by Bruce | July 3, 2008 | Articles, Finance, Innovative Managing Partners, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy
This is a column about wringing our hands. Our first text, from the Old Testament conventional debate, stems from today’s WSJ story on "Axiom Legal," headlined Newcomer Law Firms Are Creating Niches with Blue-Chip Clients, discussing the business model...
by Bruce | July 2, 2008 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management
Knowledge @ Wharton has an enlightening interview with William Weldon, CEO of Johnson + Johnson, on the challenges of leadership in a decentralized company. You may think the scale of J&J (120,000 employees, $61-billion in revenue, operations in dozens...
by Bruce | June 26, 2008 | Articles, Compensation, Finance, Practice Group Management
Three guesses what these numbers represent: Blank Rome 20 Cadwalader 35 Clifford Chance 6 Hunton & Williams ?* Paul Hastings ?* Powell Goldstein <10 Sonnenschein 37 Sutherland Asbill & Brennan 15* Thacher Proffitt 24 Thelen Reid 26 Total 174** *not verified...
by Bruce | June 21, 2008 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Last week Eversheds sponsored a conference in New York, primarily targeted at senior inhouse counsel, to discuss the current and future state of relations between law firms and inhouse departments. It was not pretty. About 90% of the attendees were the chief...
by Bruce | June 18, 2008 | Articles, Finance, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Over at LegalOnRamp there’s an interesting discussion underway about the extent to which GC’s do—or don’t—seek genuine innovation in the way BigLaw provides services. I’m taking the liberty of republishing it here (with...
by Bruce | June 11, 2008 | Articles, Finance, Globalization, Practice Group Management, Strategy, Technology strategy
In the course of two hour-plus long interviews over the past couple of weeks with Ray Bayley, co-founder of NovusLaw, I learned that everything I thought I knew about outsourcing was wrong. Or rather, that I hadn’t thought about outsourcing, really, at all. Read...