Monday, March 8, is International Women's Day. So how are we doing?

Bain and Company recently released results of a survey, reported in the Harvard Business Review, of 1,800 business people worldwide. 80% believed that companies benefit from a gender diverse workforce; 75% reported having initiatives in their workplace to improve gender parity; but less than 25% felt those initiatives were effective.

When it comes to the law, women have been in the law practice “pipeline” for over three decades now; there are currently more women than men graduating from law school, where women have for some time made better grades than their male counterparts, which has resulted in women joining the ranks of prestigious firms in large numbers over the years. Whether for culture or client reasons, women's initiatives abound.

Yet women leave the practice of law  (not just change jobs) much faster than men—although not because of low performance—and constitute a mere 16% of partners in major law firms. 

How have women done in the current recession?  Better than might have been predicted.  According to a National Law Journal article entitled "Bad Times Could Have Been Worse for Women," "women lawyers have not suffered more in the current recession than their male counterparts. At least not when it comes to headcount at NLJ 250 firms."  According to The National Law Journal's 2009 survey of the nation's 250 largest law firms, the number of women lawyers at those firms decreased overall by 2% during 2009, compared to an overall headcount loss of 4%. And while the average number of female associates fell to 112, compared with 124.7 in 2008, the average number of women partners went up slightly, to 41 from 39.4.

Nonetheless, the National Association of Women Lawyers’ November 2008 report "The Third Annual National Survey On Retention And Promotion Of Women In Law Firms" reveals an alarming difference between the amount of power and money men and women have in large law firms: “At every stage of practice, men out-earn women lawyers… Male equity partners earn on average over $87,000 a year more than female equity partners. In 99% of large firms, the most highly compensated partner is a man.” The report also notes that women have no presence at all on 15 per cent of the nation’s largest firms’ governing committees.

And to further complicate things, one managing partner of a large firm claims that in spite of beefing up its diversity credentials and trotting them out in response to every RFP a socially conscious potential client has submitted, he believes that those credentials have not gotten the firm one piece of business.

What's going on here? Are women not up to the heavy lifting that firms require?  Are we as firms doing a poor job of delivering and following through on those diversity initiatives?  Or are the initiatives out of touch with want women are looking for? Are law firms, clients and others paying lip service to a bigger umbrella that in fact they don't put their money (and matters) behind?  If clients and firms resolve to be gender blind, shouldn't all this work out fairly to both genders in the end?

Or, in other words, what do women want?

A lot of ink has been spilled over that question. In and out of the arena of practicing law.

The authors of the Bain and Co. survey mentioned above urged firms to develop "less rigid promotion processes and career paths" in order to better accommodate women.

“If companies want to help more women climb the corporate ladder, they have to go beyond flex jobs or flex hours. Instead, they need to develop less rigid promotion processes and career paths — and actively promote and ‘de-stigmatize’ flexible career arcs within the organization. For companies, the pay-off can be huge: not only will they double their talent pool of leaders as more women return to the workforce in senior positions; they will also retain more male and female employees in the long-run and slash retraining costs.”

In a study conducted by Rutgers’ Center for Women and Work, more than 70% of the women lawyers who had left their jobs during the previous five years said their previous employer was not supportive of full-time flexible alternatives, while only 30% described their current employer as unsupportive of such arrangements. 

“An important new finding of this study is that women lawyers often choose an exit strategy when faced with the dilemma of choosing between work and family obligations,” the study said. “The business case for more family-friendly approaches to the practice of law could not be more clear.”

A study of thousands of associates using Westlaw throws some interesting light on the question. 80% of the associates worked in AmLaw200 firms and  the remainder worked at firms with more than 80 attorneys. The gender split was 50/50.

Four types of associates emerged.  The group dubbed Career Practitioners, who are driven, aspire to partnership, and will take on as much work as a firm gives them, constitute 23% of the associates and are 60% male.  Flexibility Seekers, about 23% of the associates and 60% female, are looking for a satisfying career that allows work-life balance and become less interested in partnership over time.

