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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Muir will participate in a webinar entitled “Think Like a Lateral—How to Hire and Retain Quality Lawyers” to be presented on Tuesday, March 9 for the members of the Attorneys' Liability Assurance Society (ALAS). 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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One of the more interesting developments in the law industry over the last couple of decades is the emergence of the mega-firm.  Or what might be called the strange case of the temporary triumph of the delusion of efficiency.

"Convergence," the short-hand name of the corporate model for managing outside legal fees by reducing the number of preferred firms, was developed originally in the early 1990s by DuPont and then trumpeted by interested advocates--primarily consultants--who benefited from advising both sides of the aisle. Law departments needed to know how to evaluate firms for their preferred list, and law firms needed to know how to get on those lists.

The theory was that dealing with fewer law firms meant that a company would have more leverage in negotiating fees and conditions with those few that they did hire, that the company would no longer pay repeatedly for bringing firms up to speed on its business, and that this more holistic global legal approach would benefit the company in both concrete and intangible ways. 

Leading the way, DuPont reduced its 350 outside law firms to 41 and its 150 legal vendors to 4.  Five years after the program's introduction DuPont reported that

• Legal service expenses were reduced 39 percent from 1994 to 1997.
• Litigation savings amounted to over $30 million in the last four years of the program.
• Cycle time dropped from 39 to 22 months in two years and the docket was cut in half.
• Legal staff requirements can be forecast accurately.
• Purchasing power was leveraged.
• More women and minorities are employed in the PLF and supplier firms.
• True partnering was achieved: work is usually performed so seamlessly that outsiders have trouble distinguishing between DuPont's outside attorneys and in-house counsel.                     

Over 200 other major companies followed suit--General Electric's hundreds of outside firms were reduced to 140.  Pfizer slashed its outside litigation counsel from 200 to 52.  Pfizer eventually designated only 1 outside law firm to advise them nationally in some practice areas, a bold step again followed by others, such as Tyco and Honeywell.

Law firms were told that more types of business from a single client would guarantee a more consistent flow of work, again reduce the embedded cost of getting up to speed repeatedly and, with the more rounded view of a company's issues, ultimately make better lawyers of us all. 

So law firms geared up to offer companies a broad range of legal services and it was only a short step from there  to offering those services at locations all around the world.  Whatever you need, we can do.  Wherever you are, we are there.

Law firms started acquiring IP, land use and employment departments and boutiques to supplement their usual expertise. They opened offices in Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi and Omaha.  

In 1992, an admittedly lean year because of a financial downturn, there were 9 law firm mergers, which accelerated into a record high of 75 mergers in 2001.  By 2008, also a year of financial downturn, there were 70 mergers.  And those numbers don't reflect the many acquisitions by firms that don't count as a "merger"-- acquisitions of groups of lawyers, practice groups or other pieces of firms. A 2007 Law Firm Inc. survey of AmLaw 200 COOs found that evaluating merger possibilities was the single matter on which COOs collectively spent most of their time. 

Top US-based firms (NYLJ 250) grew from an average of 100 lawyers in 1985 to today's behemoths, topped by DLA Piper's 3,785 lawyers with 2008 revenue of $2.26 billion. As to profitability, before the current downturn, law firm revenues (along with expenses) had been ticking upward for years at double digit rates, fueled by pass-along billing practices that also rose without fail each year, resulting in compounded average growth in profitability of over 9%. 

Corporations and big law firms seemed to be on to something.  Consultants were in hog heaven. 

But the economic slowdown has hit big firms particularly hard. Clients are turning increasingly to small and mid-sized firms who charge hourly rates 20-50% lower for large swaths of work that don't require legions of associates, firms which are also less likely to dump them because of the complicated conflicts arising from a global presence.  

So where is the mega-firm now?

