Law Firm Names
Real inside baseball here.
My friends. I have fallen grievously behind. I feel I owe you an explanation. But there is no explanation worth reading. I’ve got three little kids, I have a day job, I have other hobbies. All the usual newsletter-killers.
But I can’t stop now. We haven’t completed our mission.
The good news is that I have twenty-six unpublished draft articles in varying states of dishabille. The bad news is that, in about a third of them, I’m just apologizing for not posting more. Another third is meaningless fluff.
Like this one!
Law firm partnerships contain actual names of actual humans. I like that. Standard Oil, US Steel, Google, Microsoft: boring, boring, boring, boring. Meta: meta-boring. They tell you nothing about the genealogies of the people who founded them! Who would want to run a company like that?
Law firms, though. They’re like little clans. Or better yet, like Roman gentes. They grow by adoption, not blood relation. Back in the day, they attracted, recruited, and accepted only those men who fit the prototype of the founding partners. As far as I know, that no longer true when it comes to ethnic origin. It’s still true however in most other ways that matter (Ivy League, likes to play golf, is a grind).
And now I present to you my telegraphic, opaque, and cursory study of the top ten most prestigious law firms as judged by Vault.