Insights

How Do Leaders Decide What’s Worthy of Their Time? In the early part of your legal career, the most important measure of your performance is very clear: How many hours are you billing? At virtually every point on the path to equity partnership, the way to do better is to do more. At some point, though, as you have entered the ranks of practice and firm leadership, the expectations of your performance and the measures of your effectiveness have gotten more...

De Novo's book review section has got you covered. With a selection of business books and narrative nonfiction, we search for and review books that we know our lawyer friends will enjoy reading. Take one of these titles to the beach as you enjoy the last few days of summer:

The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore: A young Paul Cravath — not yet the...

Are you a male law firm leader comparing notes with other male law firm leaders about the state of gender equity at your firm? If so, you are probably feeling pretty positive about the progress you’ve made in elevating women to more influential positions and increasing women’s access to opportunity. To be specific, 84% of men in the legal industry “believe their firm has succeeded in promoting women into positions of leadership,” and 88% of men said gender...

In the early days of social media, most lawyers wouldn’t have dreamed of posting under their real names, especially about anything remotely related to their work for law firms. Whatever online life was — and law firms weren’t interested in finding out — it was considered both frivolous and risky. Attorneys who took their careers seriously were expected to conceal any online activity, and could be and were censured, formally or informally, when their...

Perhaps because they often work hand-in-hand, “public relations” and “marketing” are often used synonymously. In some firms, they even report to a single director, and digital media has muddied the waters by radically changing the landscape for all communications. But while these two communications tracks sometimes overlap, they do represent distinct sets of activities and play distinct roles in the process of promoting a law firm. Here are the...