The illustration for our big feature this week was very nearly a caveman bashing an iPhone with a rock. We refrained in the end, but it’s odd to think that modern-day law firms – some of the most sophisticated and complex businesses on the planet – are still using prehistoric methods to allocate work to employees. […]
Last year I spent a lot of time talking to managing and senior partners about culture and how to define it; not culture change, but culture itself. The conversations were fascinating, but inconclusive. Do we define culture by communication? Is it governance? How do you bottle the elusive personalities of different law firms? How to […]
Following a train of defections and sliding profits the embattled Cadwalader leadership thrashed out on a recovery strategy. Get back to basics; focus on key product lines; close Asia.
This week is the first publication of The Lawyer Court Rankings, a mammoth piece of research in which we examined 5,000 cases in English courts over a two-year period. We tracked not only the parties, judges, forum, law firms, barristers and their chambers, but the sectors in which the clients operate. The good news for […]
Recent pointless pay boosts in legal history are hard to justify from a business perspective and lacking true incentives to retain talent. The Lawyer’s Salary Survey 2016 40 per cent of senior associates regret legal career
When was the last time you were a minion? If you are a typical reader of The Lawyer the answer is probably a long time ago, if ever. Even as a lowly trainee or pupil you were one of the favoured children: the future of the business. This week’s cover feature, however, looks at the […]
Is Asia turning out to be a headache? This week we publish our annual Asia-Pacific 150, which follows hard on the heels of our new Global 200.
Theories can be attractive, but they’re quite often useless. Take this one: that international law firms will consolidate in a similar way to the accountancy firms and dominate the global market in legal services.
How’s your platform? Or your global coverage? Or, indeed, your bench strength? Most big firms these days obsess over these supposed indicators of legal market leadership, if not necessarily excellence
There’s a bonfire going on. In the past week 420 business services jobs have been put into consultation
After a year of buoyant M&A activity and a continued flow of contentious and restructuring work, the financial results for the biggest European firms are in – and it was a record year
Partner promotions are only a single lens through which to assess the strategies of the UK’s leading overseas-headquartered firms, but they’re an important one.