Sublime

To have a good contract with the client, responsibility

professional service firms do not serve a mass market. Each of their projects, engagements, or “matters” is customized to specific client needs. Accordingly, that form of market research which provides aggregated results of what large numbers of clients “think” about various issues tends not to be as directly helpful as it may be in other situation

Management of a professional firm requires a delicate balancing act between the demands of the client marketplace, the realities of the people marketplace (the market for staff), and the firm’s economic ambitions.

many firms cannot “fix underperformers” as a profit improvement tactic because their financial reporting systems do not reveal where the real underperformers (assignments, service lines, clients, or partners) really are.

firm whose practice-mix was made up predominantly of clients who, rather than needing the profession’s most creative talent, wanted to find a firm that had accumulated experience in handling certain types of problems, and would not take an expensive “start with a blank sheet of paper” approach to the problem.

One of the most important features of partnership is the seeming absence of hierarchy among partners.

reliability,

relative mix of juniors, managers, and seniors) is primarily determined by (or rather, as we shall see, should be determined by) the skill requirements of its work: the mix of…

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tracked—and then revised or adapted as circumstances dictate.