by Bruce | July 14, 2015 | Articles
The polls will close this coming Friday, July 15th, at 6:00 pm New York time. Take the survey before time runs out! Remember: It only takes three to five minutes, and when you complete it you can voluntarily enter a random drawing to win one of two $50 gift...
by Bruce | July 12, 2015 | Articles, Leadership, Strategy, Technology strategy
Last week here in New York we had the opportunity to invite a couple of dozen law firms to “An Introduction to IBM Watson” at the brand new $1-billion IBM Watson facility down on Astor Place. This is not going to be a report on that event, except insofar...
by Bruce | July 4, 2015 | Articles
by Bruce | June 30, 2015 | Articles, Client Relationships, Cultural Considerations, Leadership, Practice Group Management
Two weeks ago we invited you to take a survey (three to five minutes of your time, tops) to try to get to the bottom of whether law firms are really "collegial and collaborative," as they are perennially asserting. If you missed your chance the first time...
by Bruce | June 25, 2015 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Strategy, Technology strategy
Much talk has been devoted lately to whether the growth of in-house law departments will take market share from Big Law, or, posed more in the language of economics, whether in-house lawyers are a reasonable substitute for outside counsel. Confessing that I have not...
by Bruce | June 22, 2015 | Articles, Business Models, Leadership, Strategy
Jimmy Lee, 62, died last week of a heart attack after working out, at his home in Darien. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, he was a vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase, where he had spent his entire 40-year career. He started right out of Williams College at...
by Bruce | June 16, 2015 | Articles, Client Relationships, Cultural Considerations, Marketing, Practice Group Management
We’ve written before about law firms’ nearly universal use of the terms “collegial” and “collaborative” to define what makes their cultures, each and every one, special. So indiscriminate is this usage that we find it not just...
by Bruce | June 14, 2015 | About the Site, Adam Smith Himself, Articles
Today is Adam Smith’s birthday: 1723, so he would be 292 today. Well, at least we think so. His birth was registered at the church in Kirkcaldy, Scotland (just across the Firth of Forth north of Edinburgh, not 10 miles as the crow flies) on 5 June 1723, so...
by Bruce | June 10, 2015 | Articles, Finance, Leadership, M&A, Strategy
The industry standard in tracking law firm mergers, Altman Weil’s Mergerline, has had this to say about activity in the wake of the Global Financial Reset (emphasis mine): 2011: “There were 60 law firm mergers and acquisitions announced in the United...
by Bruce | May 27, 2015 | Articles, Finance, Globalization, Strategy
With the annual publication of the AmLaw 100 and Second Hundred, it’s rankings season for BigLaw. Think of it as our little industry’s equivalent of earnings season for public companies—we having become a “quasi public” industry, as one of my...
