Consider that at last week's Davos meeting of the "World Economic Forum," one of the more outspoken hedge fund managers asked, "Why can buyout firms take public companies private and make enormous returns, while the same type of returns seem out of reach for public companies and their shareholders?"  While the reasons for private companies to outperform their public brethren are extremely complex, not to mention hotly disputed, the market today (meaning the people who have billions at their disposal to invest) believe it so, and are acting accordingly. 

Just listen to The Wall Street Journal's year-end wrapup (for 2005, emphasis supplied):

"It was the biggest year for mergers and acquisitions since 2000, with $2.9 trillion in announced deals, up 38% from a year ago, according to research firm Dealogic. The list included Procter & Gamble's $60.8 billion buy of Gillette [...]
Dealing was also brisk in the technology sector, led by the $11.4 billion private-equity buyout of SunGard Data Systems....   Private-equity firms racked up a record year, with $493.8 billion in deals, or 17% of total global volume. Nine of the 10 biggest private-equity deals on record happened this year, according to Dealogic, including the $15.3 billion buyout of Danish telecommunications firm TDC by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Apax Partners and others and the $15 billion buyout of Hertz by Clayton Dubilier & Rice, Carlyle and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity.
Look for more of the same next year, with private-equity acquirers hunting in packs, making bigger deals possible."

No kidding about the deals getting bigger:  "With some private equity funds raising as much as $10 billion, the conversation has turned to whether there will be a day when a $100 billion fund arrives, fundamentally changing the landscape between public and private businesses." 

But isn't there a limit to how large a fish private equity can swallow and still create the out-sized market returns they've enjoyed so far?  To the contrary:  Some of the smartest money is betting that "the next big opportunities [are] not in small companies but in big companies, where the inefficiencies are writ large. As one big private equity investor said, "The bigger the company, the better chance it is badly managed.""

O'Melveny & Myers chimes in:  "The buyout funds are red-hot, having reached unprecedented sizes."

So which law firms are getting the lion's share of this business?  According to Bowne, in North America last year the leader in buyout transaction volume (number of deals) was Kirkland & Ellis (31) and the leader in total value of deals was Simpson-Thacher at just shy of $16-billion.  Other familiar names included Weil-Gotshal, O'Melveny & Myers, Latham, Cleary-Gottlieb, and Ropes & Gray.   In Europe, meanwhile, the volume leaders are Linklaters, Clifford Chance, and Lovells, with 65 deals between them, and in value, Clifford Chance is #1 at nearly €19-billion, followed by Freshfields at €11.5-billion.  US firms include the usual suspects:  Weil-Gotshal, Cleary, White & Case, Willkie-Farr, and Shearman and Sterling also make respectable showings, solidly in the top ten in terms of deal value.

So my point would be?

Be nimble, be flexible, above all be aware of macroeconomic developments.  Lucrative practice areas do not materialize out of thin air; they are the creatures of capital flows around the country and around the world.  Five years ago hedge funds and private equity were relatively somnolent, certainly in the public's eyes and even in the eyes of relative financial sophisticates.

The world changes, and the composition of its demand for top-of-the-pyramid legal services changes in sync.  Incumbents at the top today have no inalienable right to their privileged status.  On what  more optimistic and energizing note could you conceivably begin your week?

David Maister confesses: 

"I have spent twenty years trying to say all professions look similar and can learn from each other, but I’m finally prepared to concede that lawyers are different – and it has nothing to do with economics."

In a piece titled "Warlords and Dickensian Factory Owners," David compares the modern day law firm to both feudal peasants terrorized by the warlord into paying tribute, and the Dickensian factory where you can, in fact, make an awful lot of money if you work people to the bone, slash costs, and have a heart of stone at the mere mention of phrases like "work/life balance."  

Partners defend this approach by appeal to economic necessity in the short run:  "If we don't keep PPP up, we'll lose our rainmakers and the firm will be devastated." 

Doesn't this fly in the face of what by now are mountains of research showing that genuinely engaged and energized employees, sharing a firm-wide vision, are the strongest driver of profitability known to management science?  Yes, it does:   But it takes years of consistent vision, and action, to get to that point.  What's worse, none of the energy expended in creating that environment shows any financial return until, essentially, the environment has been transformed.  Wall Street's, or your partners', insistence on performance this quarter is hard to square with that time-consuming and uncertain investment.

