board and retain the associates you most want to retain. You need sufficient consensus to enforce at least a modicum of the standards you say you stand for. And frankly, you need to be of a sufficiently compact size that you can realistically manage to accomplish some of these goals. But really, I'm not sure all of these put together would make enough of a difference. I still believe the long-term future of the legal profession belongs to client-driven alignments of solo and small practices. The world's largest firms -- the 10,000-lawyer behemoths on the distant horizon -- are going to be those that specialize in commodity-type work, the kind of things that can be automated, templated, algorithmed and standardized -- the kind of work for which ISO 2001 ratings will be meaningful measures of quality assurance. The bigger you are, the more your work needs to be susceptible to the consistency and predictability of the assembly line. That's just about the only way you can develop and control a brand on a scale of that size, and the law will prove no exception. If you don't control the content of your brand, then your brand becomes little more than leftover reputation, general opinion, holdover name recognition. Active brands are powered by trust and confidence, and at the end of the day, these attributes are earned by individuals, not collectives. Gather and nurture these individuals and their brands, and you have a chance. Fail to do so, and you'll be