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Legal Commentary

Adam Smith, Esq.

An inquiry into the economics of law firms.

Post Frequency: 0.9/day

Last Entry: May 16, 2009 at 12:58:52

Report From London

Posted on March 15, 2008
Just back from an abbreviated week in London (essentially Tuesday through Thursday). Herewith a report. I met with the managing partners of a good half-dozen firms, fairly representative of the marketplace, and unsurprisingly the top question on most minds is what the economic downturn portends...

Process or Passion?

Posted on March 08, 2008
A major article appears in this month's American Lawyer, penned by Ben Heineman, most famously ex-GC of GE, and David Wilkins, Harvard Law professor. Both are now deeply involved in HLS's Program on the Legal Profession, whose stated mission is "to build bridges between the academy and the profession...

The Marketing Value of Publishing: 1440 to 2008

Posted on March 03, 2008
Over at "Drug and Device Law," they kicked up a little storm last Friday by asking why the marketing value of practicing lawyers' writing a blog seemed to be undervalued. I first learned of it when my friend Mark Herrmann of Jones Day sent me a heads-up asking if I...

A Q&A With LexBlog About "Adam Smith, Esq."

Posted on March 01, 2008
Kevin O'Keefe and Rob La Gatta of LexBlog posed a few questions to me a week or two ago, for their "LexBlog Q&A Series," and I thought you, Dear Reader, deserved to see my answers. 1. When did you start Adam Smith, Esq? What was your purpose in doing so?...

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"Think Different?" Who, Me?

Posted on February 27, 2008
Consider your reactions to these three hypothetical scenarios: In light of slack demand, BMW announces a combination of price cuts, rebates, and financing incentives that would save you 15%. More or less likely to visit a dealer? The Dow Jones Industrials are down 15% year to date...

Prospects for 2008: Another Precinct Heard From

Posted on February 25, 2008
So once it's in The Wall Street Journal it must be a real phenomenon, right? I'm referring to today's "Why BigLaw Is Bracing for a Leaner 2008," along with its companion piece on the WSJ Law Blog. A sampling of the evidence adduced behind the hypothesis of leaner times:...

On Death & Dying (Financially, That Is)

Posted on February 22, 2008
Tuesday I attended one of the regular lunch-time meetings of the ABA's "Back to Business Law" project which describes itself as "a pilot project sponsored by the ABA Section of Business Law, [to] provide periodic continuing legal education programs and informal networking opportunities for attorneys who temporarily leave active...

Don't (Only) Sweat the Small Stuff

Posted on February 18, 2008
While we're all obsessing over the sub-prime crisis, the credit crunch in general, the housing market's retrenchment, the inability to mark to market CDO's, the devilish tendency of "liquidity" to be robust when you don't need it and nonexistent when you do, whether worldwide financial institutions' losses and writedowns will...

Sometimes the Joke Is On You

Posted on February 13, 2008
Guilty as charged on all counts. (With thanks to The New Yorker.)...

The Story Behind the Reed Smith/Anderson Kill Story

Posted on February 12, 2008
By now it's been amply reported that 55 of Anderson Kill's 126 lawyers are leaving for Reed Smith, effective February 1. In classically hyper-ventilating fashion, the Brits (Legal Week) reported that Reed Smith "has swooped, ...taking almost half the fee-earners...

Andrew Carnegie: Robber Baron, Entrepreneur, Philanthropist, Scot

Posted on February 10, 2008
Rarely do I review books that disappoint, but there's a first time for everything, and I want to report that in my opinion David Nasaw's 850+-page Andrew Carnegie (Penguin: 2007) is skippable. This is a shame. Carnegie, aside from being perhaps the most successful entrepreneur and businessman of the Gilded...

It's Not About "Integration"

Posted on February 08, 2008
"'The issue isn't 'integration,' ' [Barton Winokur of Dechert] says. 'I think that's a garbage word people use." He's talking about integration of laterals, a key issue on which The American Lawyer has just given us a helpful scorecard, in the form of a report detailing moves over the past...

The Ten Years' War

Posted on February 07, 2008
It's been nearly a decade since McKinsey published the seminal article, The War for Talent, but many of its abiding observations remain true today and indeed are worth revisiting. What they found ten years ago started from the implacable demographic reality that the baby boom generation was passing through the...

The Annual Hildebrandt/Citi "Client Advisory:" Glass Not Half Full

Posted on January 29, 2008
Annually, Hildebrandt and the Citi Private Bank issue a "Client Advisory" and this year's is just out. What will doubtless grab headlines (and already has at places like the WSJ's Law Blog) is the downbeat forecast for 2008—the first since 1998, according to the Advisory—affecting both transactional and litigation work,...