This is also where "lawyers are different" comes in. Consider that lawyers are socialized unlike members of any other profession or followers of any other discipline:

"Martin Seligman [writes] in his book AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS: “Lawyers are trained to be aggressive, judgmental, intellectual, analytical and emotionally detached. This produces predictable emotional consequences…he or she will be depressed, anxious and angry a lot of the time”."

Or, consider a psychographic test measuring "sociability," with the median American defined as scoring 50 on a 1—100 scale:  Lawyers' mean score was 8.  Put 250 Type A's with that personality profile in charge of a $100+ million/year enterprise, and you should not expect a touchy-feely environment to spontaneously emerge.

But we're serious here, folks. 

Is the only way to create a high-performance organization to yell, chastise, berate, intimidate, and generally treat your "colleagues" as enemy aliens?  It is most assuredly not the only way; but it has an indisputable track record of being a way.  And, not to discount its attractions, it has the virtues of simplicity, directness, and economy of action.  As everyone from NFL coaches to Parris Island drill sergeants would testify, it dispenses with the need to painstakingly psychoanalyze what subtle combination of persuasive buttons need to be pushed—in different combinations for each person, of course—to motivate your troops. 

I will further grant there are times and places where peremptory and unilateral emergency injunctions are called for:  Maister uses the examples of a combat unit or a small child nearing a hot stove.  But these are surely far removed from towers in Manhattan's canyons. 

But back to the short-term pressure cooker vs. the longer-term vision needed to escape this inhumane behavior pattern.

In Practice What You Preach, Maister reports the results of a survey of 6,500 people in 139 offices of 29 firms in 15 countries, which demonstrates conclusively (to me at least), that employee attitudes drive profitability, and not the other way around.   What "attitudes" would those be, precisely?

• A palpable sense of engagement is number one.  Are people "turned on" by coming to work? Can they tell you, without prompting and in a convincing fashion, what the firm stands for?

If this describes your firm, congratulations!  (And I'm available for interviews.)  But skeptical responses to the call for such a vision, in places where it doesn't exist, are far easier to come by:

• We don't have the luxury of thinking long-run.
• Not everyone can be engaged, or wants to be; some just want to put in their time and get paid.
• Whatever time we spend trying to move the firm in that direction is time not spent developing new clients and billing hours.
• ...and you can fill out the list.

And lest you think I'm casting aspersions on people who think that way, or that I believe it's only partners who have these attitudes, let me hasten to add that these attitudes are understandable, they're not intrinsically abusive, and clients and associates often feel very similarly, albeit from their own perspectives. 

Associates can feel that they're only in it to pay off their law school loans, or to get enough experience to be able to credibly interview for inhouse positions.  Clients, increasingly, issue RFP's and sponsor "beauty pageants" before awarding work; institutional relationships of longstanding are increasingly rare.  And to firms that do win work from sophisticated clients:   Be careful what you wish for!  Requests for discounts, volume billing, and Procrustean itemization of activities and expenses (the better to micromanage their costs) are on the way.

Can any of this be changed?  Can we, in fact, ever get back to the days of longer-term thinking, and a willingness to invest both time and money to build an enduring firm with a distinctive identity?  Maister is pessimistic:

"I’ve tried logic. It hasn’t worked well on non-believers. I’ve tried presenting conclusive data. It hasn’t worked well on non-believers. I’ve tried appealing to matters of principle, standards, values, and meaning. It hasn’t worked well on non-believers.

"I no longer believe people can be “converted” on this topic."

For those still willing to try, because the cause is as worthy as they come, try these steps on the road to change:

• Ignore the skeptics; you'll never win them over anyway.
• Start with the believers, and talk to their needs.
• Enlist allies.
• Celebrate small wins.
• Spread the word.
• Win a few more.
• Keep telling the story.
• Welcome the converted fence-sitters who decide you must be doing something right.
• And keep telling the story.

What follows is a highly selective and distilled excerpt of and extrapolation from a paper forthcoming in the University of North Carolina Law Review (84 N.C. L. Rev. __ (2006), draft version available at SSRN), by my good friend Prof.  William Henderson of Indiana University Law School at Bloomington. 

