bruce | November 17, 2009 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Innovative Managing Partners, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy
What’s going on at Reed Smith? Less than a week ago, they announced a roughly 20% cut in first-year associate salaries and hourly billing rates for the 50-odd lawyers joining the firm in January 2010. Here’s what they had to say about it (emphasis...
by Bruce | November 14, 2009 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
One of the more thoughtful and, frankly, creative responses to my two recent columns on lateral partners asked a simple question: What should a firm recruiting a potential lateral be obligated to tell the putative future partner? This is the kind of question that gets...
by Bruce | November 10, 2009 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
My recent column, What Makes Laterals Run?, has generated a most rewarding level of reader feedback, worthy of an update to the original column. Reactions have literally come from around the world, and, with the permission of my correspondents (all of whom expect...
by Bruce | November 7, 2009 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Perhaps I don’t write as much as I should about lateral partners. I mean the economic phenomenon of lateral partner hiring, not gossip that much of the legal press seems to specialize in about specific “gotcha” movements of partners or small groups...
by Bruce | October 30, 2009 | Articles, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Strategy
Clients coming to me–and they’re coming to me as never before–seeking clarity on what this will all look like “on the other side” are usually, for starters, really asking “How worried should I be?” Sometimes of late, to reduce...
by Bruce | October 26, 2009 | Articles, Business Models, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures
According to the most recent fossil record discoveries, life on Earth dates back about 3,450-million years. But for about the first 85% of that time span, organisms were extremely simple, composed of individual cells, occasionally organized into colonies. Pretty...
