Photo by Furkan Salihoğlu at Pexels By Murray Gottheil | March 22, 2025 Paul is a junior lawyer. His supervising lawyer expects every document that Paul creates to be perfect. To ensure this, the supervisor reviews and often revises all of Paul’s draft documents, no matter how routine they may be. Paul resents the extra time […]
By Murray Gottheil | February 16, 2026 I have been on many cruise ships. Every single one featured a daily meeting listed in the schedule of events for the “Friends of Bill W. and Doctor Bob”. After my first 10 or 12 cruises, I remarked to someone that these fellows must cruise a lot, because they […]
By Murray Gottheil | January 5, 2026 [Note from Murray: Many of my readers are younger professionals. They may not be crazy about the content of this article. In my defense, I can be a curmudgeon sometimes, but that does not necessarily invalidate my old-fashioned opinions!] After much thought, I have concluded that young people should […]
Photo by Kampus at Pexels By Murray Gottheil | November 24, 2025 One of my former partners checked out my profile on LinkedIn the other day. Since he is a litigator, my paranoid streak – honed to perfection during my 40-year career – got me thinking that perhaps he was trying to find an address for […]
Photo by Yaroslav Shuraev at Pexels By Murray Gottheil | November 12, 2025 Getting into a partnership can be exciting. Staying in one is often more of a mixed bag. But exiting a partnership? Now we have something to talk about! Some of my best client work involved partnership break-ups. They can become very nasty, very […]
Photo by Pexels By Murray Gottheil | November 3, 2025 Back in the days when everything seemed to be a binary choice, I was a young man who saw many things in black and white. At the time, I would classify law firms as being one of two types. Type One were “real” partnerships, where people […]
Photo by Pexels By Murray Gottheil | October 7, 2025 We all know people in wonderful marriages. We also know people in terrible marriages. Sometimes we attribute this to them having been so desperate to have a life partner that they rushed into things without taking the time to get to know their partner, or even […]
By Murray Gottheil | September 10, 2025 In prior parts of this series, I wrote about the advantages and disadvantages of becoming an equity partner in a law firm. In order to complete the picture, I really should address the fantasy of a non-equity partner (“NEP”) as well. Some years ago, law firms decided that they […]
Photo from Pexels By Murray Gottheil | August 28, 2025 In this Part, I would invite you to live in an imaginary world where you respect and appreciate all of your partners, each of them is a phenomenally talented lawyer who is also productive, respectful, collaborative, ethical, and has an amazing client base. And they all love […]
Photo by August De Richelieu at Pexels By Murray Gottheil | August 27, 2025 Becoming a partner in a law firm is easy enough. You pay your money, you take your chances. But what exactly have you bought into? We all know that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Partnership meetings are much the same. […]