When I ran across a recent study by the Blickstein Group of COOs in law firms I wondered if things had changed from the days when equity partners pretty much decided everything. If they had COOs, too often they ignored them or treated them as 2nd class citizens.
After reading the study, it’s clear that while the status of COOs may have grown, true decision-making and power in most law firms still rests with the equity partners. And there’s still a gap between the way businesspeople think and the way lawyers who think they are businesspeople think.
It made me think about why that problem seems so intractable which I explore in my Above the Law post.