Photo of Bill Henderson

Bill Henderson

Subscribe to Bill Henderson's Posts
Follow:Read more about Bill HendersonBill's Linkedin ProfileBill's Twitter Profile

A level set for future posts.

If you wake up each day disturbed by the unraveling of the world around you, and you question whether another day at work is the most rational, constructive, and moral use of your time and talents, consider starting your morning with The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perservance, and the Art of Living (2016).

I cracked open this book for the first time on September 17, 2023, and was immediately struck by its relevance (and practical guidance) to the present day:Continue Reading The Daily Stoic (book review) (354)

Before drawing firm conclusions on the 2024 election and what to do next, take a clear-eyed view at what actually happened.

November 5 culminated several decades of economic, political, and social change. These changes gradually increased the electorate’s feelings of alienation and insecurity. When these feelings became sufficiently intense and widespread, more than 50% of voters rejected the governing elites in favor of a strongman. Therefore, what comes next is up to him.

Four charts illustrate the forces that produced this outcome. The underlying analysis comes from earlier Legal Evolution posts. So this is a cold take. Also, it’s not the usual longform. If you want the complete, unabridged analysis, click the hyperlinks to the original posts.Continue Reading A post-mortem in four charts (353)

Source: “A Journey Toward Justice,” Stone Ridge Magazine (Winter 2021).

The unpaused version of Legal Evolution will be different. This post explains why.

Legal Evolution has been paused since January 2023. The most concise explanation for the pause is a rupture in my worldview, which I attempted to illustrate through my last post, “The Mindshare Matrix (349).” Without a solid foundation, writing seemed counterproductive.

During the past year, a friend commented that I was in a period of discernment. A short time later, a second friend made the same observation. Thus, I deferred to their wisdom and embraced the term. Nearly a year later, the purpose of this post is to share the solution to my own mindshare matrix, which includes some changes to Legal Evolution.

In preparing this re-entry post, I came across the above graphic, which is the discernment model of the Society of Sacred Heart. Its five component parts closely track my own journey. Thus, I am using it as a roadmap for this essay. Obviously, the Pause is complete. So, I’ll start with Reflect.Continue Reading Period of discernment (350)

Mindshare Matrix for legal professionals

The hardest puzzle I’ve ever tried to solve.

This is the last post for several months, as Legal Evolution is pausing publication until the fall of 2023. The reasons why don’t neatly fit into a box. In fact, per the graphic above, I needed several boxes to understand the problem I am trying to solve. I’m sharing my thoughts on this topic because I suspect some readers share some of my values and goals and hence will appreciate my candor.

The purpose of this post is to explain the mindshare matrix for legal professionals, using 20 years of observation plus my own work journey to illustrate the key points. After that, it’s a short walk to understand why the mindshare matrix is an immensely difficult problem to solve. Continue Reading Mindshare matrix for legal professionals (349)

Henderson residence, Bloomington, IN, Christmas 2022.

Our publication schedule landed on Christmas this year. For this Sunday, anyway, there’s nothing happening in the legal industry that justifies our attention.  Instead, I’d like to wish everyone a wonderful holiday and a happy 2023.  Sincerely, Bill H.

Digital transformation was largely a buzzword until I saw what David accomplished during the pandemic.

For this week’s feature post (342), Legal Evolution is pleased to welcome guest contributor David Freeman, a renowned business development consultant who has trained and coached well over 10,000 lawyers in over 200 law firms worldwide.

I have known David for several years.  After reconnecting this summer, David walked me through some of the key features of his Lawyer Bookbuilder® online course.  Much to my delight, it was a fully productized version of 30 years of David’s best-in-class business development training condensed down to 4+ hours of video content, excluding exercises, homework, quizzes, worksheets, and many other downloadable practice aids.

Although David’s course is worthy of promotion, it’s equally noteworthy how a seasoned consultant who graduated from law school in the 1980s successfully engineered his own digital transformation.  Prior to the pandemic, David Freeman was the legal profession’s most successful “bespoke” BD consultant.  Now, two years later, he has a fully polished online course that arguably delivers better, more cost-effective results than David Freeman live.  How, exactly, did this happen?
Continue Reading Guest contributor David Freeman (341)

Yale has a different decision set than other law schools.

