Strategy
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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Strategy & Partner Pay
Herewith the second article by Richard Rapp. Thanks, Richard!—Bruce. Law firm managers who are planning large-scale, hubristic expansion-by-acquisition should study the Dewey LeBoeuf morality play very closely. The rest of us should not. It’s a distraction that diverts attention from what matters closer to home. Permit me to analogize: Those of us who are
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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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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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“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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“Standing at the Precipice”
That—Standing at the Precipice—being the title of a short video our friends at Axiom have put together in hopes of informing the conversation about how we got here and what some of the actual underlying stats and figures are in the evolution of law to this point. What it’s not: dry or dull long (barely
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Last Chance to Share Your Voice on “ReInvent Law”
As the politicians say, “let your voice be heard.” Our good friends at Bloomberg Law plan to do a report on the results of our “ReInvent Law” survey (Is it Real or is it Memorex?) and yes, there will be video. So if you haven’t taken the survey already, please do! We’ll be tabulating the
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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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“ReInvent Law:” Real or Memorex?
For years, there was a prominent, and ultimately iconic, billboard in Times Square advertising the Memorex brand of recording tape, displaying an image of a stoner being blasted back in his chair by music coming from, presumably, a Memorex tape. Since recording tape has gone the way of camera film, the billboard has long since
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Wish You’d Been Here
As I hope many of you saw, we held a launch party for Growth Is Dead: Now What? here in New York about ten days ago, and some photos are now back. Our generous friends at Above the Law hosted the event, which was held at the NoMad Hotel on Broadway at 28th Street. We’re
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