Law People : Law Practice Management, Law Firm Coaching : Ronda Muir of Robin Rolfe Resources : Law People Blog

If you stay with it long enough, a practice that goes out of fashion will often come back around again.  Those of us of a certain age remember when the first year or more at a big law firm was spent "rotating" around departments to get a good feel for the full range of legal practice.  That quaint practice was drilled out of most firms with the arrival of big ticket associate salaries and the push for faster and higher realization of revenues on their time. 

Now we hear from across the pond that Linklaters is proposing countering  "damaging over-specialisation" by having junior associates spend time in different practice areas in their first few years, a practice that Allen & Overy is also considering and Slaughter and May has already adopted.

“There was an awareness that people are specialising too early and there’s a desire to see people get a more rounded experience in their early years,” a senior partner at Linklaters was quoted as saying. However, it was noted that the move "should not be seen as a reaction to the economic climate."

With due regard to that  Linklaters partner's opinion, whenever this "new" practice is discussed at the law firms we advise stateside, it is raised expressly in the context of the current economic climate--one of the reasons being to position associates to be able to move more quickly out of and into practice areas depending on the firm's needs.

Non-equity partnership tiers have been the fastest growing population segment of law firms during the past decade, but those partners are sometimes specialists in areas where firms can no longer reliably provide sufficient work.  And, like specialized associates, those non-equity partners are often difficult to re-deploy quickly to where the firm's work is.  Many firms are therefore considering limiting or eliminating entirely that tier, moving to an all-equity partnership like back in the old days. Addleshaw Goddard intends to put that reversion in place next year. And a similar noise is being made as DLA Piper reviews its entire firm structure, with unattributed partners saying that the firm could move toward a single tier of partners, eliminating both tiers of income partners in its current model.

The wheel goes round and round.

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The recent 5-4 Supreme Court ruling on the New Haven Fire Department vocational advancement exam in Ricci v. DeStefano once again stirs the waters on the question of how to choose the best from among a crowd. (See our entry "The Outliers of Law--Embracing Heresy".) The "best" in this case was determined to be simply the highest scorers, even if those scores seem to imply discrimination against a particular group. 

What's Sonia Got to Do With It?

A lot of press has been devoted to parsing whether Sonia Sotomayor's vote with the majority at the appeals court, which affirmed throwing out the test results, implies her personal position on affirmative action.   

A look at Sotomayor's own test scores gives an interesting gloss to the discussion.  She was, by her own admission, an "affirmative-action baby" who did not do well on her SATs  and LSATS, or at least not as well as her fellow students at Princeton and Yale.  Yet she went on to graduate from Princeton with highest academic honors and has reached the upper echelons of law practice.  As Walter Kirn said in a recent New York Times article about his own experience at Princeton, "the poorer and browner of my classmates — particularly the women — seemed to study twice as hard as I did, clocking endless hours in the library and forgoing weekend parties for late-night cram sessions. Maybe their SAT scores were lower than mine, but they ranked higher than I did on the effort scale. And on the bravery scale too." 

So was this a case of retrospective justice-making by Ms. Sotomayor? 

Regardless of what Sotomayor was doing in the public sector, the glaring lesson to be taken from her own story is that aptitude assessments are not the last word on potential for achievement.

The Texas Experiment

In 1997, Texas House Bill 588, better known as the "Top 10 Percent Law," was passed, guaranteeing high school graduates who ranked in the top 10% of their senior class, regardless of their SAT or ACT scores, admission to a state institution.  While hotly contested at the time as risking the influx of less able students, it is a law that school administrators and legislators agree "by any measure of public policy is a success."

Not only did the 10% plan in Texas get more minority students into top public universities with race-neutral criteria, it spawned similar programs in California and Florida and the consideration of many other states. (Due to its immense popularity, last month the Texas Legislature agreed to limit to 75% of its freshman slots the number from the program that their flagship school, the University of Texas at Austin, had to admit.)  According to the most recent issue of Inside Higher Ed, "every internal study that... the UT system conducted and every external study has shown that the 10 percent students, relative to others, have done better by any measure -- lower attrition rates, graduate in shorter time periods," etc.

