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...
by Bruce | April 22, 2019 | Articles, Client Relationships, Cultural Considerations, Innovative Managing Partners, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Recruiting, Strategy
The following column is by Janet Stanton, Partner, Adam Smith, Esq. The reason we’ve never written about gender diversity before is that there was frankly not much to say; regurgitating dispiriting statistics without offering credible remedy is not what we do. But...
by Bruce | April 15, 2019 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Strategy
The hard core bulls-eye of our practice is helping firms assess, refine, or discard and re conceive their strategic plans. We approach and proceed through the course of these engagements–as we do in all our work–without preconceived templates, 2 x 2...
by Bruce | April 1, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Latin America, Leadership, M&A, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Last week I spent three full days in Bogota, meeting with firms and colleagues, giving a talk at the always-wonderful “Gun Club,” and generally trying to soak up as much market intelligence as I could. Although I’ve been to Bogota several...
by Bruce | March 26, 2019 | Articles
“La Republica,” one of the two leading business/finance papers covering Colombia, saw fit to publish a couple of pieces last week around my breakfast talk with local law firm leaders at the delightful Gun Club in Bogota last week. First was a day-before...
by Bruce | March 15, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
AT&T’s long-delayed acquisition of Time Warner finally closed some days ago, and within about a week The Wall Street Journal put out a front-page story “It was once ‘game of thrones’ inside Time Warner: AT&T said, enough.” What...
by Bruce | February 21, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Cultural Considerations, Globalization, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Lurking in the wings, if not center-stage, in almost everything we do in our work with clients–and I imagine something similar holds true in the work of many of you, invaluable readers–is the nebulous and unclear, but mostly ominous-sounding, notion of...
by Bruce | January 30, 2019 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Ineffable, Just Plain Interesting, Leadership, Strategy
My title for today steals literally from Ronald Coase’s legendary 1937 paper of the same name, which gained Coase the Nobel in Economics in 1991. The paper, barely over a dozen pages long, asks the question, childlike in its simplicity, “why do firms...
by Bruce | January 15, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Leadership, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Having discussed the Citi/Hildebrandt annual client advisory, we now turn to the Thomson-Reuters/Georgetown Report on the State of the Legal Market for 2018. If Citi’s editorial tone tends to be rather celebratory of good news, Thomson-Reuters’ tends in...
