Recruiting
How do we know what we know?
What follows will be a bit out of the ordinary—OK, a lot out of the ordinary—for regular readers of Adam Smith, Esq., but there’s a cold, hard, important, gem of truth in it for lawyers, our firms, and our bedrock assumptions about the way things ought to work (which is precisely the same way they’ve
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USNWR, RIP
Most people attend law school to obtain jobs as lawyers (Not butchers or bakers, or candlestick makers.) If law school was just a cool place to chill out for a few years without building specific job skills, they’d call it “college.” Jobs are important, and we think that law schools should be competing to place
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Richard Rapp Joins Adam Smith, Esq.
It is with great personal and professional pleasure that we announce Richard Rapp is joining Adam Smith, Esq. as Senior Advisor. Those of you who have learned even a little about the consulting side of Adam Smith, Esq. know that we have remained small by choice, reflecting our conviction that the most challenging and sophisticated
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Execution is the New Strategy
I suspected as much all along. I’m referring to the recent admirably data-intensive study of lateral partner movement in London compiled and written by Mark Brandon of Motive Legal and published in The Lawyer a few days ago. This is must reading for anyone involved in the massively escalating lateral partner hiring minuet—which seems to
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5 Top Recruiting Trends
I was recently asked to write a piece addressing this topic and it has just been published here. In case that link ceases to work or requires login credentials, I’ve also provided my own link to it here. Enjoy, and as always, thoughts and comments most welcome.
Articles, Recruiting
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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But I Have All This Debt
I’ve been developing a theory for awhile about what the structure and composition of lawyers at a typical BigLaw firm may look like in future, and how it’s evolved already, and now that The New York Times has made it official that law school applications are plummeting, it’s timely to bring the two together and
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2012 Economics Nobel
On Monday the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science was awarded to Lloyd Shapley and Al Roth, for their work on market design and matching theory, which relate to how individuals and firms find and select one another in areas from school choice to jobs to organ donations to marriage itself. Dr. Shapley, 89,
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Entry-Level Recruiting Conference
We’re pleased to be sponsoring a conference on entry-level recruiting: San Francisco Tuesday 13 November 2012 9:00 am – 4:15 pm AMA Executive Conference Center (Union Square) This is actually an updated version of a conference we did in New York this past January - back by popular demand, as they say. I’ll be moderating the
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Something Completely Different
Through a route too circuitous to rehearse, the Girls’ Guide to Law School asked for an interview. Here are their questions, and our responses: 1. I’m an undergrad who’s trying to decide whether to go to law school. I hear a lot about how the profesion is in trouble (including from articles like this one). What
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