Professional Firm Leaders: The Book from Harvard Business School

Posted on January 24, 2008
A potentially important new book has been published?don't worry, I've already asked the author for a review copy?but it's just now been featured on Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge. Titled When Professionals Have to Lead: A New Model for High Performance (Harvard Business School Press: 2007), the authors are: Thomas...

Unintended or Unanticipated?

Posted on January 21, 2008
On the wonderful landscape of economics, several highly visible landmarks are in the form of "laws:" The law of supply and demand, of economies of scale, of diminishing marginal utility, of the downward stickiness of wages, of decreasing returns to factors of production, etc...

A Contrarian Bounce?

Posted on January 16, 2008
I previously asserted that corporate America teaches that firms that treat recessions as opportunities rather than threats could steal a march on their more conservative brethren and emerge into the post-recession recovery as more powerful competitors...

The Upcoming Banana?

Posted on January 13, 2008
Regular readers, or simply those with good memories for the jovial Cornell University economist Alfred Kahn, who briefly served as Jimmy Carter's czar over wage-price controls, as well as the last head of the unlamented Civil Aeronautics Board (where he deregulated the domestic airline industry), will recall that he was...

In Palm Beach Next Week (Wed 16th Jan)

Posted on January 10, 2008
I'll be at Hildebrandt's Marketing Partner Forum 2008 held this year at The Breakers, Palm Beach, on January 16. If any of you will be attending, shoot me an email and maybe we can get together....

Is Your Managing Partner Still Making Jet Engines?

Posted on January 09, 2008
Text #1: "He was recruited as a very senior director in a very large City law firm. His work went well but the thing that really bugged him was the pass he had to show every time he went into the staff restaurant. The words ‘non-lawyer’ were printed on the...

Report to Readers: 2007-2008

Posted on January 02, 2008
At the end of one year and the beginning of a new, it's fitting that I offer to you all a report on the state of "Adam Smith, Esq." As Presidents intone at the start of their State of the Union address (I believe utterly without fail), I can report...

Happy New Year

Posted on December 31, 2007
May all your resolutions become resoundingly true....

Out of the Mouths of Children

Posted on December 31, 2007
"You're too smart for your own good." How quickly we dismiss that snide accusation as revealing the ignorance and probably the intransigent know-nothingness of the accuser. But could there be a grain of truth in there? If you believe in the "curse of knowledge," a phrase apparently invented in a ...

Alternatives to PPP: The Word from London

Posted on December 27, 2007
As many of you know, back in November I was in London for a week. Among other activities—many other activities—I was pleased to be invited to participate in a panel discussion hosted by Guy Beringer of Allen & Overy, who was on the panel, along with his partner Stephen Denyer,...

A Compensation Meditation

Posted on December 26, 2007
Our text for today, Dear Reader, coming from The American Lawyer, is as follows: "There's nothing like a fund-raiser at a private school in Manhattan to define your social station. Time was, lawyers were near the top of the heap. Investment bankers and other finance types have long eclipsed them,...

Merry Christmas to All

Posted on December 25, 2007
Rockefeller Center, New York, Christmas 2007...

Why Do Firms Merge?

Posted on December 20, 2007
Why do law firms merge? The fact is, I wonder sometimes myself. More seriously, there is typically an array of stated and unstated reasons, among them: Growth for the sake of growth: Inadvisable. Size alone doesn't guarantee anything particularly desirable, and may guarantee some things undesirable, such as increased managerial...

The Missed Exit Ramp

Posted on December 13, 2007
Today, in a rare departure into citing what not to do, we have as Exhibit A a piece in the current issue of the ABA's Law Practice Magazine, "Essential Attributes of Successful Managing Partners." And what, pray tell, are those attributes of the successful? Visionary Trustworthy Financially rigorous Optimistic Team-oriented...

Report from Hong Kong

Posted on December 09, 2007
An initial report from Hong Kong (written in HK and in mid-air, but published from New York): If you've never been to Hong Kong, you should know that the Brits may be unsurpassed in their talent for choosing their colonial HQ's. The natural strategic, mercantile, and scenic advantages of HK...

Report from Beijing

Posted on December 03, 2007
An initial report from Beijng follows. First of all, the city appears to be growing exponentially. As more than one long-time resident has told me, "it changes every day" and "although I've lived here all my life, sometimes I wake up and don't recognize it...

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