Having spent hours poring over this week's analysis of the fall of Halliwells, I come today not to bury the firm but to praise it. With Legal Week having spoken to dozens of close observers of the firm's collapse, it became apparent that some have conveniently forgotten what Halliwells achieved during its striking ascent.

Perhaps that is inevitable. It is human nature to lean heavily on hindsight when condemning the decisions of others – it is a habit that journalists, particularly, fall prey to. But individuals, especially those running businesses, don't have the benefit of hindsight.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in how the now-notorious decision regarding the property-related payout distributed to the firm's equity partners in 2007 is now discussed. It was certainly a deal that contained risks and it failed to address the imperative of investing in the future of the business. But given Halliwells' track record of growth, it was a more calibrated bet than some have allowed. There is also the small matter that the firm suddenly faced a very deep recession, which virtually no-one forecast.

Certainly, Halliwells made mistakes – but frankly I've seen a lot worse in 14 years covering business. For all the brickbats now hurled at the firm, Halliwells was an impressive performer from the mid-1990s until it began to over-reach around 2006, and it was widely lauded at the time. Indeed, there was much to admire in the firm's entrepreneurial spirit.

So what lessons are there to take from Halliwells' fate, if you reject casting the firm's management as pantomime villains? For me, the key point is that this episode shows that law firms rise and fall on the unity of their partnership. Plenty of firms bicker, but those that don't have the ability to put issues aside when testing times come are very, very vulnerable.

As a related issue, communication from management matters. A lot. The biggest failing of the Spinningfields deal was not the size of the payout, but the decision to conceal it from the fixed-share partners. This destroyed trust and badly split the partnership. A more ambiguous point is that Halliwells' fate shows that fast-growing law firms are inherently more vulnerable as expansion makes it harder to enforce process and guard profits.

Relatedly, entrepreneurial law firms typically have entrepreneurial partners – and clients are more likely to move with departing partners. That's a very tricky balance for law firm leaders to manage, since most want to achieve growth but are less keen on the instability caused by clients following mobile rainmakers.

A final point – partnerships are very bad at shouldering debt. By the standards of a corporate, Halliwells had conservative debts, but in retrospect it was enough to destabilise a large legal business. But I suspect we'll be learning from this drama for a while yet.