As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his 2001 New Yorker article "Examined Life": "Critics of the policy said that it would open the door to students from marginal schools whose SAT scores would normally have been too low for admission to the University of Texas—and that is exactly what happened. But so what? The 'top ten percenters,' as they are known, may have lower SAT scores, but they get excellent grades. In fact, their college GPAs are the equal of students who scored two hundred to three hundred points higher on the SAT [emphasis added]. In other words, the determination and hard work that propel someone to the top of his high-school class—even in cases where that high school is impoverished—are more important to succeeding in college (and, for that matter, in life) than whatever abstract quality the SAT purports to measure. The importance of the Texas experience cannot be overstated."

Predicting the Best Lawyers

A number of studies have looked for what might predict eventual success as a practicing lawyer. Evidently LSAT scores, and not undergraduate grade point averages, are the best indicators of academic performance in the first year of law school, and academic performance in the first year of law school appears to be the best predictor of whether the new graduate will pass his/her state bar exam on the first attempt. There is also a very strong correlation between the personality attribute of pessimism and law school grades, i.e., the higher the pessimism, the higher the grades.

But none of these factors--undergraduate grades, LSAT scores, law school grades--gives us the key to determining who is likely to be at the top of the lawyering heap. 

A New Kind of Test

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In a review of law school news, applications are holding steady but expected to go up, tuition is up, letter grades are being changed to pass/fail, big law firms continued through 2008 to hire apace, law schools are having it out with the ABA over accreditation, and then there is the case of the graduate who burned his Harvard Law School diploma.

Applications.  Although a few law schools, including Duke, surging 4%, and Penn, rising 6%, and the D.C. area schools mentioned below, have seen increases in the number of applications, according to communications director Wendy Margolis of the Law School Admission Council, law school applications nationally have risen by less than 1% from last year, despite the dismal state of the economy. That compares to a 17.6% increase in the national law school applicant pool in 2002 following the 2001 recession.

A bigger surge in law school applications may come next year, she says, since the economic debacle striking so late in 2008 limited the ability of many applicants to apply in time for this year’s spring decisions.  However, the higher cost of law school tuition today and the limited availability of loans also may be discouraging potential applicants.

Certainly the number of students applying to D.C.-area law schools has surged as the economy sunk. George Washington University Law School’s applicant numbers are up 8%, the University of Virginia School of Law’s applicants have risen more than 10%, and Georgetown University Law Center has received 12% more applications than last year.

Andrew Cornblatt, Georgetown’s dean of admissions, says the law school pushed its deadline back a month to March 2 to accommodate last-minute applicants coping with lay-offs and other bad economic news. His office received roughly 1,000 applications on Feb. 2 and Feb. 3 combined, a sign that people were rushing to get in before the original deadline.

Tuition.  Most law schools are raising tuition for the 2009-10 school year by 3% to 15%. Stanford Law School, for example, announced a 3.75% raise and Saint Louis University School of Law is raising tuition by 3%, less than its traditional annual increase of 5%.

Budget cuts in some states are forcing public law schools to debate tuition increases. In Missouri, Governor Jay Nixon has proposed no tuition increases if the legislature doesn’t cut the higher education budget.

Ellen Suni, dean of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, where annual tuition and fees total about $15,000 for in-state students and $29,000 for those from out-of-state, tuition went up 3.8% last year. Tuition hikes reflect increases in competitive faculty salaries and library expenses that have gone up by more than 10% each year, she says, even though the school has done some cost cutting, such as instituting a hiring freeze.

Albany Law School announced that it is freezing tuition, currently $38,900, for the 2009-10 school year and plans to increase scholarships as well, even though annual giving is anticipated to be down by 10% for the year. Said Thomas F. Guernsey, president and dean, in "these particularly uncertain times, we want to do what we can to make it easier for students who are incurring all this debt."  The school is also considering various cost-cutting measures, such as reducing the number of speakers and their travel costs, temporarily halting courses that have only a few students, and converting paper copying to electronic storage.

On the other side of the pond, three of London’s leading law schools are increasing the cost of both their Legal Practice Course and Graduate Diploma in Law by an average of 9%.

Grades.  Several leading law schools are retooling their grading policies, with some making major revisions. Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School, for example, are switching to pass/fail systems, which Yale Law School has used for decades. And New York University School of Law now allows professors to give more A's. Columbia Law School says it is also reviewing its grading systems.

