Just as I was thinking it was about time to publish a column on the topic of "leverage" at law firms (roughly speaking, the associate to partner ratio, although there's more than one way to calculate something that people will call "leverage"), here comes a slew of pieces on the ...

The Latham news is of course all over the place: The WSJ Law Blog , Above The Law, The AmLaw Daily, LegalWeek, and etc.  The figures are, frankly, grim: 190 associates laid off, or about 12%; 250 paralegals and staff, or about 10%; but As of this writing, no partners (of whom there are 550...

When non-lawyers ask what's happening in the world of law these days (i.e., what ATL is covering), our first response is usually one word: layoffs. It's been a dominant theme in our coverage since the fall. —Above The Law (today) While I might nominate that quote for Understatement Of The Seas...

Robert Shiller, the Yale economics professor who has co-authored the forthcoming Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism, has an important op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. Shiller's op-ed itself is an argument that the Obama Administration's ...

Actually, the formulation of that headline that I prefer these days is the famous inversion by the Nobel economist Paul Samuelson: "If you're so rich how come you're so dumb?" And yes, that brings us promptly to the Bernard Madoff scandal. Among the multitude of "we should have seen i...

Consider a nonrandom selection of headlines from The New York Times, The Financial Times, andThe Wall Street Journal: Citigroup Pays for a Rush to Risk Citigroup Tries to Steady Stock Turmoil Continues in Banking Sector Citigroup: You Can't Step Into the Same Crisis Twice, Right? Citi crisis deepens...

In the nearly five-year history of "Adam Smith, Esq.," you could have counted the number of guest columns on one finger.  As of today, make that two. The following comes from E. Leigh Dance (see immediately below), who has a strong perspective on what globalization means for our indus...

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 Fir...

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:  &...

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...