The paper is titled "An Empirical Analysis of Single-Tier vs. Two-Tier Partnership in the AmLaw 200," and among a host of other fascinating findings is the creation of a statistical model attempting to explain the level of Profits per Partner (the "dependent variable," in statistics-land) based on an extremely limited number of quantifiable factors (the "independent variables").

If you were creating such a model, what would you nominate for your universe of independent variables?  What, in other words, drives PPP—what is most relevant and determinative?

Brainstorm for a moment. [...]

Time's up.

• Leverage?  Defined strictly as [total # of lawyers/# of equity partners].  Yes; it's in the regression analysis, although with a counter-intuitive and surprising caveat.
• Average billable hours per lawyer?  Yes again.  (That was an easy one.)
• Whether the firm switched to a two-tier model in the past decade in order to boost reported PPP?  Sorry.
• "Prestige" of the firm, based on annual Vault and American Lawyer surveys?  Yes again.
• Size of firm?  Bzzzz; nope.
• How about "associate satisfaction," as measured annually the The American Lawyer, which tracks such measures as open-ness about firm finances, candor about prospects for partner, and a firm's commitment to professional development?  Yes; but see my remark about leverage.
• Percentage of lawyers who are in New York?  Yes—so let's hear it for the home town.
• Composition of practice areas?  Not in the equation, partly because it's not readily quantifiable.

This leaves us with five independent variables:

• Leverage
• Average hours billed
• Prestige
• Associate satisfaction, and
• % of lawyers in NYC

Together, these five variables explain three-quarters (74.2%) of firms' profitability:

So relatively "immutable" factors, at least in the short to medium term, account for all but 26% of the size of the average AmLaw 200 firm's bottom line in terms of PPP; the most enlightened or brilliant management in the world (plus our fair- and foul-weather friend, luck) affect only one-quarter of the average AmLaw 200 firm's results. 

We can say more:  Being above the regression line means your firm is outperforming expectations; being below it, the converse.  Out of a sense of charity, Bill did not identify any firms below the line by name (although if you contact me directly, we can talk...).  On the other hand, some of the firms identified above the line enjoy particular circumstances that explain their unusual performance.  I'll select a few from the top right down (I know it's hard to read, but I have a larger copy):

• Cahill-Gordon:  An outsized presence in junk-bond issuance, plus a notoriously tight-fisted cost control culture.
• Simpson-Thacher and Davis-Polk:  Unbeatable prestige, making them law-firm-land's equivalent of "bulge bracket" investment banks.
• Kirkland & Ellis:  The go-to brand in high stakes litigation, especially antitrust.  (And an unusually canny twist on the two-tier partnership model, which I'll discuss another day.)
• Gibson-Dunn:  Supreme Court practice.

You get the idea:  It is extremely difficult to establish, or sustain, a position "above the line."

The good news is it's less difficult, given enough time and a consistent strategic approach, to move up the line.   To move up the line, you dial in changes in those famous independent variables:  Leverage, % of our lawyers in NYC, average billable hours, prestige,  and associate satisfaction. 

For which of those do you get the biggest bang for the buck?  Back to our friend, the regression analysis.  The following table displays the value, in annual profits per partner, of a one-unit increase in each of our variables.  A few explanations and caveats first:  Remember first and foremost that these are values derived from the entire universe of AmLaw 200 firms.  As they say, "your mileage may vary." 

Second, the meaning of a "one-unit increase" depends on which variable you're talking about.  A one-unit increase in the leverage ratio, or the average number of hours billed, is fairly self-evident, but a "one unit" increase in prestige, and in associates' likelihood of staying for the next two years, reflect the subjective scales on which they were measured.  For "prestige," Vault uses a 10-point scale.  (For example, in 2003, Cravath and Wachtell each scored a stratospheric 8.93, Davis-Polk 8.12, and Simpson-Thacher 7.78.)  For "likelihood of staying," The American Lawyer used a 5-point scale.  Finally, for "% NYC/Global," Bill simply divided the AmLaw 200 into four roughly equal cohorts: 0%; < 10%, 10—50%, and > 50%.  Jumping from one cohort to the next one above is our "unit" increase. 

The envelope, please:

The more you think about these numbers (at least if you're like me), the less surprising they are—except for the third row.  This says, beyond a reasonable doubt, that for two-tier firms, the more likely associates judge they will be to stay two years, the less profitable the firm:  And you're taking it in the teeth.  A one-unit increase in associate satisfactions costs you a cool quarter of a million dollars a year. What on earth is going on here?