The 3rd group, Called Lawyers, 24% of the total, have the highest percentage of females (63%) and the highest percentage of non-Caucasians (35%). This group is the most satisfied with compensation and the most passionate about the practice of law. Called Lawyers are as willing as the Career Practitioners to volunteer for committees or other firm work, but for different reasons. They also significantly value their personal and family time, and in this are more closely aligned with the Flexibility Seekers than with Career Practitioners. The 4th group, the Willing Workers, representing about 30% of the associates, have no particular passion for the law, but are willing to work hard and follow directions – unusual for attorneys who are typically highly autonomous. Willing Workers will become partners as a means to higher income, but they are loath to sacrifice quality of life. Their motto is: "Work hard, play hard, retire early." 

Note that three of these four groups place a high value on lifestyle or family obligations.  And that women are most populous in those groups.  Doesn't that support the sneaking suspicion more than a few have had that women aren't really in it for the long and hard haul, like the grizzly senior partners they are meant to succeed?  Doesn't that kind of information make a myth out of the vaunted value of diversity?

A critical finding here is that according to survey respondents, the same proportion of lawyers in all of these groups are rated satisfactory or above on performance reviews.  That is, no one group is more likely to be better lawyers than the others.

If performance is – and it should be – the primary criteria, there is essentially no difference among the four groups. Therefore, if firms promote the first and familiar group (with a larger male population) over the second and third groups (with larger female populations) or even the fourth group in the hope that they will be the best associates and partners, firms would be unnecessarily reducing their pool of candidates by up to 75% for no good reason.

Yet in fact Career Practitioners tend to hire other Career Practitioners, whether they are men or women, black or white, just as MBTI "Thinkers" tend to hire other Thinkers, resulting in law firm environments that are extraordinarily well suited for only one stripe of lawyer, forestalling every advantage that real diversity might bring.  

The real diversity challenge becomes accepting that excellence can be achieved in (and should be expected of) a truly diverse workforce--not only diverse in terms of gender and race, but diverse in attitudes and expectations about their practice and lifestyle.  In other words, excellence doesn't just come in the "driven" package--that package looks dedicated and workaholic and even macho--but that's not what is necessary to get the job done...well, very well. 

One challenge may be to offer our firms as a home to all lawyers, regardless of any attribute other than excellence.

And this might be the ideal time to start experimenting with different approaches to law practice.  Larissa Glubb made these observations in my "Women In Law--For Us and By Us" blog on LegalOnRamp:

"Most women are prevented from reaching partnership or management positions because the organisations they work for value time, not results. Female lawyers, especially those with family responsibilities, desire and require control over their work and their work choices, which is very difficult to achieve if 'time' is the main measure of success... Lawyer’s bonuses and opportunities for promotion are more often than not linked to meeting or exceeding a set number of billable hours per year, rather than the quality of the work performed or the results achieved for the clients."

In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink challenges traditional assumptions about what motivates us to achieve at work. In a chapter on the benefits of self-direction in the work place, Mr. Pink has this to say about lawyers and the traditional legal workplace:

“…at the heart of private legal practice is perhaps the most autonomy-crushing mechanism imaginable: the billable hour. Most lawyers – and nearly all lawyers in large, prestigious firms – must keep scrupulous track, often in six-minute increments, of their time…As a result, their focus inevitably veers from the output of their work (solving a client’s problem) to its input (piling up as many hours as possible). If the rewards come from time, then time is what firms will get. These sorts of high-stakes, measurable goals can drain intrinsic motivation, sap individual initiative, and even encourage unethical behavior”.

According to Ms. Glubb, "If legal organisations were to trust that the professionals they have hired can get the work done to the satisfaction of the client, it should not matter whether this work is done at home or in the office, in the morning, before the school run or in the evening once kids are in bed. These legal professionals have years of experience and are being trusted to complete transactions worth millions, yet are not trusted to balance their commitments."

A Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), advocated by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson in their book Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, is how Best Buy successfuly changed from an hours to outcomes work environment. The message Best Buy promoted is: “It doesn’t matter where you work, or when you work, as long as the work gets done.”

