Cultural Considerations
“ReInvent Law:” You Have Spoken
A few weeks ago I ran a column about “ReInvent Law,” an event in Silicon Valley in the first half of March, which presented some views about possible futures of BigLaw, most of which were, uh, challenging to those who think business as usual is a strategy. My column wasn’t so much about whether I
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Good Enough for the NFL
I don’t know about you, but I find talent markets fascinating. They have several characteristics that make them quite distinctive from regular old goods and services markets: Talent is extremely heterogeneous; it’s not as if there’s another Honda Accord where that one came from. Talent is what economists call both “excludable” and “rivalrous,” meaning that
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Growth Is Dead, The Video
OK, so the film rights to the book have not yet been auctioned, but in the meantime here’s my interview with the intrepid Lee Pacchia of Bloomberg Law. From Lee’s introduction: The era of ever-expanding revenues and profits for the nation’s largest law firms — a period that lasted from 1980 to 2008 — is
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Casualties of Discounting
Permit me to paraphrase, and hopefully not mutilate, the lead from a recent article on strategy + business, the Booz & Co. (nee Booz Allen & Hamilton) online magazine: It’s a tough world …. New technologies … have permanently changed the [law firm selection ]experience. Meanwhile, a sluggish economy and rising competition are testing brand loyalty.
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Letter from London
By the time I go home I’ll have been over here for a week; some impressions are forming and it’s not too soon to start airing some thoughts. For starters, pretty much everyone agrees, implicitly or explicltly, that we’re in a flat (“stable,” if you prefer euphemism) market. To coin a phrase, “Growth is Dead.”
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2012: Year in Review
We’ve never done a year-end review, and don’t count this (The “First Annual” if you wish) a precedent, but I thought it worthwhile to build one of the final columns of 2012 around what law firm leaders are saying. So without further ado, as the sportscasters say, “Let’s go to the videotape” (primary sources for
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“Growth is Dead” Now an e-Book
We are delighted to announce that we have just published the complete 12-part series Growth is Dead as an e-book. Demand from you, Dear Readers, to be able to have the entire series available in one spot, was unprecedented and trying to satisfy those requests was frankly one of our primary motivations. (But we must confess
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Linklaters: A Short Story
Legal Week has just run a lengthy piece diving in to the recent history of Linklaters, which provides the occasion to reflect on some of the signal tensions within law firms. Sensitive to the risk of being perceived as overindexing on articles covering the Magic Circle, their New York white shoe brethren, and other globe-spanning
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Growth is Dead: Part 12-The S-Curve
As we come to the final installment of the Growth is Dead series, I hope the challenge I’ve laid out for us is clear. Excess capacity Stagnant demand Cut-throat or “suicidal” discounting Unprecedented pressure on prices, from all directions, including who clients will pay for, and rates and realization Exhaustion of cost-cutting as a tactic
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Growth is Dead: Part 11-Granting Your Wish
We’ll have one more installment in our “Growth is Dead” series but let’s focus today on trying to synthesize a few themes that have been pervasive topics here on Adam Smith, Esq., since at least September 15, 2008, and even before, and look at their implications for “Now What?,” on the assumption that the thesis
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