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No Longer a Star, Not Even in Demand

BusinessInsider, professional anonymous networks Reddit and Blind and client sessions with me all scream out the same professional horror: Unemployed and with their old jobs not coming back, they are no longer a star. In fact, they are no longer in demand. Driving that are the return of Friedman Doctrine of the primacy of shareholder value , cost-efficiency, AI, offshoring and also the aging of societies. Meanwhile, the law of supply and demand has mutated into a binary entity. There are stars and there are the expendables. This was first signaled in 2021 in the legal sector in a Bloomberg Law interview with Paul, Weiss partner Brad Karp. He was direct: A law firm without a marque of stars wouldn't grow. Without growth, it probably would go out of business.  That reality has taken over myriad other sectors. So, what do you do if you either have lost your twinkle or the grid on which you twinkled has collapsed? Among the latter are content-creation, graphic design, much of marketin...
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IBM: Has the Time Come to Again Parachute In an Outsider?

  For IBM, observes influential The Wall Street Journal , there are: " ... discussions on Wall Street about whether IBM should be broken apart or an activist investor will come hunting for Big Blue." Seems IBM can't find its footing in the AI era. Among its challenges are its legacy businesses such as mainframes and software.  But, in addition to what the WSJ suggests, another option for catching up and maybe even leading, is to bring in an outsider. That happened in the beginning of the 1990s when upstarts Microsoft and Apple were eating IBM's lunch, dinner and breakfast. That outsider had been Lou Gerstner. He essentially taught the elephant to get off the ground and even dance. CEO John Akers stepped down. Current insider Arvind Krishna has been with IBM since 1990. He joined as a software engineer and then was appointed to the CEO role in 2020.  After Gerstner restored the corporation's confidence, innovation and growth it defaulted back to sticking with insid...
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British Invasion Continues, Equity Partners Forced Out, Get Haircuts

The British keep coming.  You already have heard that  UK Magic Circle law firm Linklaters poached two FIFA partners from Paul, Weiss for the New York office. They are Christopher Boehing and Daniel Levi. Now, a more recent newsflash from Law Fuel is how UK Freshfields is strengthening its New York presence. That includes providing Profit Per Equity Partner up to $17 million. But to pay for that it's pushing out or giving compensation haircuts to equity partners in England and Europe. The hits are coming to its London headquarters as well as the Paris and German offices. The New York legal market is the largest in the world. It is so unique that even in high-pressure Kirkland & Ellis (I learned from coaching) some of K&E lawyers decide they have to leave it for the less stressful Chicago office. But, along with the British invasion there's the American one of London. That has raised salaries among all the law firms. Paul, Weiss' Brad Karp and Scott Barshay built t...
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Microsoft Trash-Talks Competitors: How Effective?

It usually is so in our face: The trash-talk by a salesperson about how much better their product/service is compared to what competitors provide. And it usually is a turn-off. What we really need is intel about how the offering is the unique fit for our specialized needs. So, the world keeping score on the AI dog fight might be wondering if the new Microsoft approach to sales will succeed. Essentially, the sales team has been instructed to take swipes at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. As TechCrunch reports, it's framed this way:  “'Everyone else is selling parts — we’re selling the full end-to-end system. That’s the story that we all need to get out there and tell in FY27,' [Microsoft] Executive Vice President Jay Parikh reportedly told the room." However, maybe the demand is for parts. Maybe the tone and content scream desperation. Maybe, under scrutiny, that end-to-end solution isn't comparable to those of competitors. As many know, Microsoft and some of the oth...
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Counting and the Counters

  There's the old joke: The best, brightest and most ambitious in college go on to law school not an internship on Wall Street because they're lousy at math. They know that. Even if they could fast-talk their way into Goldman or JPMorgan they recognize they could never keep up with the quantitative stuff. But once they climb the ladder in Big Law those math-challenged embrace counting. Everything. Political science major in college Paul, Weiss partner Brad Karp would glow about the numbers for Profits Per Equity Partner  and more.  When a partner at Jones Day Mark Hermmann would crow about how many readers there were for his out-of-the-box guide for new lawyers.  A later book didn't do so hot and the crowing stopped. Adler legal heavyweight John Tarantino leveraged the number of viewers of his first Ted Talk to reinforce the powerhouse message about forgiveness.  And I, when a legal influencer, harnessed more and more influence through posting the numbers. An ov...
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Hope You Didn't Already Spend That Huge Estimated 2027 Social Security COLA

  Those crunching the numbers have decided that inflation isn't so bad now. At least compared to where it had been. That could affect your 2027 Social Security COLA - negatively. Remember how we were supposed to get a big fat increase.  CNBC reports: "The  Social Security COLA  may be 3.7% in 2027, estimates Mary Johnson, an independent Social Security and Medicare analyst. That figure is one full percentage point below the 4.7% COLA for 2027 Johnson estimated last month." Are we ordinary folks missing something if we feel hit so hard by inflation, ranging from keeping a roof over our head to eating healthy? Perhaps we are the last of our species experiencing financial reality. 
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Those Investigations By Law Firms: What Could Be Really Going Down?

  Ever since Paul, Weiss was parachuted in by Fox in 2016 to investigate allegations of misconduct those kinds of investigations have become a major practice niche for law firms.  But early in the game there have been questions about how objective those probes are. For example, does the corporation give the marching orders to the law firm to be prosecutorial in how it frames the investigation? Also, there has been ongoing scrutiny of Dechert's 2021 investigation of Apollo co-founder Leon Black's payment of $158 million to Jeffrey Epstein. Now, the very credibility of such probes has been under a global microscope. That has been triggered by the investigations of KPMG by law firms Allens and Ashursts.  There had been a whistleblower complaint of misuse of confidential client data. How the law firms went about their investigation is under scrutiny. What issues did they pursue and which did they not pursue? Was justice shortchanged? Law Fuel reports: " ...  both...
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