“There’s a misperception out there that just because a manager lets an employee go to a dentist appointment, that’s flexible working. That’s not flexible working at all. ROWE is really putting the freedom and the power back in the employee’s hands to determine what and how and when they work best. A Results-Only Work Environment is about recognizing and acting on people’s need to have more control over their lives to meet all the demands in their lives.”

Glubb says that Latitude-South, a legal outsourcing company she works for, has built a business model around this concept. "Many detractors will say that client demands preclude such a significant organisational change. We disagree. Our experience has been that our clients value expertise and experience and recognise that it is these inputs that produce the results they require. The work must still be done, yes, but it does not always need to be performed between the industrial age hours of 9am – 5pm, in the traditional setting and in a traditional way."

Whether it is legal outsourcing or more women in high places that you are after, an attitude less fixated on comparing accrued billable hours might be the place to start, and now might be the time.

So what women want may well be what over 75% of the legal workforce wants: control over how they get the results that are expected of them.

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This is the time of year when many of us take stock of our direction and goals and make plans to step up our effectiveness.  This particular year, 2009, many lawyers are facing an extremely difficult once-in-a-century marketplace for which no one has been truly prepared.  So we may also find ourselves questioning our ability to successfully grapple with the challenges ahead.  

How to acquire the skills that will improve your practice and advance your leadership in such a disorienting environment?

The old adage of two heads being better than one is born out by the data available on the results of coaching.  According to a January 13, 2009 article by Susan Letterman White in The Legal Intelligencer, "a research report by Diane Coutu and Carol Kauffman in the January Harvard Business Review found that coaching is a business tool most often used to develop the capabilities of high-potential performers or facilitate leadership transitions," and one which produces quantifiable benefits. "The Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology has reported that coaching leads to higher interview ratings for individuals. Telecommunications Weekly reported in November that a change program, which included coaching, improved customer satisfaction by 10 percent and call resolution rates by 56 percent at Motorola. And according to a 2008 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, coaching of university faculty improved the writing process of professors who were under pressure to publish."

As Ms. White states, "coaching is to a lawyer what organizational development is to a law firm; they both foster intentional change toward particular goals through a collaborative process. The goals are those that move the client to a higher level of professional effectiveness...Most importantly, a good coach is paid to ask the right questions."

In addition, a good coach is one who listens.

Sheryl Axelrod of Hepburn Axelrod & White, a Philadelphia firm, was quoted in the article as extolling the benefits of coaching in a law firm context. "We worked with a coach who had an uncanny ability to not only listen to our needs, fears and desires for our firm, but our own internal dilemmas and concerns about each other."

Of course, after listening, a coach must also be able to help coachees arrive at and implement beneficial changes.  And those changes are sometimes unexpected.  In the Hepburn Axelrod case, "one of our partners...reach[ed] the difficult decision to leave the partnership."

But the proof is in the pudding.  "The result of the coaching is that our firm, on our own, and our former partner, on his own, are each thriving in a market in which most firms are doing worse, not better, than the year before, " Axelrod said.

Quantitative evaluations of coaching are rare, but those that have been done demonstrate conclusively its effectiveness and bottom-line contribution.  In an evaluation by MetrixGlobal of an executive coaching program provided by the Center for Performance Excellence in 2004 to Booz Allen partners and principals, results indicated that "all leaders readily applied what they gained from their coaching experiences to make significant strides in self-development, while over half (53%) made significant improvements in their relationships with peers and team members and some  leaders (19%) went on to significantly improve client relationships; gaining greater clarity about how their behavior impacted clients and being better able to respond to client issues."

Of eight business areas senior leaders expected executive coaching to impact, "two were found to be positively impacted by at least half of the leaders who were coached: teamwork (58%) and team member satisfaction (54%). Three other areas were selected by 31% of the leaders as having been impacted: quality of consulting, retention and productivity."

Monetary benefits were rigorously documented in this evaluation. "The total monetary benefits were $3,268,325 with four impact areas each producing at least a half million dollars of annualized benefit to the business: improved teamwork ($981,980), quality of consulting ($863,625), retention ($626,456) and team member satisfaction ($541,250). Given a total, fully loaded cost of the coaching of $414,310, the ROI was 689%."