I have my own theories, which I'll discuss, again, another day.  Suffice for now for me to toss out this (I hope) pregnant thought:  Paraphrasing Tolstoy, "all single tier firms are alike; each two-tier firm is two-tier in its own way."  Single-tier land is a flat, homogeneous landscape.  Two-tier land is heterogeneous geography, full of recently thrust-up peaks and cleaved valleys. 

(And lest you think I harbor a secret intellectual temptation to indulge in potentially-entertaining year-end prognostication myself, take a look at David Maister's comment to an earlier post: 

"With no disrespect to any law or consulting firm named here, I am deeply skeptical about all this. In the past, when asked to talk about the "Trends in the Profession" I used to use a 10-year-old slide which referred to no specific profession or country. Everyone fell for it - they all agreed that, yes these are the trends we will have to face.")

Nevertheless, sometimes consensus surveys are used to extrapolate trends, and they have value if only for the snapshot they provide of the common wisdom at a point in time.

Consider, then, CIO Insight's year-end survey of nearly 6,000 CIO's and CTO's (64%) and other top executives (36%), which generated no fewer than thirty "trends." 

A prefatory note:  The results of some of the non-trend-generating questions are intrinsicially interesting.   Two of the more hopeful:  #1:  "Our research also indicates that companies are giving more employees access to business intelligence tools, in hopes they apply the insights those systems generate."  Knowledge is power; distribute power lest it corrupt.   And #2:  78% of companies plan to increase profits through growth, not cost reduction. Gordon Bethune, the legendary former turn-around CEO of Continental Airlines, like to make the latter point with his pizza analogy: "The biggest cost component of a pizza is the cheese; if you're serious about cutting costs, eliminate the cheese."  

Off, then, to the trends.  And don't worry; I've narrowed their thirty down to four of note to us:

• Trend 7: The Hunger for Analysis and Intelligence Will Keep Growing:  By this, they mean "Business Intelligence," and specifically what I've called the second generation of "BI:"  "Already, mid-level managers and planning staff use BI tools at 61 percent of companies. [...] This widening use of ever more powerful analytical tools has enormous potential for the future. But the extent to which that potential is met will depend on how well the BI system connects to strategy and user needs."
• Trend 22: IT Architecture Becomes Critical to Business Strategy:  "What once appeared arcane will become more and more central. As high-growth companies have figured out, IT architecture and infrastructure have never been so closely tied to corporate strategy as they are today. It doesn't matter whether CIOs are trying to achieve faster growth, better business processes, lower costs or global expansion."  In other words, the basic "hygiene" of your information systems has to be rock-solid.  (1) Secure, reliable data (2) shared across all your offices and employees (3) on a common platform.
• Trend 24: Data Integration Is the Technology Pressure Point:  "Data quality will go from nice-to-have to need-to-have. Flexibility and openness remain nothing but talk, while standardization and virtualization remain useless, unless companies can reliably integrate their systems and ensure the quality of their data."  It's not just your corporate clients struggling with Sarbanes-Oxley that have to get their "data" squeaky-clean; it's your own firm as well.  Don't your clients have every right to expect you can and do handle your own data with the utmost scrupulousness?
• Trend 27: Knowledge Management Regains Respect:  Isn't this the perennial whipping boy, the classic example of the "evergreen" prediction?  (My favorite is, "Brazil will lead the way the next decade," which we've been hearing since before Sputnik.)  But listen to what CIO Insight has to say at some length about KM (emphasis supplied):

  "CIOs haven't given up on its promise. Knowledge management has long suffered a bad rap as a sexy technology that falls short on delivering business value. But for two years in a row, KM has ranked a respectable 7th on our list of critical technologies. (Twenty-one technologies were ranked on this list in 2005.) This is happening in part because many of the technologies that fall under the aegis of KM have come into their own: collaboration tools, corporate portals, content management and business intelligence.
  
  "These technologies aren't mere repositories for knowledge, as earlier KM systems tended to be. They route knowledge to the people who need it, or embed what the company has learned into a process. As companies find these knowledge-managing technologies helpful, they'll look for new, effective ways to manage corporate know-how and put it to work."

