It doesn't particularly affect their private equity practice at the moment, but it poses big questions about actually how Wild Gottschall are going to shore up that strategic M&A practice.

I think it's worth... perhaps highlighting a bit of context.

So last year, last summer, I wrote a profile of Weil and their leader, Barry Wolf.

And I said they were facing that trickiest of moments for any professional services business, a period of transition.

And there has been a feeling for some time that Weil has been going through a bit of a protracted period of transition.

And Mike Aiello is right at the center of this, by the way.

This is what almost makes this take on a feel of a soap opera rather than just another partner leading, because God knows there are enough of those.

Cravath has not escaped those questions because it managed to take on six really, really good partners.

Matt, you've been looking quite a lot at, and talking to law firm leaders about where New York sits within their platform more generally.

Yeah.

Uh, I have.

And, uh, it's interesting actually, some of the comments from, uh, from some of these leaders.

So, you know, you mentioned the, the, the largest UK firms are in now.

We're talking to George Casey, who's Linklaters America's chairman.

He told us Linklaters has, has, uh, has grown its US partnership by 75% over the last four years, primarily in New York, not just in New York, but primarily in New York, across M&A and finance and disputes.

The optics.

Yeah.

They have no product cost, no delivery cost, et cetera, right? So their gross profit's like, must be 90% plus.

If you've got a standard sort of, uh, typical e-commerce business that sells and delivers products, I would say a good one is in the sort of at least 50% mark.

Our client base that sort of does really well, and the ones that have a lot of margin available that ultimately leads to profit and net cash, they tend to be doing around the 60, 65% mark-

... until you're stopping seeing that return," how do you manage that?

Well, again, that's not usually my department, but I've had this conversation I think at least four times this year already, where my advice has been to spend more money.

And that's not usually the advice that comes from accountants, and certainly a lot of accountants who don't deal with e-commerce.

I was having a conversation with a client the other day, and the conversation from their existing accountant or their previous accountant was, "You actually need to spend less money on ads.