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

Regardless of your politics, the last year has been a fabulous display of woman-power in the political arena. For the first time in American history, a woman was a major contender for her party's presidential nomination, and came damned close to winning it.

Without Monday morning quarterbacking her entire campaign, there are some interesting nuggets to retrieve from her run, perhaps telling us something about the future of women in politics and in power generally.

As someone who assists women lawyers in developing good business producing skills, I was interested to see the following note about Senator Clinton in the Sunday, June 8 New York Times:

"Unlike her opponents, Mrs. Clinton refused to make solicitation calls to donors and had to be talked into calling the party officials known as superdelegates."

Sound familiar?  Hesitation to make direct appeals for support is a recurring theme in the work I do with women. Results should speak for themselves, they say. I shouldn't have to ask. Who wants to be a squeaky wheel? Men, on the other hand, I find, tend to take the attitude that if they don't ask, how can someone say yes, and that if they are not the ones to champion their own cause, why expect others to?

What seems to underlie the hesitation on women's part to "ask" is a fear of having to deal with rejection and also an uneasiness about putting the relationship at risk.  What if they say no? What do I do/feel? And what happens to our relationship then?

There is an argument that this kind of sensitivity makes women better in the relationship building department, a critical part of developing business.  So is this a tendency that should be overcome or preserved? The answer is both.  The sensitivity should be protected but the kind of fear that immobilizes should be allayed.   Good relationship builders know how to keep the relationship even if there are disagreements.  Good relationship builders survive rejection and help the relationship survive as well. 

Learning and believing the self-talk and attitudes that help overcome the hesitation is one way to start coping with the fear. Taking the risk and then seeing that the results are not as scary as anticipated also helps.  It is a matter of venturing into the unknown, or what has been projected to be a distasteful known, with good intentions and a willingness to listen.  So you get the benefit of both high sensitivity and, hey, if you don't ask, how can they say yes?

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Shedding additional light on earlier explorations in this forum of the subject of happiness is a new book written by Arthur Brooks that distills mountains of data on the subject.  For one thing, politics and happiness turn out to be clearly correlated.  But the correlation may not be what you think.

For starters, conservatives are happier than liberals.  Much happier.  And they have been for over 35 years.  Almost twice as many who describe themselves as "conservative" or "very conservative" say they are "very happy" (44%) as those who consider themselves "liberal" or "very liberal" (25%).  Brooks ascribes that result to three factors:  conservatives are twice as likely to be married, twice as likely to attend church every week, and more likely to have children.  They are NOT, however, richer than their more liberal, more miserable cohorts.

In fact, when the religious and political data are combined, a fascinating continuum of happiness appears.  Religious conservatives are ten times more likely to report being "very happy" than "not too happy" (50% to 5%).  Secular conservatives and religious liberals are about equally happy in the middle. And secular liberals are as likely to say they are "not too happy" as to say they are "very happy" (22% vs. 22%).  

In addition, extremists on both sides are happier than their more moderate cohorts.  Of those "extremely liberal," 35% say they are very happy (vs. 22% of the ordinary liberals) compared to 48% of extreme conservatives (vs. 43% of their less extreme brethren). Brooks attributes the extremists' happiness to their conviction that they are right, which, he notes, often leads them to conclude that the other side is not merely wrong, but evil.  Evidently two-thirds of America's far left and half of the far right say they dislike not only the other side's ideas, but also the people who hold them!

Brooks finds the determinant underlying happiness to be attitude.  Conservatives are more optimistic, believing that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can succeed.  Liberals, on the other hand, tend to focus on injustice and victimization, encouraging people to feel helpless and aggrieved.

So what does this mean for us hard-working lawyers?  The striking correlation is with the well-established personality trait that lawyers exhibit en masse:  pessimism, which, according to Brooks' analysis, should mean that we are also a less happy lot. 

And indeed we are.  It is now well-documented that lawyers are less happy in their work and their personal lives than nearly every other profession surveyed.

Maybe we should get hitched, join a church and start a brood? 

For a full book review of "Gross National Happiness," go to The Economist.

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The use of assessments worldwide is rapidly expanding and lawyers are still lagging at the back of the pack--way back. 

