Law People : Law Practice Management, Organizational and Personal Dynamics; Talent Management : Ronda Muir of Law People Management, Inc.

Hiring the right people is the first and most important goal in recruitment.  And these days firms do not have the luxury of over-hiring and waiting a few years for the "keepers" to rise to the top. 

A speech at the International Bar Association conference in Madrid last month reiterated the importance of an often-neglected part of recruiting:  determining the personality and other personal attributes, such as emotional intelligence, communication skills, resilience and rainmaking ability, of potential hires to make sure they "fit" a firm as well as a firm's clients.  In anticipation of that presentation, Janet Moore said: "I have been thinking how (most) law firms do not fully assess lawyers before hiring them... What if, as part of the hiring decision, law firms objectively and thoroughly assessed their potential hires?" 

Or, we might add, if firms worry about scaring off recruits with such a sophisticated approach, what if firms used assessments as part of the orientation and integration process to better place new attorneys in practice groups and firm roles?  Or used assessments to help their lawyers build individual career development plans and to inform professional development programs?  Or used them to steer leadership development programs and succession plans?

There is a long list of assessments that have been successfully used for decades by corporations and consultants to the corporate world.  Some shed light on business development propensities, others highlight personality attributes that help position a person in his or her most productive role and others predict and shape delivery and management style.

At a time when law firms are turning more aggressively to business schools for management programs to help their lawyers become better businessmen, it should be pointed out that business schools fairly uniformly require that their graduates complete some sort of personal assessment and take a class on how those attributes influence their team participation and management style--and can help them be more effective.

But an important step is doing the upfront work of identifying what attributes a firm is looking for in hires and how the firm can support the development of those attributes.  “We want bright people, but we’re also looking for other qualities, like a sense of responsibility and a willingness to go the extra mile for clients,” as Cynthia Pladziewicz, Chief Development Officer at Dallas-based Thompson & Knight says.  “We need to understand who succeeds here..." and  “make sure we integrate our recruiting with our development process.”  

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One of the important implications of Muir's article "What the New Law Firm Looks Like: The Reinvention of a Reluctant Industry" is that going forward firms will require the close involvement of sophisticated management professionals who are not necessarily or even preferably lawyers to help design and manage change.  These critical players will not only assist in initially envisioning the goals of the firm and its related programs and in easing the various players toward them through the transition period, but will also remain important in ongoing firm management in order to make those initiatives fully operational and successful over the long term.

In the past many law firms have often taken a pass when it comes to building the depth and quality of their non-lawyer professional staff.  For the most part we aren't that focused on these "unseen" professionals--there are going to be complaints about them within the firm anyway and rarely does a client interact with them.  So the firm librarian could be a dud, and the head of recruitment simply cheerful. 

We seem to realize marketing and technology advisers (and at the bigger firms, the professional development directors) have some importance, but still we often opt for less sophisticated, less expensive personnel who act more as placeholders than change agents, undercutting their potential effectiveness from the start. We tend to hire them young and tell them what to do and even sometimes how to do it.  After all, lawyers are the ones who really head all of these areas: the non-legal staff are simply assistants and overhead to boot.

The problem is that lawyers are no longer the experts in all the areas that law firms need expertise in. 

For example, Muir notes that firms will develop "serious project management skills that focus on evaluating and reviewing client goals (both fee-related and outcome-related) and managing matters to reach them."  Such skills include the technological capacity and human expertise to analyze, bid on and track client matters, including producing interim progress analyses to manage staffing and expenses and keep the client up to date.  Lawyers working on those projects need to be spending their time doing what they do best--providing legal services, and should rely on non-legal professionals to fine tune the timing and extent of those services. 

Similarly, "staff managers" acting like purchasing managers are likely to be responsible for engaging and managing a complex and highly changeable array of lawyers and services for specific and often fixed-term projects.  They will need the technology and expertise to manage a large database of information on individual lawyers, temp providers and outsourcers, produce contracts, evaluate performance and follow up complaints and contract violations.

Making "frequent and accurate evaluations of lawyers and staff and effectively using targeted training" are not only complex processes in themselves requiring careful analysis but become critical to morale and retention as these evaluations and trainings impact compensation in the new merit and competency models (see, for example, "The Issues in Moving From Law Firm Lockstep to 'Levels' Compensation").  And those charged with determining compensation based on multiple indices and complex formulas applied across numerous parties similarly need to have reliably sophisticated expertise.  The mid-level partner who doesn't have a lot of client work these days isn't the best choice to run with these valuable, exacting tasks.

Finally, "building relationships, which is key to exerting leadership influence, will be more challenging," and firms are likely to require more leadership time from their leaders--whether firm-wide or practice group leaders--which implies more time diverted from practice to firm management and more reliance on professional assistance.  Work assignment evaluation and management, leadership development, diversity compliance, client succession planning--these tasks can be taken on or assisted by non-lawyer professionals with the appropriate skills.

Of course, these professionals mean a rise in overhead--whether you obtain your expertise by in-house personnel or from outside consultants, another reason profits are likely to be diluted going forward.

But we lawyers can't effectively do all these jobs.  We can't because we are not diverse enough in our approaches and talents (see "The Unique Psychological World of Lawyers").  We not only haven't been trained in the relevant areas--project management, talent  evaluation, competency testing--but we also aren't likely to be naturally inclined toward or good at the process, patience and attention to the types of details that are required. Or if per chance there are lawyers among us who are so inclined or talented, we are not likely to know who they are.

