Globalization
A law firm taxonomy: Introduction
We humans like to put things in categories. And while we can get it plain wrong, or mix up two categories benignly or malignly, there’s no question our propensity for categorization—from friend or foe and food to poison, to Linnaeus, to the periodic table, to the Dewey decimal system—has gotten us a long way on
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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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A Tale of Three Cities
Regular readers may know, or have intuited, that I was born in Manhattan and have spent essentially my entire adult life on the island (save for a childhood detour to a close-in suburb, and four-year and three-year sojourns to college and law school) and may have therefore assumed various things about me premised on that
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Growth Is Dead Party: Update
Update: Growth Is Dead: Now What? Book launch party Pete Kalis to join yours truly You don’t want to miss this Tuesday February 26/New York You’re invited! Dear Readers, To make the launch party for our new book, Growth Is Dead: Now What? even better, the irrepressible Pete Kalis will join in on the discussion. Not
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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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Economic Snapshot: Year End
At year end it seems fitting to take a look at economic conditions overall, and what better source than the McKinsey Global Survey Economic Conditions Snapshot/December 2012? It’s a compilation of 1,575 responses from executives “representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, tenures, and functional specialties,” and is weighted by the contribution of
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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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