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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

Buy High, Sell Low

Posted on September 06, 2008
Best of times or worst of times to make some acquisitions? This is one area where the head/heart divergence may be more radical than usual—and where it could really cost you. Here's how McKinsey poses the dilemma: "As the credit crunch threatens to become a global downturn, corporate leaders...

Costs & Revenues: Health Check Time

Posted on September 05, 2008
So maybe you can't save your way into profitability, but you can save money more and less intelligently. And I'll give you a hint: It's not about how many meetings are held at times when food should be served. (Think I'm making this up? Firms have sent out memo's to...

What's Your Time Horizon?

Posted on September 01, 2008
Time to take stock. This dratted credit crunch has now celebrated, if that's the word, its first birthday, and there is no clarity about when it may end. What's a law firm to do? If you believe McKinsey, and if you believe that where investment bankers go, law firms will...

ILTA 2008

Posted on August 29, 2008
Apologies for a dearth of columns this week, but I was at ILTA/2008 at the Gaylord Texan outside Dallas. Two comments about the Gaylord, Dallas, and August. First, the Gaylord comes as close as any place I've ever been to meriting the word "indescribable...

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How's Your 2008 Shaping Up?

Posted on August 22, 2008
We have our first comprehensive report on how 2008 is shaping up financially, courtesy of The American Lawyer, and Dan DiPietro of Citi's Private Bank, and it paints a picture of what are soon going to be, if they aren't already, vastly diminished expectations...

The Balanced Scorecard, Version 5.0

Posted on August 16, 2008
One of the most famous management books in recent history is The Balanced Scorecard, published in 1996 by two Harvard Business School professors, Robert Kaplan and David Norton. If you've never heard of it, you should at the very least become familiar with its core precepts, which can be roughly...

London and New York, Meet Mumbai and Delhi

Posted on August 12, 2008
With the news today that both Clifford Chance and Eversheds are ramping up their outsourcing initiatives in India (covered in The Lawyer and in LegalWeek), it's timely to report on a panel on outsourcing that I attended last week at the ABA's annual convention here in New York...

The Thirty Years' Associates Salaries War

Posted on August 09, 2008
Put these trends together, as reported by this month's issue of The American Lawyer, and what do you get? Midlevel associates, despite their pay jump since 2006, aren't satisfied with with their compensation; New York City salary levels have penetrated every major market across the country; The annual midlevel associate...

Bubbles

Posted on August 04, 2008
This is about the Cadwalader layoffs. But I won't be piling on. I really won't. Instead, I'd rather examine how the firm got to this unhappy pass and what managerial lessons it might hold in store for us. To understand what brought it to cutting fully 20% of its lawyer...

The New Whipping Boy?

Posted on July 29, 2008
Earlier this month, I wrote a column "about wringing our hands" (its actual title was How High Quality Are Your Lawyers? And How Can You Tell?) and I've just received a most thoughtful email from Alec Guettel, one of the co-founders of Axiom Legal, which is extensively discussed in the...

Zero Tolerance to the Rescue

Posted on July 24, 2008
"This is [the program] in its best light. But what lies beneath is a pattern of behavior that places law firms at risk. Generally, the improper activities take place out of the spotlight. ... [Participants] expressed a sense of feeling powerless about how to respond...

A Conversation with Jay Zimmerman

Posted on July 22, 2008
I recently had the chance to sit down with Jay Zimmerman, Chairman of Bingham, to discuss the changes he's seen over his career, and to talk about the future of the legal industry and Bingham. Herewith a synopsis. Jay (Harvard, Harvard Law) started his career in New York at Debevoise,...

The Bi-Modal Starting Salary Distribution

Posted on July 21, 2008
My friend Prof. Bill Henderson of Indiana University School of Law has just published a highly significant column titled "How the 'Cravath System' Created the Bi-Modal Distribution." At least one blog ("MoneyLaw") has already deemed it "The blog post of the year;" be that as it may, it's worthy of...

Is Your Firm Innovative? As Innovative as Pixar?

Posted on July 18, 2008
Does it strike you (as it does me) that the noise level surrounding "innovation" in law firms is reaching crescendo proportions? Just in the last few months, I've written about Legal OnRamp, Allen & Overy's mini-conference on innovation here in New York, Eversheds' 21st Century Law Firm survey, Altman Weil's...

The Dog That's Not Barking

Posted on July 14, 2008
I've been increasingly mystified, now bordering on troubled, by a new case of "the dog that didn't bark." Here's my question: Given that we've been slogging through this subprime/Alt-A/Bear Stearns/Freddie & Fannie financial quicksand for a solid year, where is all the restructuring and insolvency work? Just a few days...

