Twenty-eight years ago, when I co-founded “The Edge Group,” (now Edge International), I could not have hoped for nor imagined the talent of its current partners. But you needn’t take my word for the quality of Edge’s thought leaders — I believe the six feature articles in this edition of our Edge International Review, along with smaller items like roundtables and media appearances, speak for themselves.

I’m especially proud, in this issue of the Edge International Review, to welcome the newest member of our team. Australia-based Sean Larkan has served as a managing partner in three leading law firms in three countries on two continents. For the past several years, Sean has been a premier strategic consultant to law firms, and has now added tremendously to both Edge International’s substantive capabilities and its geographical footprint.

What constitutes the underlying, unifying essence of your firm, the thing that defines your identity and sets you apart from your rivals? It’s your Capital Fabric, and it’s the single most important trait a firm can develop in these times of unprecedented upheaval.

Here’s how to understand, apply, and reap the benefits of Capital Fabric.

Picture these two scenarios:

Partner A is a nice guy, has always been a solid performer, consistently achieves budget and serves clients well. He leaves the firm. Hardly a ripple is felt.

Partner B leaves soon afterward. This time, there is an indefinable sense of loss and sadness. It feels like a piece of the firm has left.

The old “talent wars” were fought over top law students or laterals with big books of business. Tomorrow’s talent competition will be about systems first and people second. Here’s a preview of the new players and new rules of the forthcoming “legal talent portfolio.”

Hey, remember the “Talent Wars”? Five years ago, you were probably reading articles in journals like this one, warning that a lawyer shortage was coming and urging you to act now to preserve the safe supply of that most precious resource, legal talent. With the imminent retirement of Boomers grown rich on years of plenty and the simultaneous emergence of a Millennial generation notoriously hard to please, you had to fight early and often to corner the market on good lawyers, right?

But then the financial crisis happened, and the recession came in like a storm, and Boomers’ savings dried up, and Millennials were thrown out of law firms by the thousands. And suddenly, the Talent War didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore. In fact, it seemed a lot more like an HR version of the Y2K crisis: a lot of consultant-powered hot air that caused great consternation but ultimately came to nothing.

Exponential expansion in the use of Requests for Proposals (RFPs) has placed a powerful tool in the hands of general counsel — one that they use with uneven skill. Here are the pitfalls to avoid and the keys to making RFPs clear, fair and effective.

Recently, the general counsel of a major corporation met with us to discuss consulting support for a Request for Proposal (RFP) process that would winnow down the number of out-

side law firms they would use in the future. But he mentioned an astonishing twist: “Of course, we’ve already selected the firms we’ll use.”

When I asked why they would go through an expensive and time-consuming exercise (for them and for law firms that responded) when the outcomes were already determined, the GC replied: “Well, to make the selection process look fair.” It turns out that the real purpose of this was not to select the best counsel, but to avoid hard conversations and potential acrimony with the firms that would be “deselected.”

In each issue of the Edge International Review, we pose a “big picture” question of significance to our clients and the legal marketplace generally, and ask our partners to sup- ply answers. This edition’s question is:

Trans-oceanic law firm mergers, legal process outsourcing companies, and the economic momentum of China and India are making the legal marketplace truly globalized. What global trends and developments affecting lawyers do you see emerging in 2011-12?

Here are some of our responses (access PDF below).

Conventional wisdom says that a firm needs at least 100 lawyers to be taken seriously in the marketplace. But is that really true, and does it apply to all types of firms in all locations? Viewed in five dimensions (capability, clients, reputation, collegiality and profitability), here is an analysis of whether, and to what degree, size matters.

Lawyers and the legal media frequently talk about the size of law firms. But unlike how most businesses address size (annual revenue), law firms seem to define size as the number of lawyers practicing at a firm. Managing partners who talk about growth typically mean adding enough lawyers to reach “critical mass.” When lawyers are laid off, it’s termed “right-sizing.” So with all this focus on lawyer head count, shouldn’t there be some benchmark as to the optimum size for a law firm?

When a firm starts talking about size in the abstract, it is usually signal- ing concern about being big enough to compete for the most sophisticated and challenging work while remaining small enough to maintain a strong client focus — large enough to attract the big fish and small enough to not scare away the small fish. At the same time, firms want the prestige of being a large firm while enjoying the culture and collegiality of a smaller firm. And oh yes, this should all occur while maximizing profitability.

Lawyers are notoriously slow to trust. But in law’s “new normal” that demands collaboration, trust problems become business problems no lawyer can afford. Here are ten factors to consider in your effort to build greater levels of trust and achieve better outcomes in your client relationships.

Take a moment, if you will, and think back to a legal project that came up short, or a legal relationship that imploded, because some of the players didn’t trust each other. Review the life-cycle of that interaction, and try to parse the causes and consequences. What really happened? Was trust lacking from the outset? Did a promising opportunity fall victim to a loss of trust over time, or did things just seem to go belly-up all of a sudden?

This isn’t just an exercise in retroactive finger-pointing. This exercise matters, because trust is becoming an essential element in the success of any and all legal enterprises. The modern legal environment demands unprecedented levels of collaboration — among colleagues, between practice groups, among lawyers and firm administration, with clients, between lawyers and regulators, and even with adversaries.

The partners of Edge International are among the most widely respected writers and analysts in the global legal marketplace. In addition to their own blogs and web periodicals, Edge partners are frequently called upon to contribute articles to or be interviewed by major legal publications worldwide.

Here is a sampling of Edge’s published thought leadership over the past few months.