More than half of the 50 largest US firms have fired associates and staff in anticipation of or reaction to revenue declines and some firms, such as DLA Piper and Dewey & LeBoeuf, have cut year-end payouts to partners as well.  Star partners at the country's biggest firms--DLA Piper, Skadden Arps--are leaving for smaller firms in order to offer clients more reasonable rates and avoid the thicket of conflicts. Regardless of the economy, the promise of cross-selling did not materialize and no one's sure if they are better lawyers for the mega-firm experience, or just poorer ones.

So did the DuPont Legal Model of convergence and its virtues fail? 

If you ask DuPont, "the keys to the legal model’s success have been its ability to streamline legal representation through its designation of primary law firms (PLFs) and its commitment to the utilization of paralegals."  And you should note that DuPont's current roster of Preferred Law Firms includes eight of the 100 biggest U.S. law firms but four times as many smaller firms, which General Counsel Thomas L. Sager says he prizes for their “flexibility and creativity” in billing.

Perhaps the real bottom line is, as was clearly stated in an analysis of law firm mergers done by Vanderbilt Law School back in 2005: “There are no obvious economies of scale or scope for law firms in a merger, where productivity is largely a result of billings by individual professionals.”

That conclusion has been born out by the financial statistics kept by Dan DiPietro of Citibank’s Law Firm Group, who said flatly at a recent conference forecasting future growth that "bigger has not yet proved to be more profitable."

 

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

What's Sonia Got to Do With It?

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

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

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

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

The Texas Experiment

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

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

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

Predicting the Best Lawyers

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

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

A New Kind of Test

Continue Reading...

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Not only do lawyers score very differently from the rest of the population on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) (see Muir's article "The Unique Psychological World of Lawyers"), but it appears that a lawyer was responsible for the development of the assessment in the first place. 

According to the Center for Applications of Psychological Types, Inc.  (CAPT),  the organization Isabel Briggs Myers established to research and maintain the assessment, the MBTI was developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel in the middle of the 20th century because of questions they had about Isabel's husband, who was a lawyer.

Katharine’s father (Isabel's grandfather) was on the faculty of Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University) and her husband (Isabel's father) was a research physicist who became Director of the Bureau of Standards in Washington. Isabel had a bachelor’s degree in political science from Swarthmore College, where she met and later married Clarence Myers, who became a lawyer.

Katharine first became interested in types because her son-in-law Clarence was so different from the rest of the family, CAPT reports. To try to help them both better understand Clarence, Katharine introduced Isabel to Jung’s book, Psychological Types, which was published in1921.

As they worked on the indicator during World War II, Myers' and Briggs' goal became “to show how our differences... can be valuable rather than divisive, and can be used constructively . . . to promote personal development . . . manage conflict and . . . increase human understanding worldwide,” and specifically to help women who were entering the industrial workforce for the first time identify the sort of war-time jobs where they would be "most comfortable and effective."

The Myers' marriage was by all reports happy and long-lived, so Isabel's inquiry into types may have proved productive not only for the greater world--where over 50 million MBTI assessments have been given, making it the oldest and most widely used personal style instrument. 

 

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The Grant Study is an extraordinary longitudinal study undertaken in the late 1930s to shed light on "the urgent question of how to live well."  As participants, a group of 268 (male) Harvard College sophomores, including John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, were chosen for showing particular promise.

An article interestingly entitled "What Makes Us Happy?" in the June 2009 issue of the Atlantic explores what we might learn from 72 years of following that gifted group.

The biggest surprise may be how unreliable those evaluations at a formative age turned out to be for purposes of predicting future success and happiness. Or perhaps, that in spite of those evaluations, how inevitable stumbling is.

As David Brooks, in his May 11, 2009 editorial "They Had It Made" in The New York Times relates: "Their lives played out in ways that would defy any imagination save Dostoevsky's.  A third of the men would suffer at least one bout of mental illness.  Alcoholism would be a running plague.  The most mundane personalities often produced the most solid success."