An article by Lisa Belkin in yesterday's New York Times notes that there are 2,500 "profiling instruments" that companies rely on more every year when deciding whom to hire or promote. Sixty-five percent of companies surveyed reported using assessments in 2006, up almost double from the 34 percent reported a year earlier, according to Staffing Industry Report, a human-resources newsletter.

To paraphrase her article, the content of tests has stayed more or less constant for three decades. What has changed is the workplace. The cost of losing experienced employees now represents a tremendous lost of investment.  "Employers want a guarantee that a new hire will stick — and the best way to do that is to make sure that job and candidate are a good fit in the first place."

Globalization that separates performance and accountability/review across continents has further complicated the process of finding and training the best person for the job. So offering on-line testing across those continents makes these assessments not only appealing but also fast.  

I am often asked by potential clients, particularly those who have been in corporate settings, if we either offer or recommend simple, cost-effective assessments for them to use in attorney recruitment, training and development.  While we can recommend and administer a number of good assessments that can be highly useful -- Myers Briggs Type Indicator (the most popular test in the country, used by 89 of the Fortune 100 and taken by 2.5 million Americans each year), Caliper's Personality Profile, Birkman Method, MayerSaloveyCaruso Emotional Intelligence Test, Thomas Kilmann Conflict Instrument, among others--they are not inexpensive and they are not targeted to lawyers. 

A recent college graduate friend took a Johnson O'Connor aptitude assessment, a common test for teens and young adults to help determine career possibilities.  Since her father and grandfather are lawyers and she is considering going to law school, she was surprised to find that "lawyer" was not one of her designated career possibilities.  She was told that a few years ago Johnson O'Connor stopped offering "lawyer" as an option for any of their test-takers.  The reason?  They are no longer able to reliably correlate attributes or aptitudes with the successful practice of law.

And therein lies one of the problems with assessing attorneys.  While research has indeed identified a number of attributes that lawyers exhibit to a greater degree than others-- for example, high pessimism, skepticism, urgency and autonomy, and low resilience, sociability and collaboration-- the problem lies in the data that shows the impact these characteristics are having on practitioners.  These very attributes present in so many lawyers are also the attributes contributing to the dissatisfaction and distress that the legal profession exhibits:  astonishingly high rates of depression and other mental illness, substance abuse, suicide, and divorce, for starters. High rates of dissatisfaction that are also contributing to the staggering drop-out and attrition rates.

In addition to the challenge of identifying what makes for a good (as well as well-adjusted lawyer), there is also the expense of doing that well.  The testing often done at corporations is highly individualized, developed after an extensive review of what attributes in fact produce productive and satisfied employees at that particular company, and sometimes at that particular location.  Google hires over 10,000 new employees each year and enjoys the amazingly low attrition rate of 4%, but to accomplish that.it invests in a highly detailed questionnaire and assessment that is developed from extensive employee data   That process is not inexpensive. 

Not only is it the individual lawyers who have complex and sometimes hard-to-read attributes.  Law firms and law departments, often in spite of their studied denial, also have "personalities."  Understanding those personalities is critical in determining the type of person who will thrive or fail there. 

Our unique expertise in understanding the attributes of individual lawyers, as well as each legal workplace, makes us ideally suited to help you enter the challenging world of 21st century attorney assessment, development and retention.

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In the era of the global law firm comes (wisely, in our view) the introduction of the position of Global Chief People Officer into law firm senior management .  Reed Smith announced last week that its creation of  the position underscores the increasing importance the firm places on running itself as a business.

"You see more of this in global companies," said Gary Sokulski, Reed Smith's chief operating officer. "Since we're a people business, it's only natural to have someone who focuses on the people aspect.  It's similar to a human resources officer, but focused more on employee concerns such as work-life balance, better managing and evaluating talent, and creating higher-level training programs."

Since 2001, Reed Smith has consolidated with firms from around the world, including in New York, California, Chicago, London, Abu Dhabi, Greece, Dubai, Paris, Hong Kong and Beijing, increasing in size from 600 attorneys based in the U.S. to more than 1,500 worldwide. Meeting the challenges of that much lateral integration alone would merit a full-time professional.

DLA Piper, with more than 3,600 lawyers over 64 offices in 25 countries, and arguably (depending on which moment you're counting) the second largest law firm in the world, has had a Global Chief People Officer for several years, Robert Halton, headquartered in London. 

