Two recent reports sound a warning that most big law firm leaders should heed. One is the Georgetown Center for the Study of the Legal Profession/Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor Report on the State of the Legal Profession. The other is Citi Private Bank’s Annual Law Firm Survey.
Lessons from Dewey & LeBoeuf
The Georgetown/Thomson Reuters Report is noteworthy because, at long last, thoughtful analysts are giving Dewey & LeBoeuf’s collapse the larger context that it deserves. For the most past, today’s managing partners have persuaded themselves that Dewey’s failure resulted from a unique confluence of management missteps that they themselves could never make. But most current leaders are making them.
In particular, Dewey wasn’t an outlier; it was among the elite of the Am Law 100. The firm embodied a culmination of prevailing big law firm trends that can—and will—produce future disasters. As the Georgetown/Peer Monitor Report explains, those trends include raising the bar for promoting home-grown talent into equity partnerships while overpaying for lateral equity partner hires, increasing internal compensation spreads to create a subgroup of real players within equity partnerships, and ignoring the importance of morale and institutional loyalty to long-term stability.
Crunching the numbers
Meanwhile, Citi Private Bank’s annual full-year survey of big firms produced this upbeat headline: “Firms Posted a 4.3 Percent Rise in 2012 Profits.” But important underlying details are more troubling.
For the whole article written by Steven J Harper, click here.
