by Bruce | March 11, 2016 | Articles, Compensation, Finance, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management
A few years back, as exceptionally studious and faithful readers might conceivably recall, I wrote two pieces on the lateral hiring frenzy, Our Arms’ Race and Our Arms’Race (2), which took an almost across-the-board stand against lateral partner hiring....
by Bruce | January 11, 2016 | Articles, Client Relationships, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
With the release last week of the Annual Report from Georgetown Law’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, the “Big Three” annual reports—Altman-Weil’s Law Firms in Transition, Citi/Hildebrandt’s Client Advisory, and...
by Bruce | December 16, 2015 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
It has become a commonplace—I have bowed to convention and endorsed the notion myself—to observe that law firms are labor-, not capital-, intensive, and that (here’s the dangerous and subtle segue) therefore there would be no benefit to them in taking on outside...
by Bruce | October 30, 2015 | Articles, Client Relationships, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Altman Weil’s annual Law Firms in Transition survey, the 2015 edition, was just published, and as usual it makes for some fascinating reading—at least for me and I suspect for many of the devotees of Adam Smith, Esq. As you may know, this is the seventh year...
by Bruce | October 7, 2015 | Articles, Client Relationships, Compensation, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
We recently returned from London on business, and this will be the first of a few installments presenting our thoughts given the benefit of 17 meetings in five business days. As you know, we work globally with firms of all sizes in a wide variety of markets with every...
by Bruce | August 26, 2015 | Articles, Finance, Partnership Structures, Recruiting
The AmLaw rankings have been with us for over thirty years, and despite the evergreen complaints about their design, purpose, impact, and reliability, to our knowledge no one has ever tried to systematically ask AmLaw firms themselves whether and to what extent they...
