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The auto industry created the middle class in America. Not only did ordinary factory workers get to buy their own homes in the urban Midwest. Many purchased getaway cottages "up north."  That dates back to Henry Ford. His Model-T, which rolled out in 1908, did two things, at least. It created a large number of production jobs. And since the pay was $5 daily for eight hours, the labor force went beyond survival to being the new consumer class. Now, like other sectors such as much of professional services and tech, the auto industry is slated to shrink. CNBC  details how by 2040 auto sales could decline by 2 million units. What's driving that, found Bain and Company, includes:  "Falling birth rates, behavioral changes, high car prices and a growing array of alternatives ..." Of course, already we're seeing signs of that.  Actually since the dawn of the digital age, fewer kids were getting their driving licenses or putting that off for years. They preferred vi...

  Timing is almost everything. And, as a former communications pro, I assess that law firm Paul, Weiss has decided the timing is right to again be telling its story.  After the perfect storm of multiple controversies, Paul, Weiss went low profile. That's a fundamental of crisis communications management.  Then came the James Sprayregen development. A mega star in bankruptcy at Kirkland & Ellis - a major Paul, Weiss competitor - he retired in 2024 and went on to Hilco Global.  The media story was positioned and packaged to have legs. First was the announcement that Paul, Weiss and the dazzling twinkler were talking. Then, yesyesyes, the deal was done.  Immediately that's been leveraged. Financial Times publishes an interview with Sprayregen. Re-opening is the law-firm's willingness to be a story. This move resonates in Big Law. Way back in 2021, celebrity lawyer at Paul, Wess Brad Karp told Bloomberg Law  that the sector operates on star power.  Ma...

  For Boomers and Gens X,Y the "it's always something" more and more is about housing. About a third of us are "housing cost burdened," that is, we're paying out more than one-third of our income for shelter.  No one really gets off the hook, at least not for long.  Thought it was smart to hold on to your low-mortgage house? Yeah, now it's time to put on a new roof and cough up the increasing insurance. Figured you were mighty clever to relocate from HCOL (high cost of living) area to a LCOL (low cost of living) one. I did that and the corporate owners kept raising the rent plenty at lease-renewal times. Low cost was no longer low cost. Maybe as a public service The New York Times  has published a very long-form article on home-sharing. Essentially that means renting space, sometimes also adding services such as lawn mowing, in someone else's house. An industry is sprouting up providing a matching service. But even the enthusiastic coverage of this ...

A lot of media fanfare took place just before Leon Black's appearance in front of the House Oversight Committee. In the gym where I was working out, the television cameras panned on Representative James Comer entering the room. Great staging for a politico. That appearance turned out to be short and lot of media fanfare has been unleashed to explain why. For example, The Guardian reports: "Billionaire financier Leon Black’s testimony before a House committee investigating Jeffrey Epstein ended abruptly on Friday morning after members from both parties said Black refused to answer questions about non-disclosure agreements." Black will probably be back to appear before the Committee and the media will be again in a frenzy. Just as happened and been sustained with all that litigation involving women, against him and filed by him. Also, it was well noted that in a BusinessInsider interview in 2022, Paul, Weiss partner Brad Karp indicated Black was no longer a client of the...

The standard argument against unionizing non-equity-partners in large law firms was this: Most don't stay long enough to have the incentive to organize for compensation, terms and conditions of billable hours, job security, termination processes and more. That hesitation has held on even though professionals at a branch of Wells Fargo had formed a union. So much for the idea of knowledge work not being a fit for collective action.   Well, in the past few years enough has changed in large law firms to try out unionizing. The developments include creation of the Nonequity Partnership, the impact of AI on decline in demand for junior lawyers and the increase in demand for experienced ones and the need for most large firms to overhaul their systems and structure. About the latter, they have to come up with  a new model anyway so unions could be part of that. As is well-known, the NEP designation works well for equity partners. The model yields multi-dimensional benefits for...