by Bruce | January 24, 2017 | Articles, Leadership, Strategy
The Premortem “The premortem is a great idea. I mentioned it at Davos and the chairman of a large corporation said it was worth coming to Davos for. The beauty of the premortem is that it is very easy to do. My guess is that, in general, doing a premortem on a plan...
by Bruce | January 18, 2017 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
From the foregoing analyses, it is apparent that the financial performance of law firms over the past 10 years has been driven by only one factor: rate increases. As we have seen, demand gowth for law firm services has been essentially flat, productivity has been...
by Bruce | January 2, 2017 | Articles, Leadership, Strategy
It’s become a commonplace to observe that Law Land has entered a period of negligible overall real growth in demand. (Five years ago I published Growth Is Dead: Now What?, which at the time prompted a fair amount of skepticism, a perspective on the book which...
by Bruce | November 30, 2016 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Strategy
You deem the following quote: Surprising, because your partners are totally game for whatever changes the rapidly evolving world is throwing at your firm; Utterly familiar—depressingly so; The ace you have up your sleeve as Managing Partner when it’s simpler to...
by Bruce | November 3, 2016 | Articles, Globalization, Leadership, M&A, Strategy
Nearly 20 years ago Robert Hughes published The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, still perhaps the definitive historical treatise on Australia’s founding from the continent’s discovery by the West to Britain’s decision to...
by Bruce | October 17, 2016 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Just Plain Interesting, Strategy
In connection with an ongoing research/whitepaper project, further about which affiant sayeth not, I had occasion to look at the Original AmLaw 50 from 1985. Here are the first three columns: Rank, firm, and gross revenue: Aside from the historic time warp we...