Insights

Deb Pickett's latest article for Forbes Business Council, "How to Build a Board of Directors — For Your Own Career," counsels leaders to seek guidance from a broad array of guides to help them make key decisions, especially people whose backgrounds and experiences might give them different perspectives. 

Is an Overreliance on Performance Metrics Steering Your Firm in the Wrong Direction? The last few years have offered any number of object lessons in how different people, faced with the same information, can come to radically different, even opposing, conclusions about what that information means. Still, as leaders, we frame our decisions as being “data driven” or “evidence based” as a way of signaling that they should be beyond dispute. The legal press is full of stories...

In a cultural moment that shows little tolerance for neutral players beholden only to the interests of their clients, law leaders face uncomfortable conflicts and big decisions about what it means to be a moral actor in 2021. In the past year, and especially in the past few weeks, we've seen law firms lining up to 

Diversifying corporate boards and law firm management committees is essential to success in a fast-changing marketplace. But individual leaders and key executives often have their own personal groups of advisors to whom they turn for advice on key decisions. How can you make sure your sounding board isn’t just an echo chamber? The first international law requiring public companies to meet a minimum threshold for gender diversity on their board was passed in 2003. The Norwegian...

At its best, the practice of law is a noble profession, preserving the rule of law and translating legal abstraction into real-life application. Accordingly, law firms see themselves as materially different from other businesses. Noble and special as they might be, though, law firms are businesses. And, in an increasingly competitive marketplace, law leaders need business expertise to run them successfully: wisdom from outside the legal echo chamber. But in order to put that wisdom to use,...