by Bruce | January 10, 2014 | Articles, Finance, Strategy
Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, authors of the famous 2009 book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, are back with a study reporting their follow-up research on how major economies of the world are dealing with the aftermath...
by Bruce | December 18, 2013 | Articles, Law Schools, Recruiting, Strategy
Linear extrapolations are widely suspected of being unreliable, but maybe not widely enough. Stated differently, it’s a category error to engage in static, not dynamic, analysis. Stated yet differently, the interesting challenge is almost never to ask,...
by Bruce | November 20, 2013 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy
One of the thorniest and most convoluted issues any leader has to deal with is telling senior-level underperformers that they’d be better off elsewhere. It calls on every skill in the manager’s trick-bag, from financial analysis to subtler cultural and...
by Bruce | November 14, 2013 | Articles, Compensation, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
The always intrepid Lee Pacchia of Bloomberg Law invited me to come by and talk about the quarterly reports on the State of BigLaw just released by Citi Private Bank and Wells Fargo’s law group. We also got off on the topic of whether lawyers can really be...
by Bruce | November 13, 2013 | Articles, Business Models, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
The other week I had the chance to sit down with Ted Burke, outgoing chief executive and global managing partner of Freshfields. I’ve known Ted for years, consider him a friend, and with the announcement a month or so ago that he would be stepping down at...
by Bruce | November 7, 2013 | Articles, Leadership, Marketing, Practice Group Management, Strategy
For years, I’ve been hearing firms describe their cultures as “entrepreneurial,” and I hardly paid the slightest attention. Like “collegial” or “collaborative,” it just seemed like so much white noise. Then finally I heard it...