By joining forces, small law firms hope for access to more-lucrative deals and to retain existing clients. For larger firms, combinations offer ready-made regional offices or expanded practices. Building new practice areas within a firm is too costly these days, legal experts say. And hiring individual partners has had mixed results.

... [however]
Law-firm combinations are complex, risky propositions. The costs of integrating new employees, real estate and computer systems might not offset hoped-for gains from increased billable hours, access to more business, or economies of scale. Alliances also can founder over how much partners are paid or which lawyers will hold the reins in the new firm. Partners peel off for greener pastures, sometimes taking clients with them, after a merger. Conflicts between clients can emerge when the rosters of two law firms are combined.

Law firms, big and small, are merging. The value in consolidation is primarily on the revenue side -- they're able to serve more clients, and serve their existing clients more comprehensively. However, mergers aren't without their costs. What only gets mentioned in WSJ's coverage of this phenomenon is the costs of combining information systems.

The plodding, proprietary document management systems used in law firms don't lend themselves to easy adoption and integration when two firms merge. This is yet another reason that firms should look to cloud-based solutions like Ridacto. There is no "integration" with cloud-based solutions, and firms don't have to worry about throwing away server banks or software licenses. Cloud solutions are light-weight, flexible, and cost-effective.

In our still-budding digital world, where public and private spheres cross-pollinate in unpredictable ways, perhaps it’s not surprising that soon-to-be parents now routinely turn to Google to vet baby names. A quick search can help ensure that a child is not saddled with the name of a serial killer, pornography star or sex offender.

But what’s new is the level of complexity that Google and other search engines have brought to the name game. Some parents want names that are unique so their child will rise to the top of future search results. Others want names that are uncommon enough to bestow uniqueness, but not so exotic that they would be considered weird on the playground. A rare few want their child’s name to get lost in a virtual crowd.

That a search for your child's name brings up a porn star speaks not to your bad choice in names, but rather to how unsophisticated Google's search algorithm is today. I hope, by the time it matters for 2.0, Google search, or whatever the next great information discovery company out there is, will get relevance, rather than me searching for it.

I've seen versions of this graph for years now. The gap between the rich and poor is, without question, growing in America.

But beyond re-printing economic graphs, we seem incapable of interrogating what this disparity in wealth means. News outlets, themselves economically fragile, can't and won't. Advertisers are hard enough for publishers to retain, without questioning the wealth of those readers who are actually worth anything for those advertisers. The mass media business model is collapsing, being replaced by content strategies tailored to specific, consumer demographics. One victim of this shift is public-interest journalism that looks out for the interests of the "masses".

And sadly, public and non-profit journalism is even more reliant on the wealth of the mega-rich than commercial media. Can they really be trusted to systematically question how these same donors are essentially stealing from Americans working class?

But news media has rarely been good at reporting on systematic injustice, even when their coffers were flush. Should we be looking to artists and community leaders to tell the story of the wealth gap?