Coaching can provide to all lawyers the simple but valuable assistance of a supportive yet out-of-the-law-firm-box perspective that can be critical when steering through dangerous waters--and that can positively impact the bottom line. That perspective can help you become a more effective  partner, develop individual business, expand your expertise, master management responsibilities and otherwise plan and implement the next step in your career (whether you are motivated to do so proactively or reactively).

At RRR, we offer confidential high-performance coaching programs of six to eighteen months that are tailored to your objectives and your schedule.  Contact us for a consultation on how we can help you achieve your goals in 2009.

Happy new year!

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Sonja Lyubomirsky, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, admits being surprised by the results of the research she conducted on how to permanently increase happiness, funded by a 5-year million-dollar grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.  She conducted a meta-analysis (a "study of studies"), along with Ed Diener and Laura King, two well-known names in positive psychology, of 225 studies and concluded by writing The How of Happiness (Penguin Press, 2008).  

Lyubomirsky expected, consistent with a number of previous, more limited studies, that relationships would emerge as the over-arching key to well-being.  Contrary to those expectations, she found that, more than any other variable, including relationships, work was both a cause and consequence of happiness.  

"The evidence demonstrates that people who have jobs distinguished by autonomy, meaning and variety - and who show superior performance, creativity, and productivity - are significantly happier than those who do not," she concludes.

"Why does our work make us happy? Because it provides us a sense of identity, structure to our days, and important and meaningful life goals to pursue. Perhaps even more important, it furnishes us with close colleagues, friends and even marriage partners."  So the relationship piece is not lost, but plays a supplemental role to work itself.

The story doesn’t end there, however. Her studies reveal that the causal direction between happiness and work runs both ways. Not only do creativity and productivity at the office make people happier, but happier people have been found to be more creative and productive. They are better “organizational citizens” (going above and beyond their job duties), better negotiators, and are less likely to take sick days, quit or burn out.

One interesting finding was that people who express more positive emotions on the job receive more favorable evaluations from their supervisors as much as 3.5 years later.

"The more successful we are at our jobs, the higher income we make, and the better work environment we have, then the happier we will be. This increased happiness will foster greater success, more money, and an improved work environment, which will further enhance happiness, and so on and so on and so on."

What does this have to do with our legal business?  Of autonomy, variety and meaning, autonomy is the one we have nailed.  Autonomy is often an attribute of the legal job, one that research shows lawyers embrace, sometimes to the detriment of collaboration.  Variety is worth noting, given the rush to specialization.  In light of high salaries, many firms have retreated from the first-year rotations through departments and later year department-wide assignment systems that used to give young lawyers some claim to it.  Carefully reinstating some opportunities for variety may be greatly appreciated.

Meaning can be harder to come by, being the trickier piece to consciously engineer.  Information we have on why young people, particularly Gen X and Yers, go to law school, and what they hope to achieve in their careers, reinforces the importance of meaningfulness.  As a practical matter, that is often assumed to be measured by the amount of public or pro-bono work available to them.  Reinvigorating your pro bono program, and involving young lawyers in the process, is a good first step but also articulating and reaffirming the firm's values vis-a-vis those within the organization (for example, "we provide premier training and career support") and its clients ("we build long-term relationships based on superior industry expertise and unparalleled service") helps young lawyers place themselves in a framework of meaning.

Creativity is a skill not as often singled out for recognition by law firms, and even productivity is usually rewarded only on a single level minimum-billed-hours-required-for-the-bonus formula.  Fine-tuning both salaries and bonuses so as to reward specific behaviors, such as business development activities or developing a specific expertise, offers eager Type As the opportunity to both increase their compensation and distinguish themselves from the pack, while achieving firm goals.

Providing positive feedback is an important part of evaluations that firms often overlook, so set in their problem-solving mode that they forget to reinforce what's working.  This study points out the importance of encouraging evaluees to crow or compliment too, for the firm's sake as well as theirs.

In short, this meta-study flags as important some of the same things we hear from lawyers going out the door:  provide a more meaningful, personally relevant work experience with supportive personal relationships in order to increase satisfaction and earn loyalty.