The changes are being made to create fairer evaluation systems and to better convey students' accomplishments to employers, educators say, although it’s hard to see how a switch from grades to pass/fail accomplishes either. Other advantages cited by the law schools are incentives to professors to conceive innovative course work, reducing grade anxiety of students and providing a fairer comparison of students.

"I think each school has to look at their culture, their own pedagogy, their own curriculum and make a decision for themselves what works best," said Michael A. Fitts, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Since 1995, the school has given traditional letter grades and sees no need to change that, Fitts said.

The University of Chicago Law School and Northwestern University School of Law said that they have no plans to change their letter grade-based systems. The University of California, Berkeley School of Law uses high honors, honors and pass designations and has no intention of changing that policy, said Stephen D. Sugarman, a professor at Berkeley. "When you have a less refined grading system, people who are employing your graduates are going to make distinctions, but they'll make them on their own grounds," he said.

Hiring.  Despite the economy, the nation’s biggest law firms—the NLJ 250-- hired roughly the same percentage of graduates from the top 20 schools in 2008 (54.6%) as they did in 2007 (54.9%). And the quality of hires arguably went up: those firms also hired 5.3% more graduates than in 2007 from their favorite schools among the top 20. Columbia was at the top of the list of schools sending the highest percentage of graduates (70.5%) directly to NLJ 250 firms, and Boston University School of Law rounded out the bottom with 41.2% of graduates going to those firms. Yale Law School fell from the top 20 list for 2008 primarily because it sends so many, roughly 40%, of its graduates to clerkships.

The hiring statistics make it clear how hard it is to change direction mid-stream for big firms, which usually operate on a two-year hiring cycle and extend offers to most summer associates. 

Compressed JD/MBA. Yale announced recently that it is adding a joint juris doctor and master of business administration program for completion in three academic years. The offering is in addition to the school's existing joint J.D. and MBA program that takes four years. Yale is not the first to offer a J.D. and MBA in three years: Indiana University School of Law — Indianapolis and Northwestern University School of Law also do.

Accreditation. Northwestern University is leading a charge to revamp the criteria that the American Bar Association follows to grant U.S. law schools accreditation.

Outgoing Northwestern University President Henry Bienen has sent a letter to 35 other law schools asking them to sign a statement that urges the ABA's Council on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar to stop stipulating employment terms at law schools. Bienen explained in the letter that the ABA had threatened to revoke his law school's accreditation because it did not provide tenure to its clinical faculty and law library director. The demands were ultimately dropped, but the letter contends it was "an attempted infringement on our authority to govern our institutions."  With supporters on both sides, the issue is dividing the law school administration community. 

Burning Your Diploma. "Jack," a self-described, anonymous, 30s-something lawyer in D.C., who graduated from Harvard Law School has caught the attention of many in the legal field.  He blogs in Adventures of Voluntary Simplicity about giving up the material excess associated with corporate law for a simpler life . Last year he burnt his diploma in a YouTube display and in spite of the economic environment has announced that he intends to leave his $300,000+ legal position.

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Lawyers are introverts, big time.  According to Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) results, almost 3/4th of lawyers, compared to only 1/4th of the general public, are introverts.  That means they go inward to charge their batteries-- preferring internal introspection to external interaction. 

On the Caliper Profile personality test, lawyers also rank astonishingly low in the sociability trait--which measures how comfortable a person is initiating and building close relationships. Low sociability scorers are less inclined to enjoy interacting with others, preferring to spend more time with information. 

Of course, we know that lawyers are thinkers--they think, analyze documents and deals, edit and write, all loner tasks.  In a recent study, lawyers ranked sixth overall on a list of the 200 best jobs for introverts, just behind the loner braniacs who work as computer software engineers and accountants. 

The question for management becomes how to integrate these loners not only into a coherent, committed organization but also into the 21st century vision of service delivery:  coherent, committed teams.  How do you overcome/compensate for the introverted nature of lawyers in day-to-day management, business development endeavors, client service?

Slowly.  Start by using the strengths of introverts--such as their tendency to (appear to) listen and to deliver well-thought-out opinions-- and proceed from there logically to the overwhelming consensus from research that collaboration improves productivity and satisfaction. 