"Unlike other organizations, the cliche of people being the best asset is completely true in law firms. We don't have any machinery or stores, so it's the people providing the competitive edge in the market. Getting the right people is crucial to the success of a law firm, and keeping that pipeline of talent flowing is also crucial," Halton says.

Small and mid-size firms face equally critical people issues as do the new behemoths, but for them, adding a dedicated full-time professional to firm overhead in order to address those issues often is unrealistic. 

We at RRR offer an Outside/Inside Consulting arrangement whereby we will spend a designated number of days per week or month as your Chief People Officer.  Our experience brings efficient expertise to your people concerns in an affordable format.

Make way for a Global Chief People Officer at your firm, whatever the size.

 

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As many of the biggest law firms are concluding, “professional development” has become the preferred vehicle for addressing diversity attrition. Professional development encompasses enhanced orientation, mentoring, assignment and delegation processes, leadership training, career planning, diversity training, management skills, feedback training, business-development training, affinity groups and other tactics aimed at recruiting and keeping a diverse associate group.

The concept of professional development or talent management did not exist in law firms 20 years ago, and the data shows a clear pattern of women and minorities historically reporting less assistance with professional development, as well as lower job satisfaction, compared with white males.

Now most large law firms have some sort of professional development program and recent data from the NALP Foundation shows that this trend toward formalized programs is paying off. In 1998, 20% of associates left their positions at or near the end of their second year of employment. This year, entry-level lawyers are more likely to make their first move at the end of their third year of employment, staying 30% longer. 

The ABA Commission on Women engaged the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to examine why retention rates for white men are so much higher than those for women of color, and women of color retention rates are higher than those for men of color and white women. Consistent with the NALP’s data, the study found specifically that women of color felt excluded from networking opportunities, felt they were denied desirable assignments, and had limited access to client development opportunities, thereby making their billable hours targets harder to achieve.   

The NALP found that white men are more likely to report a consistent workload, regular feedback and intellectual challenge in their work, and they also report the intention of staying longer at their firms.

A consistent workload, regular feedback and intellectual growth are matters within the control of each firm, and are geometrically enhanced with the involvement of a person charged with professional development.

What specifically can firms incorporate into their processes to improve diversity retention? For starters, here is a short list.

• Exit interviews
• Coaching for partners to improve associate management and feedback techniques
• Formal mentoring program
• Color-blind assignment program
• Sophisticated evaluation and feedback forms and procedures

But the best way for firms to systematically enhance diversity retention is to establish a professional development department/person/consultant who can provide benchmarks to identify areas for improvement, formulate goals and then work with the diversity committee, the associate recruitment committee and associate managers to realize those goals. 

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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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A recent article in the New York Times on young 20-something Internet mega-millionaires quoted one as saying “You ask yourself, ‘Why am I not happier given how lucky I’ve been?’”

While we as lawyers, being supremely circumspect, would rarely verbalize this sort of “squishy” sentiment out in the open, given the levels of unhappiness in our profession, it is a question we should be asking ourselves. 

So here are some of the findings about "happiness," which has exploded as a subject of research over the last few years. Let’s start with the data on the current state of happiness in the US.

Recent surveys point to a relatively high “happiness quotient” these days:

·             86% of Americans are content with their jobs (General Social Survey)

·             76% are satisfied with their family income (Pew Research Center Survey)

·             62% expect their personal situation to get better over the next five years vs. only 7% who expect it to get worse

·             65% of Americans are satisfied over all with their own lives—one of the highest personal satisfaction rates in the world.

As the query of that Internet mega-millionaire illustrates, happiness is not correlated with financial resources or even political stability: countries like Nigeria, El Salvador, Columbia, Mexico and Puerto Rico (along with Switzerland, Denmark and Canada) register higher rates of happiness than the US in the World Values Survey. Other countries, such as Romania, Russia and other former Soviet countries, consistently score at the bottom.

This fairly rosy picture in the US becomes decidedly darker when we factor in the “happiness” data on lawyers:

·             Lawyers generally have one of the highest dissatisfaction rates with their work of all industries/professions, with 65% of young associates surveyed by the ABA last year intending to change professions within two years.

·             Lawyers also have the highest “personal distress” rates of any industry, exhibiting dramatically higher incidences of suicide, mental illness, divorce and substance abuse than other industries. 