There is the problem of overcoming the legal ego--it's not important if we can't do it well, and conversely, if it's important, then we can do it--but don't let that attitude be what keeps your firm from moving ahead.  Good management these days lies in identifying and locating needed expertise, not in attempting to be it.

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We spend our days advising law firms and law departments about the changing landscape for their professional services.  But just as the legal industry is in a state of transition, so is the industry that consults with the legal industry. 

We at Robin Rolfe Resources are retuning our services in order to offer you cost-effective updates on the fast-paced corrections and counter-corrections occurring daily in the legal world.  And we are going to do so without killing a lot of trees or landing in your bottom file drawer.

We can meet with your general counsel or managing parter, executive committee, planning committee, a practice group or the whole department or partnership to discuss trends and innovations--both successes and bloopers--in many realms of practice management: governance, client service, compensation, recruitment, lateral integration, retention, performance evaluation, motivation, promotion, training and development, leadership, morale, diversity, and succession, among others. Our own years of experience in practicing law and then advising practices of all sizes, coupled with an expertise in lawyer psychology, make us uniquely capable of providing sophisticated, up-to-date and practical advice.

We can meet for a morning, a day or regularly on a quarterly or other basis.  If you need more extensive research or written advice, we can provide it.  Regardless of the extent of our role, we are on your side of the table when you are analyzing the tough calls.

A much-heralded business author is working on a new book about reinvention and has concluded that both law and consulting fall into the category of needing to be reinvented.  In both of our businesses, tomes on best practices should be relegated to the last century.  Ours certainly are.

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What the New Law Firm Looks Like: The Necessary Reinvention of a Reluctant Industry

"I’m using [Muir’s] piece on 'What the New Law Firm Looks Like' for the Law Firms course that I will be teaching at Harvard Law School this spring. It does the best job I’ve seen of succinctly describing in one place the various trends that are likely to be transforming law firm practice."

--Mitt Regan, Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center January 2010

"[Muir] presents as cogent an expression of what the future of law firms and law practice will look like as we have yet found." 

--IOMA’s November Law Firm Leadership Alert naming Muir Thought Leader

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Muir points out in her article What the New Law Firm Looks Like that building bigger firms does not necessarily produce better bottom lines.  Of course for many firms long-term client development or other factors beside profitability fuel growth.  And then there are some growing firms which in fact achieve greater profitability in spite of the odds.

K&L Gates is one of the firms that has managed to accomplish that.  The product of a 2007 merger of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart with Preston Gates & Ellis, and then mergers with Nicholson Graham of London, Washington's Hill Christopher and Boston's Warner & Stackpole, the firm has completed since the beginning of 2008 three additional mergers -- one with Texas-based Hughes & Luce, a second with Charlotte, N.C.-based Kennedy Covington Lobdell & Hickman and the third with Bell Boyd, which took effect March 1, 2009, bringing together a total of over 1,800 lawyers. Over the same period, the firm opened offices in Paris, Shanghai, Frankfurt and most recently Dubai, among others, and established a relationship with Taiwanese firm J&J Attorneys at Law, for a total of 33 offices.

This astounding growth trajectory is true to Chairman and Global Managing Partner Peter Kalis's express intention to "grow aggressively," taking advantage of the firm's lack of short-term and long-term debt. Not only has growth been achieved but in this case the approach has so far proved profitable--revenues for 2008 were up 27% over 2007, while profits per partner for that year rose almost 7%, with first half 2009 continuing to show significant increases, again meeting Kalis's stated goal of increased profitability every year. 

So if a firm like K&L Gates manages to do the difficult if not impossible by growing aggressively while increasing profits, what are the challenges?

Of course the firm has been through a few clouds, as there always are around silver linings.  No firm, regardless of its size, can escape them.  Microsoft Corp.'s list of preferred legal providers did not include Bill Gates's father's firm this year. While Microsoft GC Brad Smith had welcomed the original merger of the Gates firm and Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, former Microsoft GC William Neukom left K&L Gates last year, perhaps signaling something. Or perhaps it was simply time for a change.  The firm did not add another DuPont "Meeting the Challenge" Award this year to those accumulated over the past few years.  And K&L Gates has had its share of difficult client relations--MTV Networks noisily canned the firm as defense counsel a few months ago.

One insight into the challenges that the firm's success raises may be in a comment from K&L Gates' most senior trademark lawyer Mark Peroff, who left the firm last year for a smaller firm.  "In my experience at K&L Gates," he was quoted as saying in explanation of the move, "the focus was entirely on making money.  There was no glue among the partners."  (Peroff also pointed out that in a smaller firm he could significantly lower his billing rate.)

There might be some who would question the importance of glue, both as to whether it significantly colors one's experience at a firm and also whether it adds to the bottom line, a discussion we will take up in a later entry. But Peroff 's comments raise the conundrum that many growing firms in fact face, and often without the benefit of rising profitability. 

Every year the ranks of new hires, lateral hires, and various contract, counsel, income, equity and other lawyers shift, while there is simultaneous shifting among personnel at various offices. How to add so many bodies to various locations and still keep a sense of commonality if not collegiality among the players?  

And similarly, if a firm hopes to improve profitabiliy, can it push bottom-line results persistently, making each person accountable for their own production, and still maintain strong relationships?

In other words, do our goals and policies bind us or divide us?

Sometimes glue is simply a commonality that keeps all the various firm systems running in decent working order.  Sometimes glue produces real revenue through cross selling and enhanced relationship building.  Sometimes glue is just that ineffable bond that keeps people from leaving.

It may sound pretty fuzzy, but it's important to consider the glue in your firm.

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