Almost as interesting as the study is the man who has been overseeing it for more than four decades, George Vaillant.  Vaillant doesn't hesitate to arrive at a familiar yet profound conclusion:  relationships are the key to happiness. 

Yet the difficulty of putting that dictum into practice is evident in Vaillant's own life.  At work, he has proved to be a valued colleague and mentor.  On the personal front, things are much more challenging.  His father committed suicide, which his mother never acknowledged, his three marriages all ended in divorce and his children describe their home as being a "civil war" and their father as having a problem with intimacy.

There are some other interesting takeaways from the study, which Brooks points out.  All the men tended to cope better as they aged.  Those who suffered from depression by age 50 were much more likely to die by age 63.  Those with close sibling relationships proved much healthier in old age than those without them.

What is not clear is why these particular young men were chosen to participate in the study in the first place.  All we really know about them is that their admission to Harvard College at that time meant they were at least reasonably bright and probably the sons of influential and wealthy families. And that someone at  Harvard College had a high opinion of them. 

Of course, in the 1930s they didn't have access to the bundle of assessments available to us in the 21st century.  The "science" of head size and phrenology (the study of bumps on the head) had had its heyday during the prior century. The concept of an assessable intelligence quotient had only recently been introduced; the Wechsler Intelligence Scale would appear a few years later.  

What did the Grant Study originators think success in "living well" meant?  And what did they think it took to accomplish that?   In other words, what specific attributes were they looking for?  Might the many different paths that the participants eventually took reflect a lack of a clear vision on the part of the originators as to their concept either of success or its antecedents?

Perhaps Brooks' note that "the most mundane personalities often produced the most solid success"  informed another editorial, "In Praise of Dullness," that appeared a week later.  There he cited a recent study that seems to point to "relentless and somewhat mind-numbing commitment to incremental efficiency gains" as the critical attribute of successful CEOs.  Even if that correlation is in fact relevant (see the comments on Richard Edelman's "Dull Advice," which question its relevance as a broad-based indicator), it seems unlikely that it was young men with that attribute whom the Grant Study originators sought to identify.

Knowing what you are looking for in any selection process is critical.  Organizations around the world use sophisticated assessments to choose candidates for employment and advancement based on the competencies, attributes and traits that they have found predict success in their organizations.

Yet we recruiters of legal talent often don't know what we are looking for.  At a roundtable two weeks ago on legal hiring, David Van Zandt, Dean of Northwestern University School of Law, entreated law firms to develop a better model for selecting their summer associates.  "I've long advocated that firms really need to look at their data... and identify the characteristics that they're looking for in their candidates," Van Zandt said. Now, "you just go out and throw a wide net and pull people in." 

In fact, as we've suggested (see our entry "The Outliers of Law--Embracing Heresy "), the single attribute--high class standing--that firms do look for may be the one that could well be jettisoned--or at least modified--with little impact on the quality of legal services.

What the Grant Study does show is that predicting the future course of even a bright young person with a shiny veneer of promise can be difficult.  And that regardless of their credentials or intelligence, many are likely to fall to the various vicissitudes of man--mental illness, addiction, relationship breakdown. 

So then, what can one do to be happy?

Valiant knows: "Happiness is love, full stop." 

Now it's just a matter of implementation.

 

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In the final tranche of a triad of bad news over the last few weeks, two recent reports--one about associates and another about partners--point out how, despite the current abysmal employment market, there are still lawyers of various stripes who, given the chance, would choose to jump overboard rather than hang on to their position.

In a recent New York Times article, it was reported that Skadden Arps had offered all of its 1300 associates worldwide the option of taking a year off for one-third pay, with no pro-bono obligation.  One hundred twenty-five associates opted in, a number that a partner was quoted as describing as "in excess of our expectations."

The Lawyer reported April 14 that CMS Cameron McKenna, a large English firm, in a makeover termed a "Magic Roundabout" because of its spiral design [the English are into monikers: Linklaters calls its remake "New World" and Clifford Chance has settled on the term "size and shape review"], offered all of its 160+ equity partners the opportunity to move to non-equity status.  Sixteen partners stepped forward, more than managing partner Duncan Weston said he had expected.