Women lawyers seem particularly effected by these developments:

·             Fewer women are seeking law degrees: from 1963 through 2001 female enrollment at law schools climbed nearly every year, from 3.7% to a peak of over 50%; since 2002, however, the percentage of women in law schools has declined each year, currently down to 46%.

·             At a time of very high attorney turnover generally (over 20% leave their jobs every year), the highest drop-out-of-the-profession-entirely demographic is women.

·             In spite of many years of women in the "pipeline," only a small proportion of women stay to become partners in law firms (17%) or senior legal counsel in corporations (18%).

The message seems to be that, in spite of Americans' general glee, few lawyers are happy living the lawyer's life.

What Makes Us Happy?

As it turns out, over the last few years a wave of books on happiness, primarily written by academics, have been published. Among them are:

The Pursuit of Happiness, by David G. Myers

Happiness, The Nature and Nurture of Joy and Contentment by David Lykken

Happiness, A History by Darrin M. McMahon

Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman

The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama and Dr. Howard C. Cutler

The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Happier: Learn the Secrets of Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment by Tal Ben Shahar

Most of these books are based on David Lykken's findings that there is an individual “set point” of happiness to which most people revert, regardless of their life circumstances—illness, financial concerns, family problems. Lottery winners and paraplegics, those both accepted and rejected as partners or general counsel, all on average return to their baseline levels of happiness within a year.

If health and other circumstances don't impact our happiness, what does? Jonathan Haidt compares our emotional life in The Happiness Hypothesis to a small, conscious monkey riding a large, unconscious elephant: in many ways we are estranged from the great bulk of our own inner feelings. The running commentary in our minds about what we feel and why is often simply wrong, he contends. For example, research subjects unknowingly hypnotized to react in a specific way to a cue quickly come up with rational, and in their mind truthful, “explanations” of why they acted that way, even though those explanations are causally entirely beside the point: their reaction was programmed in their unconscious by the hypnosis. 

Not only are we not able to access a great part of our inner feelings, evidently we are not very good at analyzing the happiness data that we do have access to. Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness explains that we are very bad at remembering what made us happy in the past and in predicting what will make us happy in the future, often overestimating the bang we will get and how long it will last. For example, people often list children as a source of happiness, yet the data indicates that children in fact are "extremely negative," "mildly negative" or have no effect on overall happiness. (More about this later.)

Could We Be Happier?

Continue Reading...

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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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An article by Ronda Muir entitled "The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Law Firm Partners" appears in the July/August 2007 issue of the ABA Law Practice Management Section's Law Practice Magazine. 

Among the attributes that emotionally intelligent partners bring are better judgment, higher productivity, enhanced business development skills and better client relationship management.  Most importantly, high emotional intelligence fuels the kind of leadership-- one which promotes collaboration and teamwork-- that is critical to excellence in the 21st Century, and that can provide firms with a competitive edge.

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In connection with the 129th annual International Tradmark Association meeting in Chicago, Ronda Muir, Senior Consultant, presented a program on Wednesday, May 2, at Robin Rolfe Resource's Women's Power Breakfast for seventy senior corporate and law firm women in intellectual property.   Her presentation focused on what makes lawyers, and women lawyers, different from other professions and how to use those differences to make good lawyers better.  This year INTA welcomed over 8,500 registrants from around the world.

 

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Give yourself the advantages that insights from sophisticated behavioral science tools and informed collaboration can produce.  Out of ideas for how to motivate your team?  Can't take another day with a difficult boss or colleague?  Strung out from too many committments and not enough time?  Looking for a meaningful way to both practice law and live your life?

Achieve improvements in your professional and personal life, including progress in leadership and management skills, work/life balance, conflict management, business development and time and resources management. 

Our experienced lawyer coaches use their expertise and assessments to give you the tools to maximize your strengths, raise your emotional intelligence and social IQ, as well as benefit your bottom-line results.  You choose the program that best suits your needs and schedule.

For further information, contact RMuir@RobinRolfeResources.com. 

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Ronda Muir, Esq., Senior Consultant at Robin Rolfe Resources, was featured as a speaker at a conference on Risk Management for the Modern Law Firm, sponsored by ARK Group. The conference was held in Chicago on April 17 and 18, 2007. 

