Law21 Twitter Updates- @jeffrey_brandt Not yet -- anything especially notable?
- Survey says post-recession shifts are here to stay: http://t.co/Qel8xtux | Remarkable changes in three years.
- Interesting new website from Axiom Law: http://t.co/r4VicptU
- Trucking company enters legal services market. Seriously. http://t.co/FqkhrHsV (@legalfutures)
- My new article for the CBA's National magazine: The endangered partner: http://t.co/1AExKEGg
Category Archives: Big Firms
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 legacy of work-life balance
I think we’ll soon be closing the book on one of the legal profession’s most-used and least-understood phrases of the last decade: “work-life balance.” It was still all the rage just a couple of years ago — new lawyers invoked it as a mantra, talent recruiters bandied it about, and many legal publications (including those [...]
Also posted in Billing, New Lawyers, Purpose, Satisfaction, Talent 13 Comments
Peer pressure
“If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” Every parent has uttered some variation on that line to a child who insists on doing something unwise, over-priced, or physically perilous simply because “everyone else is doing it.” Training children to resist peer pressure is one of the thankless but necessary [...]
Also posted in Innovation 2 Comments
The other shoe
If you like your comedy dark, track the law firm layoff news. There’s the partner at Pillsbury LLP who, seated on a crowded but quiet commuter train into NewYork City, conducted a loud cellphone conversation with a colleague at the office that revealed planned associate layoffs at the firm, right down to naming the names [...]
Also posted in Recession, Talent 2 Comments
The evolution of lawyer regulation
The thing about change is that once it gets rolling, it’s almost impossible to control and can go in directions you neither anticipated nor like very much. That thought occurred to me while reading a report issued last week by the Legal Services Policy Institute, the think-tank division of UK legal training company The College [...]
Also posted in Governance, Talent 5 Comments
Law firms on demand