There is no denying that much is changing in the structuring of firms on both sides of the pond, and these two firms are among those riding that wave.  The interesting note in both of these reports is that management remains surprised at the number of lawyers who, in spite of perilous times, would rather step away or down than stay at the helm.  Unfortunately, it speaks to the still prevalent but now less obvious dissatisfaction that was manifest in the massive attrition rates of only 18 months ago.

When things get back to normal (yeah, right) and probably even before then, firms still have to tackle the issue of how to attract and keep the loyalty of their talent--since that is what in the end makes for a successful law firm.  In spite of, and perhaps also particularly in the midst of, the rush to distribute pink-slips, let's not let that particularly item fall off our "to-do" list.

 

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A 2008 ABA Journal survey, with reponses from more than 1400 women lawyers, produced some interesting results as to who they prefer to work with.  Of the 42% of women who expressed a preference in the gender of colleagues, that preference was different depending on the age of the respondent. 

Female supervisors age 40 and over preferred working with women lawyers because they 1) take direction better (80%), 2) have more discretion (79%) and 3) take constructive criticism better (59%).  

Yet younger female lawyers don’t have the same regard for their older female colleagues. Of those under 40 who thought gender matters, the majority preferred male supervisors for 1) keeping confidential information private (64%), 2) giving better direction (58%) and 3) giving more constructive criticism (56%). 

Theories about the reasons for the difference abound. Some contend that younger women (and also some younger men) are not on the same wave length about the role of work in their lives, and are not willing to make the sacrifices that older women have made.

According to Lauren Stiller Rikleen, who advises law firms about workplace issues, “I'm concerned that more senior women don’t fully understand the profound demographic changes taking place,” demographic changes that affect all young lawyers and override issues of gender. As a practical matter, Arin Reeves, another lawyer who does diversity consulting, notes, the differing generational views of women can mean that women’s initiatives developed by female partners are often not useful to female associates.

The upshot is that there may no longer be “the woman’s situation,” but rather a growing diversity in what women lawyers want, and, given the luxury of having more role models to choose from, a growing diversity of what they can actually have. Perhaps it is worthwhile reminding ourselves that, as we have advocated for years, rather than placing judgment on women generally or on any particular choice, we as women lawyers can and must accept more diversity even among ourselves.

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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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According to the “broken windows” theory of social science, addressing small concerns (like broken windows) that matter to individuals eventually produces major improvements in the overall sense of community and belonging, which in turn fuels a more committed, dedicated group. This theory was instrumental in rebuilding parts of Harlem, the South Bronx and other devastated areas. 

In this difficult economic climate, there is a great temptation to do the reverse:  delay until a better financial day fixing the broken windows that litter our organizational landscapes.  Why not save the money for the bare necessities?  Why not focus on growing business or collecting revenues, which have clear connections to the (ever-diminishing) bottom line?

While firms are laying off associates, reducing their non-equity troops, halving bonuses and freezing salaries, they would be advised to make sure that they are not neglecting the small things that make a firm a good place to come to work every day--courtesy, interest in each lawyer's work, willingness to spend time training, providing feedback, and whatever other individual strengths your firm prides itself on.  Do the simple, doable things that make your lawyers feel someone is listening and responding:  adjust heat or air-conditioning levels, extend night staff hours, upgrade the coffee. Small steps will make the difference in whether your lawyers have a sense of devastation or rebuilding.

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Teamwork may be the 21st Century's technology, in that it promises greater productivity--but only when used well.  After seeing double digit increases in firms that have implemented team systems--management, marketing,  industry and client teams--an initial question many interested law firms have is how to go about achieving teamwork.  Luckily, research provides a clear "life cycle" of teams that can help firms successfully reach team goals.