Muir's presentation was on the risks that arise in managing a law firm's greatest asset: its people. She pointed out the ways in which lawyers are different from all other professionals, the challenges and risks that those differences pose to management, and how to use those differences to make good lawyers better. 

Participants raved:

• "Innovative, new information!"
• "Excellent, new material of real value.  I would love even more detail and time on this topic."
• "Great presentation!" 
• "Great speaker!  Knowledgeable and forward thinking."

ARK Group also lauded Muir's participation: "Your involvement was pivotal to the success of the program… and brought a fresh perspective to the agenda."  

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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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Carol S. Dweck, a Stanford University psychology professor, is the author of the recently published "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success," which documents how people with a "growth" mind-set who believe they can improve themselves out-perform those with a "fixed" mind-set who believe their capabilities are fixed.  "The growth mind-set person recognizes that you're not good at something before you're good at it," Dweck points out. 

In one instance, Dweck found that when people experience a blow to their self-esteem, those in a fixed mindset repair their self-image by trying to feel that they are better than others, which n a business setting might take the form of blaming or taking things out on a colleague. Those in a growth mindset recover their self-esteem by trying to improve themselves and correct their deficiencies.

While it's gratifying to see the impact of personal belief documented so clearly, parts of this thesis are hardly new-- optimists outperform pessimists across all industries and job descriptions (except in law), in part simply because they believe they are capable of effecting change.  And the success that this sense of empowerment generates in any arena leads to the expectation of and achievement of success in others.  Optimists are also more resilient--understanding that specific setbacks are just that, and not a referendum on their personal worth, which makes them more likely to persevere.

Which brings us to lawyers, the least optimistic of any career, for whom Dr. Seligman has documented that pessimism is in fact a career enhancer, and who consistently score low on resilience.  For lawyers, the new psychology of success begins with systematically training themselves to confine their pessimism to their legal analysis and to bolster their resilience and optimism in the rest of their lives, including management.

In any event, Dweck's overall assertion that rigid thinking benefits no one, least of all yourself, and that a change of mind is always possible, is welcome.

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A recent study conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership found that effective leadership has changed over the last five years. Eighty-four percent (84%) of those polled said leaders today are valued for collaboration skills, such as building and mending relationships, rather than solitary heroics, the standard five years ago. Specifically important is being able to "enhance co-worker relationships." This change is due, according to those surveyed, to the more far-flung demands of leadership, which often go beyond an individual's capability, creating a need to work interdependently with others across boundaries—geographic, language, cultural, and expertise.

Law firm and law departments would do well to take note of this study-- "leader" is often a designation born out of unrelated circumstances-- a lawyer has extra time, was good at revenue production so will maybe be good at this too, or is simply senior, none of which relates to his or her ability to build a collaborative organization that supports individuals and teams. 

In a recent interview, Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ and more recently Social Intelligence, commented on the error many make in choosing leadership:  "Too many organizations are rather naive about the ingredients of leadership and make the classic mistake of assuming that someone who is an outstanding individual contributor would therefore be an outstanding leader. If they're an outstanding individual contributor, keep them as an individual contributor. Give them a raise," he says emphatically.

This study brings that point home in spades.

 

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The Board of Law Examiners proposed increasing the passing score on the New York bar exam from 660 to 675 in 5-point intervals, the first of which was instituted in July 2005 with the next two increments scheduled for the following two summers.  Those have been delayed and the National Conference of Bar Examiners has issued a 155-page report on the diversity impact of that proposal.  If the full 15-point increase were instituted (which is significantly less than the 33 point increase initially considered), fully half of all African-Americans would fail the exam--up over 8% from the prior fail rate.  The impact on other races would also be significant--an additional 5% of Hispanics, 6% of Asians and 10% of Puerto Ricans would fail, but their total pass rates would in each case remain over 65%.  Only the African-American pass rate would fall below 50%. 

This data corresponds interestingly with the study conducted by Professor Sander at the University of California, Los Angeles, which has generated fierce debate.  Sander's provocative study concludes that a major reason blacks are not as well represented among law firm partners as they are among new associates is that they have much lower average grades than their cohorts.  Sander also indicts the law schools for admitting blacks who are not prepared enough to do well at law schools.  Very few blacks graduate from the top 30 law schools with high grades.  While blacks make up 1-2% of law students with grades in the top half of their class, they make up 8% of corporate law firm hires, yet they are one-fourth as likely to make partner, and they leave large firms at 2-3 times the rate of white associates.  An interesting fact is that blacks have a much better shot at partnership at smaller firms, which are less likely to hire associates with lower than standard grades.

