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Full-Text Articles in Law
Talent Systems For Law Firms, William D. Henderson
Talent Systems For Law Firms, William D. Henderson
Articles by Maurer Faculty
irtually every large US law firm owes its rise and success to a talent system it adopted several decades ago. These talent systems were effective because they created highly skilled business lawyers in a way that aligned the interests of partners, associates, and clients. The most prominent example is the Cravath System, though other business lawyers throughout the US were making similar discoveries at roughly the same time. The tremendous forward momentum of these first-generation talent systems has created the problem of ahistorical partners — owners who collect the late-stage benefits of a talent system approach without understanding its original …
Human Capital Accounting, William D. Henderson
Human Capital Accounting, William D. Henderson
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
The Elastic Tournament: The Second Transformation Of The Big Law Firm, William D. Henderson, Marc Galanter
The Elastic Tournament: The Second Transformation Of The Big Law Firm, William D. Henderson, Marc Galanter
Articles by Maurer Faculty
In 1991, Galanter and Palay published 'Tournament of Lawyers: The Transformation of the Big Law Firm', which documented the regular and relentless growth of large U.S. law firms. The book advanced several structural and historical factors to explain these patterns, centering on the adoption of the promotion-to-partnership tournament. Systemic changes in the marketplace for corporate legal services in the intervening years suggest the need for an updated account of the modern large law firm. Using 'Tournament of Lawyers' as a starting point, we propose to fill this void in the literature. Marching through a wide array of empirical evidence covering …
Coming Of Age In A Corporate Law Firm: The Economics Of Associate Career Patterns, Ronald J. Gilson, Robert H. Mnookin
Coming Of Age In A Corporate Law Firm: The Economics Of Associate Career Patterns, Ronald J. Gilson, Robert H. Mnookin
Faculty Scholarship
The traditional American corporate law firm, long an oasis of organizational stability, in recent years has been the subject of dramatic change. The manner in which firms divide profits, perhaps the most revealing aspect of law firm organization because it displays the balance the firm has selected between risk-sharing and incentives, has changed in a critical way. From a long standing reliance on seniority that emphasizes risk-sharing, profit division is shifting to a system based on the productivity of individual partners that emphasizes incentives. With what seems to be only a short time lag from the change in how profits …
Sharing Among The Human Capitalists: An Economic Inquiry Into The Corporate Law Firm And How Partners Split Profits, Ronald J. Gilson, Robert H. Mnookin
Sharing Among The Human Capitalists: An Economic Inquiry Into The Corporate Law Firm And How Partners Split Profits, Ronald J. Gilson, Robert H. Mnookin
Faculty Scholarship
Large corporate law firms seem to be in a state of extraordinary flux. Success and failure are both on the rise. Large firms appear to supply a substantial and growing proportion of the legal services consumed by American business enterprises and to hire a significant fraction of the graduating classes of elite American law schools. Moreover, the last twenty years have witnessed a remarkable expansion in both the number of large firms and the absolute size of the biggest. But accompanying this striking success, there are also signs of serious institutional instability. During the last few years, several previously successful …