Yale Law School’s $1.2 billion share of the Yale University endowment provides approximately $63 million in operating funds, which translates into $106,000 per student, though this amount appears to be headed up due to the 40.2% increase in Yale’s endowment in 2021. See “Yale endowment earns 40.2% investment return in fiscal 2021,” Yale News, Oct 14, 2021; Evan Gorelick, “Yale’s endowment, explained,” Yale Daily News, Oct 22, 2022 (discussing Yale endowment’s 5.25% target payout and policy of smoothing returns over multiple years).

To be clear, these are the funds available before Yale Law collects its first dollar of tuition.  Nonetheless, as the top-ranked law school in the US News rankings for more than 30 years, Yale has a superabundance of highly credentialed students who would be willing to pay or borrow the current cost of attendance. For the 2021-22 admission cycle, Yale admitted only 5.6% of applicants; of those admitted, 81% enrolled, making Yale the most selective and elite law school in the nation. See YLS, “Statistical Profile of the Class of 2025.”
Continue Reading The dollars and math behind Yale Law’s withdrawal from USN rankings (340)

“Firms outside the Premier and Championship leagues are playing a different sport.” Thus, the winning strategies are different.

Jae Um, in her bracketing exercise for The American Lawyer magazine, arrays the 2022 AmLaw 100 based on the structure of the English football league system. At the top are 22 firms in the Premier League. Next is the Championship League, with 23 firms focused intently on getting promoted to Premier.  The third group is “Everybody Else,” which includes all the corporate law firms playing in lower-tier leagues.

Yet, as Jae Um pointed out during her visit to my Law Firms class, “it’s a mistake to extend the soccer metaphor to all 300 US/UK law firms that are doing significant amounts of corporate legal work.”  Jae explains that Premier and Championship League firms have some combination of practice areas (type, quality, depth), sector focus, and geographic footprint that enable them to attract price-insensitive work from the world’s largest and wealthiest clients. See Part II (332) (discussing market power of these firms).

Jae continues, “The 250+ firms outside the Premier and Championship leagues are playing a different sport.”
Continue Reading Learning about law firms, Part III: Innovation at “Everybody Else” firms (335)

Stable, transparent, not very complicated, reasonably profitable, and often quite collegial. It also has flaws.

As noted in Part I (330) of this “learning about law firms” series, it’s taken nearly two decades in the trenches, including many years doing applied work with law firms, for a very confusing and counterintuitive insight to come into focus:  Most large firms are not “firms” in the sense of conventional business theory.  Instead, they are a confederation of individual partners building and running leveraged practices in various complementary and adjacent legal specialties.

In today’s essay (Part II), I’ll add a second counterintuitive insight:  For the most part, lawyers pay little or no financial price for organizing themselves as a confederation rather than a firm.  Even in the event of spectacular collapse, as was the case with Dewey, Brobeck, Heller, Howrey, Thelen, and many other large firms, see ALM Staff, “30 Years of Law Firm Collapses: An Annotated Timeline,” Law.com, Oct 29, 2019, there’s always a large cadre of competitor firms looking to give the partners (and their fee-generating practices) a new home.  In most cases, what provides financial security and certainty to an equity partner is seldom the quality of firm-level strategy, or the ability of firm leadership to execute, but instead the health and vitality of their own practice.

This is what distinguishes law firms from conventional businesses. Like Legos blocks, individual law practices can be removed from one law firm and snapped onto another. 
Continue Reading Learning about law firms, Part II: Why confederation is our default model (332)

“Some things are clearer from a distance.”

20 years ago, I didn’t know very much about law firms, though I was curious and knew law firms were important, at least to students attending law school.  Thus, why not dig into the primary vehicle for a successful and rewarding legal career?

That was my reasoning back in the fall of 2004 when I first taught a course called “The Law Firm as a Business Organization (B573).”  As a junior professor, it was an early win for my career. Foremost, the students gave it strong reviews, which enabled me to teach it again in 2006.  Second, it put me in direct contact with practicing lawyers, as I invited them to class to bring color to the assigned readings. Third, it launched some novel and original research that earned me tenure and opened doors to do challenging applied work in the legal innovation space, including Lawyer Metrics, the Institute for the Future of Law Practice (IFLP), and Legal Evolution.

Now, for the first time in 16 years, I am teaching the Law Firms course, prompting much reflection.  See 2022 Syllabus.  What’s changed more—the law firm market or my perspective?  It’s a close call.
Continue Reading Learning about law firms, 20 years in (330)