by Bruce | June 27, 2019 | Articles, Finance, Leadership, M&A, Partnership Structures, Recruiting, Strategy
Ask almost any Managing Partner or office leader this question and odds are about 98% that the answer you’ll get is, “It depends.” Indeed. We wish there were reliable, consistent, industry-wide data on laterals’ success ratios, but we’ve...
by Bruce | June 14, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Client Relationships, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Marketing, Partnership Structures, Strategy
Let’s open this third and final installment with the #1 question we’re most frequently asked about this model: Can one firm excel at being both a Maroon and a Gray? No. Or in the very best of circumstances, it’s extremely hard to do and it’s...
by Bruce | June 9, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
At the end of installment #1, we promised you we’d discuss what happens if you apply Porter’s famous “five forces” to the Maroons and the Grays. Shall we? Insight from Porter’s “Five Forces” In 1979, Harvard Business School Professor Michael...
by Bruce | June 3, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Marketing, Partnership Structures, Strategy
We have never subscribed to the belief that law firms operate in a fundamentally undifferentiated industry—that each law firm competes with every other law firm—and that given the magic alignment of expertise, cost, and personal rapport, clients’ choice of law firms...
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...