Some commentators have questioned the importance of grades (women lawyers have higher grades than men but are also under-represented as partners), others have attributed the fallout to a lack of mentoring or training, or to the fierce competition for able blacks, who are often hired away by clients, while still others contend that the big firm hiring practice sets blacks up for failure, reinforcing stereotypes on the way.

The importance of the two studies converge, particularly for New York law firms, if raising the bar pass rate further reduces the number of eligible black associates that firms can choose from.  Will those reduced numbers make prestigious firms lower their grade standards even further, with the implication that retention rates may drop even lower?

There is no question that any firm solving the diversity puzzle reaps a hiring, marketing and productivity bonanza.  Successfully hiring and integrating blacks, as well as other minorities, including women, requires that a firm understand its own and its associates' cultural strengths and biases, have an active, long-term integration program that addresses each specific attorney and his/her goals, and honestly, consistently and regularly evaluate its own progress.

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Between 1986 and 2005, the number of lawyers employed by the nation’s 100 largest law firms nearly tripled, from roughly 25,000 to more than 70,000, and the most recent report is that the Am Law 100 gained 4% in numbers of lawyers this past year. During this time the number of top students at top law schools has not increased measurably.

In the last two years, firm attrition rates have gone up dramatically. According to NALP reports, in 2003 53% of fifth-year associates had changed firms. In 2005, that percentage rose to 78%, more than three-fourths of associates, and 81% for women of color. According to The American Lawyer, in 2005 2,429 partners left their firms for other attorney jobs, compared with 2,081 in 2004, up more than 20%.

More and more law firms are trying to land a limited number of top-tier associates, who will, once bagged, nonetheless leave their firms—most while still associates, but others as partners. Therein lies the recruiting challenge.

Some firms are looking to alums to fatten their recruiting pool. On October 16 2006, The National Law Journal highlighted how firms are working harder to maintain ties to alums, sometimes succeeding in bringing that talent back to the firm. Vinson & Elkins partner Veronica Lewis, who left to go in-house for more flexibility, was courted personally by V&E’s managing partner, and returned as a partner after 18 months. Gibson Dunn was cited as viewing rehires as a growing component of its recruiting program. 

The National Law Journal’s Sept 25, 2006 special section on the Business of Law included a lead article on the hunt for talent. It suggests that top students at less prestigious schools be carefully considered and that summer programs should more accurately reflect real legal practice, both to educate the associate and to test the students’ interest in and commitment to the practice of law. Third, it advocates that firms “integrate, integrate” to bolster retention generally and diversity specifically. However, the assertion that attorneys envision their law firm as not merely a job, but a professional home base that they return to after government or academic stints, is out of touch with the realities of modern legal practice. As ideal as that goal may be, given the turnover in attorney ranks, both associate and partner, loyalty to a firm looks fast to becoming an outdated concept. 

Another alternative is to make sweeping changes in the way you hire and care for your associates.  Assessments that corporations have used for decades more accurately pinpoint those candidates who are likely to flourish in the practice of law as you practice it and who can add a healthy mix to your current team.  Refining your culture by addressing the most important concerns of your hires will go much further towards raising retention rates than throwing another wad of money at them. 

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While Emotional Intelligence has become a popular buzzword, the researchers on whose work Daniel Goleman based his bestselling Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, only formulated an assessment to test EI in 2002. Called the MSCEIT (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test), it is the only EI assessment based on abilities instead of self-reports, i.e., it gauges your actual EI performance instead of asking how good you are at EI. 

Does it make any difference whether a lawyer is emotionally intelligent or not? To determine whether there is a correlation between emotional intelligence and excellence in lawyering, we undertook a study. 

We began with lawyers listed in The Best Lawyers in America as our "excellent" lawyers. Those willing to participate were given the MSCEIT and follow-up feed-back free of charge. 

Our participating lawyers practice across the country: Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Columbia, SC and New York. Their firms range from a small, 15 lawyer boutique to regional powerhouses to global behemoths. And the results are interesting.