Now, back to work...

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At a time of some idling in the legal industry, a good use of lawyer time may be to spiff up the old pro bono program.  Davis Polk & Wardwell recently announced the addition of Ronnie Abrams, former Manhattan US Attorney's Office prosecutor and daughter of renowned First Amendment litigator Floyd Abrams, as its first Special Counsel for Pro Bono.  She succeeds a former associate of the firm who oversaw the program and is being made a partner.  For a firm with historically good standing on the American Lawyer's pro bono A-list, one might wonder what prompted the star power addition.

"[Pro bono] is becoming much more important in terms of client relations, recruitment and marketing," says Esther F. Larfent, president of the Pro Bono Institute, which, since 1995, has urged large law firms to commit 3-5% of lawyer hours to pro bono work.  Hiring someone of stature to oversee the pro bono effort "is a very fast growing trend, there's no question."  And having an inhouse partner can fill a talent void at firms that have historically relied on public organizations to oversee lawyer work.

As we all know, pro bono has been around for decades.  Pro bono was what firms long offered to do for pet projects of friends and clients that could also fill young lawyers' time when real work got a little slow.

It has, however, become a much more complicated matter.  Feeding into the equation are various factors:  public perception (falling) of lawyers' civic mindedness; the motivation of many who enter law school to "do good" followed by those same graduates going to big, bad corporate firms and suffering the resultant identity crises; the escalating dissatisfaction of law practitioners and correspondingly escalating attrition rates (perhaps related in part to the previous observation); inspired in part by the expanded transparency that Sarbanes Oxley has imposed on corporations, the increasing client demand (often with teeth) for their law firms to also demonstrate their bone fides in social agenda areas, such as diversity and community service.  There is even the prospect of using pro bono work as a marketing device to tether a firm to a new client or strengthen existing ties.

What Law Firms Are Doing

Some law firms have moved to adopt firm-wide programs that identify them with select non-profits or cause campaigns. Cravath, Swaine & Moore attracted widespread attention a few years ago when it became the primary sponsor of the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Brooklyn, one of 200 small schools that Mayor Michael Bloomberg created to overhaul public education in New York City. Cravath took ownership of this visionary community program, vowing “hands-on” involvement on an “in-school” basis. Throughout the firm, partners, associates and administrative staff work to develop and build an initiative that they believe can lead to real, systemic social change. 

Cravath’s community venture was sufficiently distinctive to merit feature news coverage. According to Stuart C. Ross, partner in ross+price communications, a public relations and marketing services agency that advises professional services firms, “What Cravath did, and how it was reported by the news media, represents an important shift... Clearly the press will cover effective and innovative corporate citizenship, but only if those efforts go well beyond simply writing a check or donating a few hours of legal expertise.”

Skadden had a 38% increase in pro bono hours in 2007 after it assigned Douglas Robinson, a longtime partner devoted to defenses in death penalty cases who was considering early retirement, to become its first pro bono partner. 

What are the Benefits for Law Firms? In addition to the obvious good these programs do for the community and the favorable public relations they can generate, these programs also have a positive impact on a firm’s retention and recruitment effort, producing real bottom-line results.  A study by the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College revealed that 73% of employees involved in volunteering through work said their employers’ support of these initiatives had made them more committed to their jobs.

David Sirota, co-author of The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want (Wharton School Publishing), argues that employees, regardless of industry focus or experience, have three basic goals in their work. First, they want to be treated “equitably,” with competitive pay, benefits, job security and respect. Second, employees want a sense of achievement from work and to feel pride in both their own position and in the organization of which they are a part. And third, employees want to experience camaraderie. As a Cravath partner phrased it, “This [camaraderie] is not mentioned much in our field, but it's key – not only in the sense of having a friend, but working well together as a team. That is a tremendous source of satisfaction for people…. Working with the School for Law and Justice has been great for Cravath. Having one firm-wide project involving the entire staff builds office morale.” 

