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Category Archives: Big Firms
The platform is changing
Seth Godin calls it the WordPerfect Axiom, and he’s exactly right: When the platform changes, the leaders change.
WordPerfect had a virtual monopoly on word processing in big firms that used DOS. Then Windows arrived and the folks at WordPerfect didn’t feel the need to hurry in porting themselves to the new platform. [...]
Also posted in Competition, Innovation 4 Comments
The boutique exodus
I was talking the other day with a partner in a large national firm. For a variety of reasons, including the nature of his practice area, his annual billings have been declining for a couple of years now, and he’s been contacted about it by some of the senior people in the firm. He’s been [...]
Also posted in Solo & Small Firm 3 Comments
The lamp and the laser
When you set up a home office, as I’ve recently been doing, you begin to notice lighting in a way you hadn’t before. It quickly becomes apparent that fixed overhead lights and large floor lamps, no matter how bright they might be, don’t illuminate desks and laptops very well. For close-range work, helping you navigate [...]
Also posted in Marketing, Solo & Small Firm 5 Comments
Law firms on demand
What if you could take a law firm, carve away all the parts of it you don’t like, and keep all the parts you did? What if, from the client perspective, you could get rid of high and rising prices, time-based bills, gratuitous overhead costs and unfamiliarity with your business? What if, from the lawyer [...]
Also posted in Clients, Talent 5 Comments
Hands across the water
I don’t normally focus on very large law firms and mergers thereof, but I’ll make an exception for this one. As you might have heard, US-based Hogan & Hartson and UK-based Lovells have apparently reached an agreement to merge their respective firms by May 2010. The combined entity (Hogan Lovells, provisionally) would crack the top [...]
Also posted in Innovation Leave a comment
Size and the legal media
My newest column has been posted at Slaw, Canada’s best legal website. As always, you can read it there, or read it here.
Also posted in Publishing, Solo & Small Firm 2 Comments
Breaking the big firm
My strongest, greatest fear by far, if it’s not too soon to look to the “other side” of this financial system meltdown and general economic interregnum, is not that things in law-land will look overly different when we emerge, but that they won’t look different enough.
That observation comes from Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith [...]
Also posted in Billing, Diversity, Talent 3 Comments
The firms of the future
“Does the future belong to virtual law firms?” That question was posed by an American Lawyer article earlier this week that focused on Virtual Law Partners, a growing firm nominally based in Silicon Valley but in fact operating, well, wherever its lawyers are. Virtual firms — two others, FSB Legal Counsel and Rimon Law Group, [...]
Also posted in Innovation, Solo & Small Firm 3 Comments
The best and the brightest?
It’s a small thing, but it’s been bothering me disproportionately, so I want to say a few words about one of my least favourite current phrases in the law: “the best and the brightest.” It’s normally used in a talent recruitment or institutional marketing capacity to describe the very small group of the very best [...]
Also posted in Law School, Talent 15 Comments
The blind side