I would be the last person to tell you that KM is easy, and I'm both unsurprised and essentially unperturbed that it's taking us so long to get it right.  We are, after all, dealing in some cases with "knowledge" that is so contextual and nuanced as to be almost ineffable.  And it's not just those at the peak of the empyrean professions:   Consider the story in today's WSJ of the technology columnist trying to make polite conversation with a FedEx guy in a high-rise office elevator.  WSJ Guy:  "So, is it quicker to work top to bottom or bottom to top?"  FedEx Guy (dead serious):  "It depends on the time of day."

Put that in a database!

• David Maister's "Passion, People and Principles":  I sincerely hope you recognize David's name; if you don't, I implore you to take an immediate look.  His inaugural post is about his "blogging philosophy."  
• "Truth on the Market," a joint blog with two "founders" and four "authors," each smarter than the last, and all law professors (at different schools) with a severe penchant for economics.   Any commonality among them?  They seem to over-index on having gone to Chicago Law School, clerked for prominent federal appellate judges (Posner, anyone?), and done a tour at Latham & Watkins.

Henceforth, you'll be able to find them on the "Adam Smith, Esq." blogroll.

As I've written before, "Business Intelligence" is  here to stay.  (And if that's an unfamiliar or unclear term to you, please refer to the earlier post on this, which serves to introduce the field; and no apologies necessary, as the term "BI" is almost perversely non-intuitive to the newcomer.  It only makes sense once one already knows what it means.)

BI 101 to launch this piece:  BI  is not to be confused with "competitive intelligence," which is all about how your firm is perceived in the marketplace vis-a-vis its competition, and about what the competition is up to—both current and potential competition.  BI, rather, is about analyzing the tremendous amounts of raw data spewed out by your firm's various systems. CIO Magazine defines it thus:

"But with Hillman Group's new BI system, curious business executives can query the system themselves and get instant answers about such critical questions as the number of unfilled customer orders, which is tracked by the system in real-time.

"There's just one problem.

"The new system hasn't made the business better—at least not yet—only better informed. That's generally the problem with BI, the umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyze an organization's raw data (sales transactions, for example) and extract useful insights from it. Most CIOs still think of it as a reporting and decision support tool."

The CIO case study involves a computer sub-systems manufacturer and a chemical company, but the key realities of BI come through loud and clear:  (1) information is power, so your firm has to be prepared to share that; and (2) knowing that some of your partners manage things better than others cannot be seen as threatening, it must be seen as empowering. The goal is not to rap the poor manager's knuckles, but to show by example how he can emulate the good manager.

In law-firm land, BI can analyze the profitability of entire practice groups, of offices, of clients, of individual lawyers, and of individual matters. Of far greater importance than its ability to write a new gloss on historical experience is its ability to capture "best practices" and, if sensitively and astutely managed, to spread those best practices across the firm.  Who's doing BI?  Firms such as Alston & Bird, Bryan-Cave, and Goodwin-Procter, which I cite for reasons that will become clearer below, but permit me to seed your thinking by observing that all three of these firms place a noteworthy premium on "cultural" considerations.  (A&B, for one, has not landed above all other law firms on Fortune's "Best 100 Places to Work" a few years in a row by accident.)

The key to "second generation" BI is to conceive of it as more than a historical-reporting tool and begin to use it actively as a way to understand how you can do what you're already doing in better ways.  The management literature calls this "best practices" or "process management," but don't let the terms glaze your eyes over.  CIO Magazine, with its understandable CIO-centric perspective, puts it thus:

"Companies that use BI to uncover flawed business processes are in a much better position to successfully compete than those companies that use BI merely to monitor what's happening. Indeed, CIOs who don't use BI to transform business operations put their companies at a disadvantage. For CIOs who have carried out this difficult strategy successfully, there is no looking back."

Or, in plain English:  If you use BI as a rear-view mirror merely to point with delight and view with disdain, don't bother.  Instead, use BI to help you understand, at a fairly profound managerial level, why, for example, two different matters that appeared superficially similar generated remarkably different levels of revenue and profitability for the firm—and how to make the laggard look a lot more like the leader next time around.

Next point:  Does this have to do with technology?  Sure, and so does time-keeping.  The technology behind BI, in other words, should matter not to you.  BI is 1% technology and 99% culture.  BI can improve matter management, client satisfaction, and even professional development (by identifying, for example, associates whose write off rates are especially high or low).  These are things your firm must care about.  (Did I forget to mention profitability?)