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Washington and Lee University School of Law has announced a plan to replace all third-year academic classes with hands-on "experiential" learning.  Recently approved unanimously by faculty, the new curriculum will be phased in over 3-4 years and teach practical skills by using simulations and real-client interactions.  It will also emphasize non-traditional topics like attorney-client communication, working in teams, problem-solving and civil leadership. 

The revised program is in response to firms, corporations and judges urging greater law school emphasis on professionalism and learning in context.  Following the March 2007 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching report on inadequacies in law schools, a network of 10 law school launched a project that aims to improve how law schools operate and teach.

Another relevant area that law schools would be wise to teach is leadership and management.  Leadership and management skills are increasingly important to both the individual lawyer's career and to the success of his/her law firm/law department.  Orrick, Goodwin Proctor and a number of other law firms send their young partners to Harvard  or other business school leadership courses, and/or hold off-site workshops for junior partners on leadership and law firm economics, management and team-building.  But partnership is often late to be grooming those skills.  The next bold step will be for law schools to introduce these critical subjects, and start identifying and honing associated skills, while lawyer students are mastering legal subject matter.

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Growing future leaders at our best business schools increasingly involves teaching "softer" skills, and often using personal style assessments. One of the more rigorous and long-standing low-residence courses at Harvard Business School is the nine-week Owner President Management Course (OPM), which spans three years.  Roughly 120 business owners, only half of whom are usually from the US, are enrolled in this course.

Last year, one of the course professors, Dr. Linda Doyle, included The Birkman Method in her "Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness" classes for the OPM, a class that examines leadership styles through case studies.  The Birkman Method is a personal style assessment that identifies a number of traits, and also how those traits manifest in an organization and morph under stress.  Using the Birkman assessment, OPM participants are able to identify and analyze their own authority styles, and the strengths and problems that might develop from those styles.  Harvard has decided to continue the use of the Birkman in this course and is considering including it in other MBA courses.

Yale School of Management has also introduced personal style assessments into its curriculum.  All MBA candidates are now required to take an assessment to help identify leadership styles, strengths and potential problems.

Heidi Brooks, Director of the Leadership Development Program at YSOM and a lecturer in Organizational Behavior, is convinced that these assessments are avenues to self awareness and interactional intelligence that can only improve management effectiveness.  Since most major corporations hire and promote at least in part on the basis of similar types of assessments, having MBA candidates familiarize themselves with the testing process and the information it provides also gives them an early advantage. 

Besides Harvard and Yale, Dartmouth University's Tuck School of Business, University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School and Stanford's Graduate School of Business are among the business schools that have heard from alums and companies across the country that it is the softer skills--communication, brokering compromises, managing conflict, developing relationships and leading groups--rather than strategy or financial analysis that are missing in MBA graduates.  And are doing something to address those weaknesses. 

Stamford's B School revamped its leadership-training curriculum this fall, now requiring all first-year students to take personality tests, participate in teamwork and management-simulation exercises and critiques of their people skills.  Professional executive coaches will watch the simulations and offer advice.

At Tuck, the leadership-development program, modeled on corporate programs, that was launched in 2004, puts all first year students in teams of five.  The groups complete coursework together, help each other with assignments and then rate themselves and each other on how well they operate in a team, including how well each of them "solicits feedback and acts on it" or helps "manage conflict."  Reports on their performance are used to inform the coaching sessions the students attend and to design personal development plans.

Says Warren Bennis, professor at USC's Marshall School:  "It isn't just nice--these interpersonal skills.  It's the stuff that's necessary to lead a complex organization."

It is only a matter of time, as they say, before law schools recognize the impact of "people skills training" and follow suit.  Not only are lawyers less educated both in school and in the workplace on the importance of developing these skills and the methods of doing so, the data shows that they are as a group psychologically and behaviorally more challenged  in achieving results.  Which makes this sort of training--whether at law school or on the job-- even more critical.

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"We evaluate 'courage' as a behavioral characteristic of our lawyers, and we link this evaluation to compensation," says John P. Donahue, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of Rhodia Inc., in the July 2007 issue of InsideCounsel.   Rhodia has "embraced professional objectivity of its in-house lawyers as a core value" and Donahue wants to make sure that "our lawyers can deliver bad news to clients," with whom they are often closely aligned. 