• This group of excellent lawyers performed 20% higher on average than lawyers generally.
• This group's highest score was in Understanding Emotions, the most cerebral of the four branches of EI, and the branch that most lawyers perform best in.
• Also like most lawyers, this group's lowest score was in the Perceiving Emotions branch. Although notably higher than the average lawyer score in this area, even excellent lawyers barely score the national average.
• Excellent lawyers score significantly higher than lawyers generally on the sub-branch Managing Emotional Relationships. 

While these excellent lawyers, like lawyers in general, are better at analyzing emotions than recognizing them, they are operating on a higher EI plane than their colleagues. The excellent lawyers' significantly higher average total results and significantly higher ability to manage emotional relationships may account for at least a part of their excellence: they are generally more emotionally intelligent and they are better in relationships with clients and colleagues.

Stay tuned for some of the (non-identifying) specifics on the best performing individuals.

CALL TO BEST LAWYERS TO PARTICIPATE

While we have a good start, we want even more results to produce a more reliable study. We invite any lawyers now listed in The Best Lawyers in America to take the MSCEIT—a 40-minute confidential on-line survey-- at our expense. We will provide you with individual feed-back, a written report, and the opportunity to have your firm identified as high performing.

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The last few months have seen five new studies relating to diversity and the practice of law:

1.  A new study by the ABA’s Commission on Women in the Professions entitled “Visible Invisibility: Women of Color in Law Firms” found that few women of color are offered equal opportunity and most choose to leave their firms rather than stay and fight for equality.   One of the study’s promoters decried how similar the results are to the results in the studies her committee conducted on the same issues in the 1990s. While, largely in response to client demands, more law firms are attempting to hire for more racial diversity, few pay attention to what happens once these women actually start working at the firm. The attrition rate for these lawyers, according to NALP, reaches nearly 100 % within eight years. At least one reason for their lack of success is laid to the lack of like-situated mentors. While there is a tendency to believe we are past the overt discrimination, 49% of women and 34% of men of color reported harassment or discrimination, compared to 47% of white women and 2.5% of white men. However, the primary reason women of colored reported for leaving legal practice was to obtain greater work-life balance, which is also the most frequently reported reason for all other groups surveyed to leave.

2.  The Inside Counsel/Dickstein Shapiro Diversity Survey, published October, 2006, focused on the diversity progress in corporate law departments based on 377 in-house counsel responses, including 19% participation from general counsel, with respondents being 70% white,14% black; 7% Hispanic and 7% Asian. 

The primary findings of that study are consistent with the ABA report above that looked at law firms, including: 

§         Legal departments lack racial diversity.  "The average legal department that responded had 46 attorneys of which 3.5% are non-Caucasian;  the median department employs 11 attorneys of which 1 is non-white."

§         Less than 9% of legal departments are headed by non-Caucasian general counsel

§         Senior leadership fails to set goals--only 32% of companies surveyed had formal diversity polices.

§         Commitment from the GC and CEO is essential, although often leadership compensation is not tied to meeting diversity goals.

3.  “Presumed Equal: What America’s Top Women Lawyers Really Think About Their Firms” surveyed 16,000 lawyers to report on what women attorneys experience in law firms, updating a 1993 report and its 1998 followup. The report found that many women believe their firms don’t provide opportunities to make partner or foster an environment that values diversity and family.  The survey looks to general trends in disparate treatment that women experience at various law firms and highlights specific weaknesses of 105 individual firms ("most prestigious law firms in the US"). It scores the firms based on responses and ranks them nationally and by geographic location.

Since it was initially created to assist law students in their consideration of job opportunities, this survey attempts to provide a discourse about what it is like to be a woman at a top law US law firm and evaluates environment for women to achieve personal goals such as (i) making partner, (ii) finding a mentor, and (iii) life balance.

The report concludes, "Objective indicators still show a disparity between the relative power held by men and women in the legal field and indicate that gender is still relevant to women's success." 

The report also finds "that long-term professional satisfaction for women is not based on the quality of a woman's work. At present, the reluctance of male dominated partnerships to mentor female attorneys, the persistance of gender biases regarding women's roles, and the tacit penalties that women endure for taking advantage of maternity leave, to name only a few dynamics at play, still profoundly shape women's experience within the legal profession."

