by Bruce | September 10, 2012 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
Welcome to the second installment of “Growth is Dead:” Our topic for today is excess capacity. Let’s start with overall supply of new lawyers, which is the font of everything else. Thanks to the redoubtable Prof. Paul Campos (University of Colorado...
by Bruce | September 4, 2012 | Articles, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
If you believe the structural environment for BigLaw hasn’t fundamentally changed since 2008, the series I’m inaugurating today is not for you. (I would also have to ask, from a mystified perspective and in the kindest of ways, if you’re paying...
by Bruce | February 21, 2012 | Articles, Compensation, Leadership, Strategy
In the Legal Intelligencer, the reporter Gina Passarella has published Revenue Race, and a companion piece, which basically find the challenge that “a mature US legal market coupled with a dip in demand for legal services” poses to the demand for revenue...
by Bruce | February 16, 2012 | Articles, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
The title, “muscle memory,” I owe to Prof. Bill Henderson of Indiana/Maurer School of Law in Bloomington. Bill-and now I-use it to describe how the habits law firms learned during the boom years have carried over into the present reality, as inapt,...
by Bruce | February 13, 2012 | Articles, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Strategy
The preliminary Citi 2011 report is out and it’s time for a bit of reading between the lines. In particular, we like to focus less on what’s said than on what is studiously elided. Here’s the top line: For law firms, 2011 was a tale of two years....