Can Bill Henderson, the one-man idea factory and Indiana law professor, do for the study of law firms what Indiana’s most famous academic, Alfred Kinsey, did for the study of sex?
Henderson is already well known for his provocative analysis of firm data, some of it supplied by ALM. He’s identified the bimodal distribution in hiring new law school graduates, a fancy way of saying that there are two groups of students — a relatively small and overhyped cohort earning $160,000 a year, hired by megafirms — and a much larger group, earning in the five figures, hired by everyone else. He’s hunted for patterns in lateral partner movement, searched for success markers in big firms and charted the one-model-fits-all expansion plans of the NLJ 250.