4.  "Creating Pathways to Success: Advancing and Retaining Women in Today's Law Firms, " issued by the Women's Bar of DC in May 2006, examined better ways to stem the departure of women from law practice.  While the report includes many specific actions, the findings generally are that there are more stumbling blocks to the success of women in law practice than are currently being addressed by the commonly used methods of supporting and promoting women.  The most common current practices focus on specific programs in specific business areas in a silo-like approach.  The stumbling blocks, however, cross broad issues and fields but unite on the key issues of  how women can achieve the level of business success they expect of themselves consistent with societal demands and personal creativity.  

5.  In October 2006, the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) reported on its survey of the American Lawyer Media's 200 largest firms, measuring the comparative role of female lawyers at different levels of seniority, types of partnership opportunities, where women stand in relation to men in firm governance and comparative compensation at the same levels of seniority.  According to NAWL, the survey findings reflect the situation at law deparatments as well.

With responses from 103 of the 200 firms (and against the background that women have been 50% of law school graduates for each of the past 15 years), women constitute:

§         16% percent of equity partners

§         26% of non-equity partners

§         28% of "of counsel" or other special counsel positions

§         45% of associates

Looking at the 16% representation among equity partners, in an era when partnerships are made within 7-10 years, many of us would have expected greater gender parity at all but the most senior levels of law firm partnership. 

The statistics also reveal that of the 16% percent of all equity partners, women are more heavily represented among the more junior classes of equity partners, constituting 21% of equity partners who graduated law school between 1990 and 1995, and 24% of those who graduated in 1996 or later.

But NAWL warned that the trend emerging from such figures is unclear, noting that women who have recently become equity partners could yet leave the profession, and that even at 24 percent of equity partners, women are substantially under-represented relative to their 45 percent of the total number of associates.  

In terms of leadership positions:

§         16% of the members of law firm governance committees are women. 

§         15% of the firms reported that up to 25% of the members of the highest governing committee were women

§         10% of responding firms reported that there were no women on the highest governing committee

§         5% of managing partners are women.

As to compensation, of 62 firms responding, 92% said that the highest paid lawyer was male.  Of the 35 firms that provided compensation breakdowns, male equity partners were paid an average of $510,000 whereas female equity partners averaged compensation was $429,000.  The survey recognized that the higher number of men at senior partnership levels could account for the significant difference in compensation.

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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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Another message that the increase in associate departures may be sending is that our attempts at mentoring are failing. Mentoring has become a favored buzzword recently that many law firms at least pay lip service to.  Most of these programs tend to fairly arbitrarily assign new associates to mentors, dictate a certain number of meetings annually, and require reams of paperwork. They are, in short, more a product of lawyers’ natural tendency to be “thinkers” (78% of lawyers) instead of “feelers” (22%), using the Myers-Briggs personality trait descriptions. Mentoring is business shorthand for “someone to watch over me,” a skill that does not come naturally to attorneys. 

Sullivan & Cromwell has recently announced a revamping of its mentoring program for its general practice group in New York and Washington. There are separate programs for junior associates—paired with mid-level associates who focus on acclimation and socializing—and more senior associates, who are paired with two partners to help develop skills. 

Why are law firms and law departments providing this “soft” support for young attorneys? There is, of course, always the “herd mentality” argument, that if other firms are doing it in this competitive talent market, so must we. But that begs the bigger issue. Why, after generations of no such official “coddling,” have associates begun to need this sort of assistance, and, more astonishingly, firms have been providing it? 

Why firms provide mentoring is partly in response to what firms view as ill-prepared and poorly motivated young associates, coupled with the exodus of those associates when they are throw in to sink or swim.  Add to this the growing bigness of law firms, with more extensive policies, rules and procedures, and mentoring becomes a formalized, lengthy orientation process. 

But I would wager that an even bigger reason behind the need for mentoring originates in the personal lives of the Gen Xers, Yers and Zers themselves. These young people are more likely to have been supported financially and academically up to and through college and law school, so they expect continued support. They have also grown up in a more generally “therapized” culture, where identifying needs and asking for them to be met is a sign of mental health. Finally, the continued breakdown of the nuclear American family and its broad geographical dispersion may mean that, as their careers progress, these young adults need to replace or supplement lagging or distant family support with relationships at work.   If they're not getting that support from your firm or department, they will go elsewhere.

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