Valuing Courage

Given the data we have about the strong tendency of lawyers to avoid rather than confront conflicts (yes, even those feisty litigators, oddly enough) (see my article "The Unique Psychological World of Lawyers"), Donahue's goal is one that can't be lauded enough.  Hospital administrators contend that a ratio of 1 conflict avoider in 4 employees results in a "dangerous workplace"--think:  "I don't want to get so&so in trouble over reusing needles" or "Maybe she'll start writing down dosages after she gets used to our procedures". 

Left to their own proclivities, lawyers' much higher rate of avoidance than hospital workers risks being just as dangerous.  Avoidance not only fails to resolve firm and client issues, but at the extreme, failure to report and confront violations of Sarbanes-Oxley, insider trading and discrimination laws, to name a few, can not only crater a career, but also a firm or a company.  Add in malpractice, fraud and the range of criminal possibilities (see, for example, Enron and other corporate demises and the unfolding saga of Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman) and silence should never be considered golden.

Hence Donahue's laudable efforts to support and promote courage.   

Which is where our thought for today could end.

Evaluating Courage

But Donahue goes further than suggesting putting in place environmental supports like "constantly talking" about maintaining objectivity, creating a culture that embraces bearers of bad news and rotating lawyers among client departments. He wants his lawyers' courage to be evaluated and then to compensate them accordingly.

Evaluating courage or any other personal characteristic as it relates to their work is a radical idea to many lawyers. Basing compensation on that evaluation is outlandish.  They don't know what a "behavioral characteristic" actually means, don't trust the evaluation process, and certainly don't think their compensation should be linked to so un-rigorous a process.  They are, after all, good lawyers, and good lawyers average in the top 10% on the characteristic "skepticism" in personality assessments (see again my article "The Unique Psychological World of Lawyers").

In this case, they should get over it.  Whether Donahue is using structured assessments or more unstructured evaluation techniques, these behavioral and personality evaluations are likely to be the key for law firms and law departments to break their recruitment and retention quandaries and, as icing on the cake, help solve the diversity dilemma.  (See my January 5, 2007 blog entry "KPMG Model Delivers Risk Management, Teamwork, Client Satisfaction and Diversity Too," reporting on KPMG's use of the Birkman Method assessment to revamp its business model and achieve retention and diversity goals.)

This is not a new position, at least for me.  (See my article "The Case for Assessment: Using Discrimination for Better Hiring," which outlines all the uses of assessments in the non-law firm world and how law firms might profit from them.)  And now the tipping point is in sight as more law departments and law firms inch towards greater use of evaluations and assessments-- and trumpet the benefits.

General Counsel Scott Terrillion, of Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc, uses an "evaluative selection method" to find the best attorneys for his company, with diversity being a natural consequence.  Roland Dumas, director of diversity for the legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, points out that "if a law firm screens candidates based on what law school they went to and how well they did there, it won't achieve much diversity.  There simply are not enough African-American and Latino law students in the top law schools who would survive the 'top quarter' cut."  Instead, Dumas recommends "capabilities" interviews, which use rich conversations to probe candidates to find those who have the talents the firm values. 

Struggling to complete with bigger firms, Kansas City, Mo.-based Blackwell Sanders developed a system for selecting and assessing associates that is more behaviorally evaluative than most firms use, and it found that using these behavioral evaluations, starting with the initial interview, enabled the firm to spot talent it might otherwise miss. The firm has documented its efforts in a handbook, From Classes to Competencies, Lockstep To Levels, which, according to the foreword by Ida Abbott, is "an act of remarkable candor and leadership ... [that] will enable law firms to expedite the design and implementation of competency-based evaluations and performance-based advancement."

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.  Blackwell Sanders doubled the total number of minority associates, tripled the number in recent incoming classes, and increased by 22% the number of females associates.  Perhaps even more notable, a "high" minority attrition rate declined to "0" within four years. 

Jeffrey N. Berman, managing partner at Berman Fink Van Horn, says that for the last 10 years his firm has taken an even more radical step--using individually administered psychological assessments as part of their hiring process. Determining assessment traits important to the firm has given the firm "a handle on the type of attorney that is going to be happy and successful here," Berman says.  

