by Bruce | May 14, 2019 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Ineffable, Leadership, Partnership Structures
A week or two ago I picked up a copy of David Brooks’ latest, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, and while this is not a book review or anything like it (I confess that I’m just a few chapters into it so far), early on he offers a few...
by Bruce | May 9, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management
We have written before about the profession’s seeming disconnect between how people perceive the typical law firm, in terms of lawyer career-level distribution, and reality. The perception, from history, is that of a relatively small number of partners on top...
by Bruce | April 22, 2019 | Articles, Client Relationships, Cultural Considerations, Innovative Managing Partners, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Recruiting, Strategy
The following column is by Janet Stanton, Partner, Adam Smith, Esq. The reason we’ve never written about gender diversity before is that there was frankly not much to say; regurgitating dispiriting statistics without offering credible remedy is not what we do. But...
by Bruce | February 21, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Cultural Considerations, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Lurking in the wings, if not center-stage, in almost everything we do in our work with clients–and I imagine something similar holds true in the work of many of you, invaluable readers–is the nebulous and unclear, but mostly ominous-sounding, notion of...
by Bruce | December 28, 2018 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Ineffable, Leadership, Partnership Structures
The lawyer personality type scores notoriously high on “autonomy.” Certainly compared to average citizens, but even to average white-collar professionals, lawyers are driven to do their own thing their own way. You see it all day every day if you hang...
by Bruce | November 16, 2018 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
We don’t often write purposefully on the topic of leadership, if for no other reason than it’s hard for most people to get past, “I know it when I see it,” but more substantively because we think it perfuses so much of our writing and...