Metrics That Might Matter #1: Against Revenue
This is the first part in a series I will audaciously and perhaps misguidedly and at the risk of over-promising call “Metrics that might matter.” It’s prompted, as many new creative efforts in human...
View ArticleMetrics That Might Matter #2: RPL
Spoiler alert: If you’re looking for a hard-hitting expose of everything that’s wrong with RPL, look elsewhere. I’m on record as saying that RPL is the most telling metric we have, and I stand by that...
View ArticleMetrics That Might Matter #3: PPL
Last year The American Lawyer introduced a new metric into its annual reports, “Profit per lawyer,” or PPL. Briefly, here’s what they said about it back in April, the second year they calculated it:...
View ArticlePlanning & Strategy Season
As we enter strategy, planning, and retreat season in advance of 2017, a quick recap of some of the ways we help our clients that they consistently find most valuable. Strategy In today’s unforgiving...
View ArticleMetrics That Might Matter #4: PPP
And now we come to the main event, the poisoned chalice bequeathed to us by Steven Brill. Let us proceed from the specific to the general, or if you prefer the structural to the symbolic. Are the...
View ArticleUpcoming Webinars on EU Data Protection
Yours truly will be moderating three webinars over the next six weeks or so on the EU’s requirements for data protection, security, and confidentiality. Our panelists will be highly qualified...
View ArticleGlobalization Forever?
Along with Brexit and the apparently unsinkable Trump, another surprise has been brewing on the world stage and I hope you’ve noticed. Globalization—measured by the most fundamental and reliable...
View ArticleWard Bower: 1947–2016
Word came this weekend that my friend and one of Adam Smith, Esq.’s closest long-time partners in the surprisingly small world we inhabit had died a few days ago of a sudden heart attack; Ward was 69....
View ArticleThe 2016 Economics Nobel
From the redoubtable David Warsh of Economic Principals: When the Nobel Prizes were established, in 1901, the Nobel Foundation for perhaps a decade sought to spirit laureates into Stockholm in order...
View ArticleTime Capsule
In connection with an ongoing research/whitepaper project, further about which affiant sayeth not, I had occasion to look at the Original AmLaw 50 from 1985. Here are the first three columns: Rank,...
View ArticleLetter from London
As regular readers know is my custom, when I return from a trip to London I typically endeavo(u)r to distill my reactions in a brief report. As my trip this week was especially brief (shy of 72 hours),...
View ArticleThe Fatal Shore
Nearly 20 years ago Robert Hughes published The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, still perhaps the definitive historical treatise on Australia’s founding from the continent’s discovery by...
View ArticleAdam Smith on the Colonists’ Victory
Adam Smith was living in Edinburgh in October 1777 when a distraught friend brought news of the surrender of British General Burgoyne at Saratoga, exclaiming in the deepest distress that the British...
View ArticleSelecting Your Firm’s Next CEO
The longer I’m a student of our industry, the more firms we observe outperforming and underperforming, and the more clients we engage with (several recently) on the issue of leadership succession...
View ArticleHappy Thanksgiving
A Macy’s Parade balloon gets ready for its big annual moment–this all happens about a mile from the offices of Adam Smith, Esq.: Courtesy The New York Times.
View ArticleTepid Can Kill You
You deem the following quote: Surprising, because your partners are totally game for whatever changes the rapidly evolving world is throwing at your firm; Utterly familiar—depressingly so; The ace you...
View ArticleOur Still Noble (?) Profession
Having been born in Manhattan, raised in a very close-in suburb which orbited in the firm grasp of The City and existed to serve it (it was the era when parents did that), and having lived and worked...
View ArticleNow What? (Hint: Growth Is Dead)
It’s become a commonplace to observe that Law Land has entered a period of negligible overall real growth in demand. (Five years ago I published Growth Is Dead: Now What?, which at the time prompted a...
View ArticleWho’s Your CISO?
Q: What could put your firm at severe peril of failure that has nothing to do with clients, markets, bank debt, partner flight, infighting at the top, or any of the other usual suspects? A: A...
View Article“Transition” or “Chasm?”
The following article was first published earlier this week in The Lawyer. We reproduce it here with their kind permission. Two days after the US Presidential election, the Atlantic magazine’s lead...
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