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?

... the mystique and magic of Steve Jobs. He's the only one that we know of really that is able to do these types of schizophrenic things -- like maintain a sustaining business and its disruption within the same organization.

Of course, there's nothing schizophrenic about the Apple that Jobs rebuilt. With a modest cash outlay, one person could reasonably own and use every single product that Apple makes. This is a remarkable feat for a $350 billion company. Steve is relentlessly user focused, and built a company guided by his focus. Lets hope he continues to inform their vision for years to come.

While many papers have deals to distribute copies through hotels, USA Today is by far the most dependent on them for readership: More than half of its daily circulation of 1.78 million consists of hotel copies. (The Wall Street Journal, by comparison, gets only 7 percent of its circulation from hotels.)

Of the 970,000 copies a day USA Today distributes through hotels, some 550,000 are paid for by the hotel and supplied free of charge to guests, according to figures reported to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. But the remainder are what’s known as “guest refund” copies, meaning the guest is automatically charged for them but can request a refund.

This business model is due for an electronic update - maybe tied to hotel apps.

But India is also a place where that abundant kindness fails, far too often, to extend into the anonymous civic sphere, to those beyond one’s little community and beyond one’s sight. In India, to be someone’s house guest or son-in-law or teacher can be delightful. To be a stranger beside the same person at the cinema or bank or airport is another experience altogether.

There is an idea that low-ranking gate staff don’t need to be listened to. There is an idea that you, the individual, are the best judge of how the system should run, not the people whose system it is. There is an idea that rules are mere hints, to be applied when useful. There is an idea of ruthless maximization of one’s interests, the world (and that old lady in front of you) be damned.

And, like it or not, these are ideas that govern how so many Indian lives are lived today: how people drive on the streets of this sprawling capital city; how people seldom hold open a door for a stranger at the mall, or thank you when you do; how people pay off the traffic police instead of waiting five minutes for a ticket to be written; how so many rich men make their billions; how individuals choose to report their income; how adults bribe and influence-peddle their children into top schools; how cellphones are bought tax-free on something casually called the “gray market.”

A heartrending example involves ambulances. Several times in the past few years, I have been in traffic in a major Indian city and suddenly heard an ambulance behind. To watch it forge fitfully ahead is to observe thousands of drivers make the choice to ignore it. Some people genuinely cannot pull over. But many can. Mostly, they don’t. Not a small number of Indians must die each year thanks to that collective refusal to be bothered.

An excerpt from a bold piece in the NYTimes. This is the kind of broad argument that easily twists into racists jokes and malicious stereotypes.

Despite the lack of data, I find Giridharadas's argument valuable. It's ultimately a commentary on the civic sphere in India, and how current norms are ill-suited to a modern society with the increasingly complex and expansive social, political, and economic systems that come with modernity. From that perspective, his piece is no more controversial than a story about the dismal state of infrastructure in the country.