WilmerHale committed both financial support and a broad range of administrative and in-kind assistance, including active volunteer service, to six community youth and education organizations in Washington D.C. and Boston, which it reports “has made our lawyers and staff part of the fabric of these community organizations.” The firm takes pride in the striking results produced by its Youth and Education Initiative in terms of student morale, student and staff retention, college acceptance rates, child literacy, improved communication skills and community building. And, it reports, “our non-profit partnerships are a rich source of fulfillment—an internal glue that unites lawyers and staff through their volunteer service to inner-city children.”

According to James H. Quigley, CEO of Deloitte & Touche USA, “What we have seen at Deloitte & Touche is that one of the benefits of contributing to the community is that it helps employees develop leadership skills and business acumen. A [recent external] survey [we conducted] revealed a strong link between volunteering and professional success. Among other findings, the data showed that 86% of employed Americans believe volunteering can have a positive impact on their careers and 78% see volunteering as an opportunity to develop business skills, including decision-making, problem-solving and negotiating. Community service matters.”

From a recruiting perspective, both established professionals and young people from Gen X and Y are seeking more than a paycheck. Candidates are increasingly concerned with work/life balance opportunities, the existence and influence of a diversity committee and the extent of a firm’s involvement in the community. 

Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, the sole law firm sponsoring the inaugural conference in 2005 of the “Clinton Global Initiative," as the former president called it, had eleven associates participate in serving as personal aides to the heads of state, corporate chiefs and academics from around the world who attended.  As one associate explained, "I wanted to do something with my life besides chasing greenbacks, and so I chose Fried Frank in order to have a balance between serving clients and doing pro bono work." 

In terms of charitable giving and community good, law firms’ pro bono programs have long produced positive returns in the legal and broader community. However, most pro bono efforts are individual donations of time and expertise that don’t necessarily coalesce to make a major impact or project a firm identity, and therefore fail to provide not only the optimal amount of good but also the optimal public relations punch as well. 

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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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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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On Thursday, September 21, at 2:00 pm EST, Ronda Muir will lead an audio conference on Associate Compensation: Where Do We Go From Here?  Included in the discussion will be a review of current trends and out-of-the-box ideas for dealing with the impact of escalating associate compensation, how to find the best strategy for your own law firm and overcoming the problems and pitfalls in making that strategy work. 

The audio conference is sponsored by IOMA, which publishes Law Office Management & Administration Report, as well as other legal publications, and provides research, educational and training products to lawyers.  To register, go to www.ioma.com/law_firm_management/. 

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Burnishing an image that is bankable is what every professional tries to do--both for him/herself individually and for the profession as well.  Doctors take bed-side manners lessons, the NYPD are being instructed on common courtesies.  What about lawyers?  What do they do to bring out the gold?

From the looks of things, not much.

A Harris Poll annually asks the question “Who would you trust?” about various professions.   Doctors, teachers, scientists, police officers, professors, clergymen and military officers routinely end up at the top of the trust chart, garnering more than 70% of the votes. 

Lawyers are usually found settled at the bottom, where members of Congress, pollsters, trade union leaders and stockbrokers rank above them with 35% or less of the vote. There, in next-to-last place in 2006, lawyers sport 27% trustworthiness, one notch above the bottom-feeding actors, over whom lawyers are able to boast a one percentile advantage.

The recent portrayals of lawyers in mass media are evidence of how low the reputations of lawyers are sinking. Long gone is Perry Mason reassuring the wronged and bringing evildoers to justice.   Last season’s TV series about a lawyer was titled “The Shark,” which pretty much says it all from an image standpoint.  That series has been one-upped by this summer’s arrival of a lawyer drama entitled “Damages,” starring Glenn Close, who will always be remembered as one of our generation’s scariest persona—the man-eating, marriage-dashing, family unfriendly “Fatal Attraction” psycho.  Legal advice, anyone?

Then there are the real-life reports that manage to make these fictional scenarios look reasonable:  the senior partner who throws law books at associates, the criminal defense attorney found naked with an adolescent in the court's conference room, the litigator who admitted to altering documents in a consumer class action, the tax lawyer who bribed IRS officials to accept tax positions, the partner whose language in court was so egregious the head of the firm flew in to apologize. 