The firm tells all prospective hires, lawyers and staff, that they will be required to take a personality test if an offer is made.  Contrary to the fear of many hiring partners, Berman reports that no one has ever objected to the assessment or refused to proceed, in part, he believes, because everyone in the firm has participated and also because it has been so accurate in predicting success.   "It never ceases to amaze me how accurate the testing is," he adds, noting that it has never proved inaccurate with anyone they've hired, even when the results contravene the impression of interviewers.

So diversity is not the only benefit firms can expect from the targeted use of evaluations and assessments--law turnover and high satisfaction and performance result as well. 

Our firm offers law departments and law firms state-of-the-art advice on identifying the characteristics that produce happy, productive lawyers in your environment and designing evaluations and assessments to use in hiring and promoting those candidates.  Don't be left in the backwash.  This is a wave that can do much to move you forward.

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Herewith a short but concise history of the twisted path that has led to billing by the legal hour, and the consequences of its tyranny.

During the 1800s, US legal fees were capped "per service" by state law, and litigation fees were usually paid by the losing party.  Some lawyers were able to collect "bonuses" or charge retainers to circumvent the limitations of capped fees. 

In 1908, the ABA declared contingency fees to be ethical, which opened a new source of revenue at least for litigation matters.

By the 1930s and 40s, however, the nature of legal fees was set on its head: what had been a capped system turned into a base system.  State bars began publishing minimum fees, in most cases providing that those lawyers charging less than the minimums were to be punished.  Similarly, the ABA Model Code, which stayed in effect until 1969, declared it unethical to "undervalue services."

Helping fuel this change in attitude was the expansion in 1938 of the Federal (and many states) Rules of Civil Procedure, which made litigation potentially more complicated and therefore also less amenable to flat fees.

Over time lawyers complained that dentists and doctors were out-earning them.  A 1958 ABA pamphlet contended that lawyers were bad businessmen in comparison to other professionals, the remedy being to better track time and to keep more detailed records.  That pamphlet also suggested that lawyers work 1300 hours a year-- or 5-6 hours @ day, five days @ week in a 48-week year.

In 1975, the Supreme Court, outlawing both the capped 1800s practice and the base system from the 40s, held that set fees for legal services constituted price-fixing, and was a violation of the antitrust laws.  In response, by the late 1970s, most lawyers charged for their services based purely on hourly billing.

In 2001, the ABA asserted that too much emphasis was being placed by firms on billable hour requirements, which was leading to bill padding and general inefficiency, as well as damaging firm culture.  This time, the ABA recommended billing expectations of 2300 hours annually, composed of 1900 hours billable to clients plus a total of 400 additional hours for: firm service (100 hours), pro bono (100 hours), client development (75 hours), training and professional development (75 hours) and professional service (50 hours).

Those expectations translate into a total 9-10 client and other hours @ day, five days @ week, 48 weeks @ year.  The standard guideline for billable hours is that it takes approximately 10-12 hours to bill 8 hours.  In which case, to achieve the ABA expectations, lawyers would be expected to work 12-15 hours daily.

In April of this year, a group of more than 100 law students from several of the nation's most prominent law schools--Yale, Stanford, NYU, Berkeley-- sent an open letter to law firms on the AmLaw 100 requesting that they improve working conditions at law firms.  Students Building A Better Legal Profession called for law firms to reduce billable hour requirements and to make their billing expectations of attorneys clear.  The group offered to exchange lower salaries for fewer hours. 

The group also promised that prior to the fall recruiting season it would post a list of firms that have and have not agreed to these principles.

Touche.

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Ronda Muir, Esq., Senior Consultant at Robin Rolfe Resources, conducted a seminar on April 10 for Yale Law School students on the economics of law firm practice and how associates can add to the bottom line.  Over 40 students, in a law school of 180, signed up for Muir's presentation.

In this highly competitive legal market, associates benefit from understanding the history and underlying financial considerations that shape law practices and their policies, and how to quickly become a productive contributor to their firms' financial success.  

Yale Law School has long been a pioneer in innovative programming and was acknowledged in the Carnegie Foundation's Advancement of Teaching two-year study of the North American legal education system, published in 2006, as one of only three law schools offering a balanced curriculum.

