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 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 | September 8, 2009 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Practice Group Management
How could the SEC have missed all the warning signs about Madoff? Understand that I don’t have a dog in this hunt. Although I’m a securities lawyer by training, I never worked at the SEC and, so far as I know, I’m not close to anyone who lost serious...
by Bruce | September 2, 2009 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Practice Group Management
Results are in from our poll of a few weeks ago in Where Have You Gone, Work-Life Balance? and here are the results (multiple answers were permitted): Since it’s hard to read, here are the results in order of popularity. The question, again, was...
by Bruce | August 28, 2009 | Articles, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management
Pop quiz: Which of these would be worse: Learning that, based on economic performance, lawyers in your practice group (including yourself) would be getting year-end raises smaller than average across the firm; or Feeling that you, individually, are being...