Into this combustible scenario comes the question of whether law firms should be able to advertise in mass media, as do other professions, and if so, what they should be able to say. 

The recent back and forth in New York, New Jersey and other states about whether law firms should be allowed to tout their "Super Lawyers" or other commercially recognized stars on their websites, use testimonials from prior or existing clients in their marketing materials, use unidentified actors in their ad campaigns or even send emails that don't clearly identify themselves as "soliciting" are no doubt reflections of the growing role that image marketing is likely to play for lawyers. 

A recent article in the New York Times heralded the arrival of professional-looking canned law firm television commercials that are affordable to "the smaller, more local firms for whom the most important thing is the message to their communities," according to Spot Runner, who is working together with Martindale-Hubbell to market the commercials.  While that approach may benefit a local firm whose clients and potential clients are individuals in the community, as the article notes, it is unlikely to be useful to large corporate firms.  And the unseemly associations with ambulance chasing still prevail.

So, other than mass advertising, how do we burnish our image in this modern era? 

Perhaps in the most old-fashioned of ways:  by building relationships, one at a time.  It does not produce a quick fix or an instant cache.  It takes time-- both immediately and over the long run, so it's not very efficient.  But building individual relationships is effective.

Clients say repeatedly that the quality they most want in their counsel is trustworthiness.  Not just someone who gets the answer right.  Or gets the answer right enough for the price.  But someone who the client can count on to look out for their best interests, provide honest feedback and reliably follow through. 

It's an image worth the investment.

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Ronda Muir, Senior Consultant, led a two and a half day retreat at the end of May for UNICEF's 22-person Armenia office to help them better serve the country's children.  She was engaged to improve teamwork, communication and conflict resolution and to assist in the office's preparation for upcoming reviews and its transitioning to potential structural and policy changes. 

Through the use of individual and team MBTI work style reports, personal conflict style assessments, emotional intelligence tests and a confidential office-wide survey, Muir assisted the team in identifying personal and office strengths and challenges and in determining strategies for improved communication, conflict management and change management.

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Should lawyers “do the right thing” in addition to “being right”?  

A favorite cartoon depicts two lawyers at a desk evidently discussing strategy. One lawyer says to the other: “Is it right?… Is it fair?  Get a grip, Carlton—we’re a law firm!”

Integrity

In an interesting study issued recently, the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence found that financial advisors who demonstrated high levels of “moral and emotional competency” nearly doubled the S&P 500 return on their client portfolios in the years 2001 through 2004, delivering an average return of 25%. 

Of the various attributes studied, integrity had the single strongest impact on client returns. “Results showed that Integrity was the key behavioral competency which predicted the most positive returns for clients." 

Integrity was defined as acting consistently with what one says is important, in other words “walking the talk.”  An example was an advisor willing to give up a lucrative client rather than compromise his/her principles, such as ultimately recommending that a client seek advice from another advisor because the advisor could not in good conscience implement a plan believed to put the client at significant financial risk.

Ethics

In the process of updating his 1996 book The Honest Hour: The Ethics of Time-Based Billing by Attorneys, William George Ross determined that lawyers in 2007 are significantly more likely than a decade ago to pad their bills with unnecessary hours or bill two clients for the same time. Almost 55% (up from 40%) of associates and partners surveyed report performing unnecessary work, and 35% (up from 23%) say they bill two clients for the same time. The number of lawyers who believe double billing is ethical also rose from 35% in 1996 to 48%, and more than two-thirds of lawyers say they have specific knowledge of bill-padding by others.   

Morals

In a May 2, 2007 Law.com article entitled “From Moral Partners to a Moral Firm”, Gregory S. Gallopoulos, the managing partner of Jenner & Block, suggests that the integrated enterprise model that many successful law firms are adopting now, in which strategy and vision belong to the entity as a whole rather than to individual partners, risks producing a vacuum in the area of firm morals. 

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Ronda Muir, Senior Consultant, has been asked by UNICEF's Armenia office to lead a two and a half day retreat at the end of May to help improve teamwork, communication and conflict resolution. Through the use of individual and team MBTI reports and emotional intelligence assessments, Muir will help the team identify personal and office strengths and challenges and determine strategies for improved communication and conflict management in order to better serve the country's children.