Thoughts on Innovation from the Firm That Brings You the FT's "Innovative Law Firms" Award

Posted on July 14, 2008
Here's an addendum to the coverage I gave to Eversheds' Report on The Law Firm of the 21st Century, as well as to the story I published last month on the conference held here in New York sponsored by Eversheds. This email came in over the weekend from RSG Consulting...

2011 Is Not Far Off

Posted on July 10, 2008
Richard Turnor, a partner in the Private Client Group at Allen & Overy, has penned for Managing Partner Magazine one of the more thoughtful pieces on the implications of the Legal Services Act in the UK. In particular, he asks the same question I've been asking for some time: "After...

Adam Smith Monument in Edinburgh

Posted on July 05, 2008
At long last, Adam Smith has been honored in his native Edinburgh, with a prominent statue outside St. Giles' Cathedral on the Royal Mile. As reported by the FT, the unveiling was yesterday: Vernon Smith, the George Mason law and economics professor and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in...

Happy 4th of July

Posted on July 04, 2008
Watching Fireworks on the Fourth: Coney Island, 1962 [Courtesy of Magnum]...

How High Quality Are Your Lawyers? (How Can You Tell?)

Posted on July 03, 2008
This is a column about wringing our hands. Our first text, from the Old Testament conventional debate, stems from today's WSJ story on "Axiom Legal," headlined Newcomer Law Firms Are Creating Niches with Blue-Chip Clients, discussing the business model of Axiom and other firms, which is to provide highly credentialed...

Lessons From Johnson + Johnson

Posted on July 02, 2008
Knowledge @ Wharton has an enlightening interview with William Weldon, CEO of Johnson + Johnson, on the challenges of leadership in a decentralized company. You may think the scale of J&J (120,000 employees, $61-billion in revenue, operations in dozens upon dozens of countries) means there's no analog between what he...

Northwestern Law School's "Accelerated JD" Program: It's Not About the Two Years

Posted on June 27, 2008
Late last week Northwestern University Law School in Chicago announced an "Accelerated JD" program, compressing the same 86 credit hours earned by traditional three-year JD students over the course of six semesters into five semesters over two years...

A Modest Suggestion re Associate Layoffs

Posted on June 26, 2008
Three guesses what these numbers represent: Blank Rome 20 Cadwalader 35 Clifford Chance 6 Hunton & Williams ?* Paul Hastings ?* Powell Goldstein <10 Sonnenschein 37 Sutherland Asbill & Brennan 15* Thacher Profitt 24 Thelen Reid 26 Total 174** *not verified **assumes "?" = 0 Yes, obviously, the number of...

The Great Divide

Posted on June 21, 2008
Last week Eversheds sponsored a conference in New York, primarily targeted at senior inhouse counsel, to discuss the current and future state of relations between law firms and inhouse departments. It was not pretty. About 90% of the attendees were the chief legal officer of their companies or just a...

GC's May Be Complaining, But Do They Really Want Change?

Posted on June 18, 2008
Over at LegalOnRamp there's an interesting discussion underway about the extent to which GC's do—or don't—seek genuine innovation in the way BigLaw provides services. I'm taking the liberty of republishing it here (with permission of Paul Lippe, the CEO of LegalOnRamp) because at the moment LegalOnRamp is invitation-only...

The CIO Challenge: It's Not About Server Up-Time

Posted on June 13, 2008
Did you know that the venerable Booz Allen & Hamilton has truncated its name to "booz&co."? Not only abandoning a name with tremendous recognition and brand equity but, in a "what were they thinking!?" blunder, shining a spotlight on the unfortunate bibulous associations of the name "Booz...

A Conversation with Ray Bayley of NovusLaw

Posted on June 11, 2008
In the course of two hour-plus long interviews over the past couple of weeks with Ray Bayley, co-founder of NovusLaw, I learned that everything I thought I knew about outsourcing was wrong. Or rather, that I hadn't thought about outsourcing, really, at all...

A Conversation with Allen Fagin

Posted on June 07, 2008
Last week I had the opportunity to sit down with Allen Fagin, Chairman of Proskauer Rose. Allen is Columbia BA summa cum laude, and Harvard Law JD cum laude at the same time he earned an MPP from Harvard's JFK School of Government. He's worked at Proskauer for his entire...

Happy Birthday, Adam Smith

Posted on June 05, 2008
Today, June 5th, is Adam Smith's birthday, in the year 1723. He would be 285 today. As I noted a year ago today, he was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, a dozen miles north of Edinburgh across the Firth of Forth: Although his birth home has since been demolished (all that...

New York's White Shoe, the Magic Circle, and Historical Path-Dependency

Posted on June 04, 2008
Chambers has a nice seasonal report it mails to subscribers, but it doesn't provide it online. This is a pity (and, I predict, a practice with a finite half-life), but one of the articles in the issue I recently received (August 2007 for those of you following along at...

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