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Temple University’s Beasley School of Law is including a course on law firm management in its curriculum for third–year law students starting this past month.

Called "Legal, Professional and Business Aspects of Law Practice," the class is divided into four sections:  law firm economics, time management, client development, and ethics related to the business of firms.  Some of the topics included are fee structures, accounting, partnership and tax law as related to firms, firm organization, and referrals.

The textbook for the course was written by a professor who teaches a similar course at Pace University. Stephen J. Friedman, dean of Pace University School of Law, and formerly commissioner of the SEC, general counsel of The Equitable and E.F. Hutton, and co-chairman of the corporate department at Debevoise & Plimpton, finds law graduates to be "ill-equipped to be effective beginning lawyers" and wants curriculum at law schools to be "more purposeful, more focused and more integrated." 

And evidently particularly more attuned to the challenges of effective legal practice and good law firm management.

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The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching summarizes its two-year study of the North American legal education system by concluding that "law school provides the beginning, not the full development, of students' professional competence and identity.  At present, what most students get as a beginning is insufficient."

The report recommends "a dynamic curriculum that moves [students] back and forth between understanding and enactment, experience and analysis," integrating traditional classes with clinical approaches to legal education.  Yale Law School, City University of New York School of Law and NYU were recognized for having balanced curricula.

Given the recent changes in a number of law schools' curricula, one commentator asked whether this "problem" wasn't already on its way to being solved.  Others asked why the Foundation had not addressed the perennial questions of improved ethics and relationship training and whether law school could be shortened to two years.

In an essay in the January 8, 2007 edition of the National Law Journal, Stephen J. Friedman, dean of Pace University School of Law, and formerly commissioner of the SEC, general counsel of The Equitable and E.F. Hutton, and co-chairman of the corporate department at Debevoise & Plimpton, finds law graduates to be "ill-equipped to be effective beginning lawyers" and wants curriculum at law schools to be "more purposeful, more focused and more integrated."  He notes that rising legal fees discourage over-the-shoulder training and rising salaries push young lawyers towards early specialization in order to be more productive.  He advocates a third year of broad and interrelated training that heps students learn how to function, as well as think, like lawyers.

Shortening law school to two years would produce a larger number of graduates to feed the maws of Wall Street and perhaps reduce tensions in the retention wars.  But more "personal relations" and "client management" types of course targeted to raising the emotional intelligence and relationship skills of law graduates would be the most direct and dramatic route to both increased attorney productivity and increased attorney and client satisfaction. 

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Pepper Hamilton has recruited one of their of-counsel attorneys who sits on a diversity committee to be responsible for a new program that Pepper Hamilton is sponsoring with Villanova University School of Law.  Pepper Hamilton will provide two three-year law school scholarships, help screen applicants for the scholarships, hire minority law students as summer associates and new associates, and provide lawyers to lecture and mentor minority college students who attend the law school's summer preparation course.

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In April 1955, Dean of Harvard Law School Erwin Griswold noted, "Many lawyers never seem to understand they’re dealing with people and not solely with impersonal law” -- a comment that unfortunately continues to ring true today, when the legal profession’s reputation suffers from an image characterized by a lack of interpersonal sensibilities. 

One of the first law school courses in the nation to apply human relations training to law was taught by Professor Howard Sacks at Northwestern Law School during the 1957-58 school year. The two-week course, entitled "Professional Relations," was offered without credit. Professor Sacks appealed to other law teachers to join in his experiment, both by offering stand-alone courses and integrating human relations training into the regular law curriculum. But a law review article written by Harvard Law Professor Alan Stone in 1971 noted that "law schools . . . have largely ignored the responsibility of teaching interviewing, counseling, negotiating, and other human relations skills." 

Legal academics continue to take the position that lawyers must learn to be more effective interpersonally. As Vanderbilt University Law Professor Chris Guthrie summarizes it, "Lawyers are analytically oriented, [and] emotionally and interpersonally underdeveloped."

It’s more than just a matter of being “nice.” Our survey of Emotional Intelligence and Excellence in Lawyering shows lawyers who are listed in Best Lawyers in America score significantly higher in emotional intelligence than the average lawyer. There’s excellence in that intelligence.