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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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Women lawyers are not serving in appropriate numbers on corporate boards, bemoans an April 6, 2007 article in the New York Times Business Section.  Evidently only 14.6% of Fortune 500 companies counted a woman among their directors in 2006.

That same year women accounted for 17% of law firm partners (presumably equity partners), 16% of law school deans, 14% of chief legal officers at the Fortune 500 companies, and only 7 of the Fortune 500 CEOs.  So even though some of these statistics are arguably comparing apples and oranges, that board participation percentage doesn't look so out of whack with the rest of US business.

The thrust of the article is that due to the "shortage of qualified candidates for directors," it is a good time for women lawyers to spruce up their board skills, which should include, evidently, how to deal with an "overbearing, pompous and unctuous C.E.O" who rules by intimidation.

Over a year ago there was a well-publicized study finding that the more intelligent (actually, educated) a woman in the US is, the less likely she is to be married.  In response to that study, reporters across the country exerted themselves by castigating those men for not taking smart women as their wives. 

No one interpreted the data to mean that the smarter the woman, the less likely she is to agree to enter into that particular union.

The Times' take on these board room statistics has that same one-sided press spin.  Yes, women could and probably should play a more visible and pervasive role in corporate management, and yes, women lawyers are as smart as those other guys.

But any lawyer with their eyes open over the last few years has seen the publicity, economic and/or legal debacles that perfectly respectable, financially successful corporations have walked into.  From Enron to Morgan Stanley to Hewlett Packard, boards have been unveiled as little more than back-scratching yes men (by a very large margin, we now see) happily unfamiliar with what goes into the sausage, their major qualification for board membership often suspiciously looking like their golf handicap.  

We also all know that Sarbanes-Oxley was passed primarily to get board members such as these to put their John Henrys on many a line that they would much rather not, and for the express purpose to make them personally liable--financially and sometimes also criminally-- for whatever fallout later occurs. 

So yes, there are a "shortage of qualified candidates."  But is this one of those times when being smart means knowing when to say no?

As Marlene Alva, recently retired from Davis Polk, pointed out:  "It is a big-time commitment, and it's liability-fraught...Lawyers are in a better position than others to judge the perils." 

Precisely.

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In what may be a first, Intel Corp. issued an RFP last fall to find law firms to partner with their attorneys on community service projects in Silicon Valley.  This year it is expanding the request to three other offices.  The firms it chose in the first round were Baker & McKenzie, which had done work for Intel before, and Nixon Peabody, which had not.  The projects include providing legal services to entrepreneurs, resolving child guardianship disputes and assisting special education students.

This is a win/win situation for everyone.   Working with corporations on specific community service projects can cement law firm relationships with clients and sometimes forge new ones.  The experiences give firms a well  of positive, common accomplishment to draw on and generally improves communications between the two groups.  

Such programs also help satisfy those altruist urges that prompted a large percentage of lawyers to go to law school in the first place.  A recent ABA Young Lawyers survey made it clear how critical the altruistic piece is to Gen X and Y associates.  Almost 65% of those lawyers said they were considering changing careers within the next two years, primarily because of the failure of law to offer ways to make a meaningful social contribution.

In addition, for the corporation, the favorable public relations from these sorts of efforts are invaluable, particularly for those who recruit from the communities involved.  Company employees also benefit from getting to know specific lawyers (and possibly other professionals and staff) in such a positive, us-against-the-world way.

A further enhancement would be for law firms and companies to identify projects that engage not only the lawyers, but other professionals and staff at each organization as well.  Law firms could also be that ones that initiate these joint undertakings, taking on some of the startup burden and sending invitations to specific clients for whom the program is tailored.

 "There's a unique bond that's formed when people team up to make a difference in their community," says Lisa Ellis, founder of Benedict Advisers, a corporate citizenship consultancy in Greenwich, Ct., which also advises law firms and law departments.  "And using the RFP process supports community service through the normal business practices."

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