This year, which law firm spent the most time fretting over the state of the legal industry? All of them. It's a dead heat. Every managing partner, office head, division head and team lead has spent pretty much equal time trying to answer the same question: How do we protect partner comp during the current climate?

Imminent recession, excess capacity, increased overheads, falling profits. What can we do to fix our shop? Make some more layoffs? Defer some first years? All this introspection and yet still no good answers.

There's one excellent reason why, through no lack of effort, law firms can't solve this conundrum. It's called reality. As mentioned in the previous lesson, all economies are cyclical, so if demand suddenly spikes, it will inevitably fall — and with it partner profits.