To participate in our study, see our entry “Emotional Intelligence and Excellence in Lawyering” under the topic Emotional Intelligence.

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Harvard Law School’s goal in its revised curriculum this year is to teach young lawyers how to “resolve client dilemmas.” How exactly is that done successfully in the modern practice of law? By calculating dollars won in the final judgment, for example? By assessing the investment of time and energy versus the payoff? 

Everyone has by now heard of the prevailing sentiment that no one wins in litigation any more. If that statement is even somewhat true, what is the course to resolving a client’s dilemma in a way that will be viewed as successful? 

The mediation industry has arisen almost entirely as a reaction to the mistrust of lawyers and what is perceived as their conflict-escalating processes. Even arbitration is becoming viewed as saddled with some of the time-consuming, rigid aspects of litigation, and in-house counsel are moving towards mediation, or at least including mediation in their bag of tools. Paul Adams, Associate General Counsel at the Gap, finds mediation “a very, very powerful process with a strong emotional component. It’s informal and the plaintiff feels like he’s controlling what’s happening.” He also notes that it allows for more creative resolutions.

Thane Rosenbaum argues in his book The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What’s Right (HarperCollins) that what clients want most is an emotional relief--to feel that their position has been understood and acknowledged. "Clients of all stripes walk out of the courtroom saying 'That’s it? I didn’t even get to say what I think?'" Lawyers, he argues, are limited by their legal vision—rather than just channeling their clients’ anger through a legal claim, such as breach of contract, which may not really address the client’s underlying grievance, lawyers should be listening to and acknowledging the hurt, and be able to offer nontraditional ways for that hurt to be addressed. While Rosenbaum’s claim that our current system of justice is morally deficient does not seem to have been challenged, his suggestions as to how to change it have been met with charges of being naive and impractical.

Web.com’s Corporate Counsel Jonathan B. Wilson’s book Out of Balance: Prescriptions for Reforming the American Litigation System takes a less radical approach to reforming how we address our clients’ dilemmas, including advocating for arbitration, mediation and a number of other alternatives.

Thomas Barton, who teaches creative problem solving and preventive law at The Center for Creative Problem Solving at California Western School of Law in San Diego, extols creative legal problem solving not only for the satisfaction it gives the client, but also for the effect it has on the lawyer involved: it feels great to do creative work that really resolves the dilemma. See www.cwsl.edu/cps According to Barton, there are two major steps involved: expanding the context of the problem so that all the dimensions are exposed, and building a larger repertoire for resolution, which includes being open to whatever constitutes “success” in the client’s mind.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink cites research that shows that doctors who are viewed as a valued resource and are able to build a trusted relationship with their patients are not sued –even if they have committed malpractice. While admittedly a subjective standard, shouldn’t lawyers be aiming for that same type of relationship with their clients? The one that makes them “right” no matter what their advice is?

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Christopher Columbus Langdell, first dean of Harvard Law School in 1870, formalized what is now classic legal education, pioneering the use of the Socratic method and a course of study driven by reading appellate court decisions. But “the world of law has changed,” Harvard Law School’s Dean Elena Kagan recently announced, and so finally has Harvard’s curriculum. This year first year law students will be required to take a new course, among others, on legal problem solving, i.e., resolving clients’ dilemmas rather than simply analyzing abstract legal issues. Other law schools, including Stanford and Northwestern, have incorporated similar programs into their curriculum. 

A recent survey conducted by Pace University School of Law of midsize law firms in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey asked firms to name a law school with the ideal curriculum. Nearly 60% couldn’t identify even one. About a quarter of the firms cited the greatest weakness of law school graduates as a lack of real-world experience. Over 20% of the firms polled felt that law school curriculum should include some clinical experience.

“You can get a J.D. without having any connection with a client,” said Mark Heyrman, director of clinical programs at the University of Chicago Law School. “No medical student could graduate without at least having some patient contact.”

The clinical component of law school education is expanding. And there are external prods. The American Bar Association now requires accredited law schools to offer “real-life practice experiences.” Some state bars are also mandating certain client training before associates can interact with clients. And, as pointed out in an earlier blog note, corporate clients may designate how senior an associate has to be before working on their matters.

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