As a friend of mine with no little experience in BI implementations in law firms likes to say, BI will only have an impact if your firm has "the will to act."   Do you?

January 18, 2006

January 16, 2006

January 15, 2006

January 14, 2006

January 13, 2006

Is Your Firm Organized Around Your Clients or Around Your Firm?

Your firm is dedicated to client service as one of its pre-eminent goals, if not the absolutely highest priority, right?

Not so fast.  Do you have a lawyer serving full-time as "Client Services Advisor," serving as an ombudsman on behalf of the firm's clients and responsible for creating and overseeing more than 60 "client service teams" (and counting)?  Akin-Gump does, in the person of Iris Jones. 

Swell:  What's a "client service team?," you're asking.

Essentially, it's a tool for formalizing and institutionalizing collaboration among the various lawyers serving Important Client X.   An example will aid understanding even better than a description.  Here's how the "Technology-Copyright-Internet" group works:

"The TCI attorneys participate in client service teams with Akin Gump’s patent attorneys, litigation attorneys and other practice groups. This collaborative commitment to client service enables Akin Gump to assist in providing clients with comprehensive counseling in all areas of IP and overlapping areas of the law."

The goal is to approach the client relationship from the perspective of the client's business (and its concomitant legal needs) rather than from the perspective of the firm's legal expertise (which may or may not be germane to the client's business).    My friend Bruce Marcus also describes this approach.

The latter approach—starting from the perspective of the firm rather than the client—is conceptually just plain mistaken. 

In practice, what does this really mean? 

• First, as noted, it requires genuine collaboration.  Teams need to be assembled and re-assembled as the client's business and legal posture changes.  Now the team may need some focused litigators; next quarter an offshore tax expert; and the quarter after that an employment maven.  Iris Jones' job is to stay on top of all this and make sure that today's "A Team" doesn't become tomorrow's "Irrelevant Team." 
  Does this mean partners need to "buy in" with their heart and soul?  Check.
  Yes, this can be the hard part:  We all know that collaboration is not in the law school curriculum.  But never underestimate the power of self-interest to trump training.  As one Akin-Gump partner put it:  "In an increasingly competitive environment, the client service team has been invaluable in [strengthening] our relationship."
• Second, it requires plain old information-tracking.  Call it "Client Relationship Management" if you like, but lawyers must have one centralized repository for everything germane about the client's legal needs and the history of its relationship with the firm.  We've all had the experience of phoning (say) the cable company to ask a service-related question or inquire about a bill, only to find ourselves forced to explain everything from square one with a succession of several different people.  As uninspiring as this is with the cable company, it leaves a positively ghastly impression coming from a supposedly sophisticated law firm.
• Lastly, it means the client service team has to have a vision of where the client fits within the firm's strategic plan—a vision which is both clear and nuanced.  Lest I be accused of throwing around the phrase "strategic plan" loosely, I'll try to define it:  "Strategic plan" in the sense I mean it is not the 3- or 5-year document delivered from the mountaintop and promptly shelved for terminal verboseness or immediate irrelevancy (the latter fate being nicely described by the epithet "OBE," or "overtaken by events").  Rather, a strategic plan in this sense is a continuously evolving awareness of the fit between (i) the marketplace's specific demands; (ii) the firm's ability (or short-term lack thereof) to meet those demands; and (iii) how the firm can develop to most closely align its capabilities and offerings with the evolving market.

Note the focus throughout is on "the client" and "the market" rather than "the firm" or "the lawyer."

We have all known in our heads for some time, even if we have not acted on it with our hearts, that excellent legal skills are merely the price of admission in today's globally competitive market.  That means they cannot pretend to be your distinctive calling card; they're table stakes.

What could provide an enduring distinction, on the other hand, is responding to your clients' business (and, as a follow-on thereto, legal) needs with the same alacrity and professional focus the client itself would apply internally.  Client service teams may not be the only route there, but they surely start at the right end of the service spectrum.

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January 12, 2006

January 10, 2006

January 8, 2006

"Giotto, Giotto, Giotto-Giotto:  Renaissance
He paints in the morning and he paints at night;
If it's a Giotto it'll turn out right.
Giotto, Giotto, Giotto- Giotto:  Renaissance."