The Social Compact
The lawyer personality type scores notoriously high on “autonomy.” Certainly compared to average citizens, but even to average white-collar professionals, lawyers are driven to do their own thing...
View ArticleQuestion of the Month: Why Aren’t Law Firms Bought & Sold?
This column is by Janet Stanton, Partner, Adam Smith, Esq. Why doesn’t $$ change hands when law firms merge or when one takes over another? (We’re not talking about solo or tiny practitioners selling...
View ArticleThe Big Three Annual Reports: Citi/Hildebrandt
Two of the Big Three Annual Reports on the state of Law Land are now out and it’s time for a survey of the horizon and some perspective. (The Big Three are the Altman-Weil “Law Firms in Transition”...
View ArticleThe Big Three Annual Reports: Thomson-Reuters/Georgetown
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...
View ArticleThe Nature of the Firm
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...
View ArticleYour Guide to Change Management
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...
View ArticleOn Business Models
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...
View ArticleNews Notes from Bogota
“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...
View ArticleLetter from Bogota
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....
View ArticleWho Does Your Law FIrm Serve?
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...
View ArticleGender Diversity in Law Land: Reason for Hope?
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...
View ArticleIs Your Firm a Pyramid or a Diamond?
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...
View ArticleOur Culture of Individualism
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...
View ArticleIs Software Going to Eat Your World?
Eight years ago, Marc Andreessen wrote that “software is eating the world.” Notably, he wasn’t specific about what geographies it had already consumed and where it was going next. Today I’d like to...
View ArticleIntroducing the Maroons & the Grays: Part 1
We have never subscribed to the belief that law firms operate in a fundamentally undifferentiated industry—that each law firm competes with every other law firm—and that given the magic alignment of...
View ArticleHappy Birthday, Adam Smith!
Born June 5, 1723, Kirkcaldy, Scotland. Today he would be 296.
View ArticleMaroons & Grays: Part 2
At the end of installment #1, we promised you we’d discuss what happens if you apply Porter’s famous “five forces” to the Maroons and the Grays. Shall we? Insight from Porter’s “Five Forces” In 1979,...
View ArticleMaroons & Grays: Part 3
Let’s open this third and final installment with the #1 question we’re most frequently asked about this model: Can one firm excel at being both a Maroon and a Gray? No. Or in the very best of...
View ArticleDo Laterals Create or Destroy Value?
Ask almost any Managing Partner or office leader this question and odds are about 98% that the answer you’ll get is, “It depends.” Indeed. We wish there were reliable, consistent, industry-wide data on...
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