The stages of teamwork, according to the established models, are 1) forming, 2) storming, 3) norming, and 4) performing.  The forming stage, even among lawyers, can be marked by tentative and polite accommodation.  Unsure of their roles and the leader's competence, team participants need the leader to be clear, directive and highly structured during this first stage. This is not the time for a consensual  "Well, what do you think we should do?" approach.

During the second, storming stage, team members, particularly lawyers, will stake out their positions to test what their authority will be.  Conflict is often a result.  This is a positive development.  Handled well, the team will learn from experience that it is safe to engage in conflict, and that issues can be settled without lasting acrimony or division, even if it requires agreeing to disagree.  This is the basis on which trust and respect is established.  Leaders are often criticized during this stage, as much because of their role as because of their personal attributes or performance.  Leaders who can keep from reacting defensively will avoid exacerbating and prolonging this stage, which, being awkward and uncomfortable, helps propel the group to resolve their differences and move forward into the next stage.

During the third, norming stage, based on the higher level of trust achieved during the 2nd stage, the group's goals are revised and a division of labor, with clear roles, is determined. 

The problem in law firms is that often lawyers don't make it out of stage 2.  Tenacious about protecting their authority and unwilling to trust others to whom work must be delegated, these lawyers keep the team in unnecessary meetings and conflict.  Yet it is only in stage 3 that delegation becomes effective and the individuals are freed up to do their work.

Stage 4 is performing, which is the highly productive stage that teams are made for.  At this point, if members are added or removed, or the goals or delegation changed significantly, the team may regress back to an earlier stage and have to work their way up again.

Ideally, team members spend about 75% of the team time on accomplishing their tasks and 25% on participating in the team process, i.e. on maintaining group relations. Goals that are most amenable to team accomplishment are ones that require collective action, i.e. that no one person could accomplish on his/her own and that are meaningful, even inspiring.  The most effective teams have an emotional commitment to the goal, so framing goals as being in the individual team members' interests is vital. 

Finally, team goals should be specific, measurable and attainable, with a real deadline that allows the team's work to culminate in a completed project.  Ongoing goals make it difficult to maintain team motivation and momentum.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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In April, Shearman & Sterling's entire Mannheim office packed up and reverted back to its original form, Schilling Zutt & Anschutz.  What prompted the schism?

"There are some great lawyers at Shearman & Sterling," one former partner is reported to have said.  "I just don't think they are particularly happy."

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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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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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Lawyers have been making it into the big-time news lately.  That is, not just into the AmLaw publications, where spots about closely-argued decisions vie for those on the merger of the month, but onto the front page of  the New York Times SundayStyles section in early January  ("The Falling Down Professions") and more recently the front page of the NYT ThursdayStyles section ("Who's Cuddly Now?").  And they're not talking about what celebrity lawyers are wearing, or about those errant lawyers taking their clothes off in the conference room or screaming obscenities at the judge. 

What's making the news these days are regular law firms and the vast universe of everyday lawyers--and the bedeviling challenges that they face:  declining law school applications over the last few years, plummeting retention rates, rising dissatisfaction among lawyers and clients.  But while some law firms have been bemoaning how hard it is to get lawyers to stay in place, just doing their job, servicing their clients, it is occurring to a number of other firms that--drum roll--some tweaking of the business model might be in order.

So it is, as persistently promoted here, and now even trumpeted in the style sections of the news, that law firms, they are a'changin'. 

Why are they changing?  Richard Florida, the author of “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life” (Basic Books, 2003) says the old grand professions have “lost their allure, their status. And it isn’t about money.”  The money, as firms contemplate a $200,000 salary for a brand new law school graduate, is still pretty good. But especially among young people, according to Mr. Florida, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, values not traditionally nurtured by the legal industry. 

But exactly how are law firms changing?  They are experimenting with different fee structures for their clients, and experimenting with different compensation and engagement arrangements with their associates and even partners (see our The Fracturing World of Lockstep Compensation).  They are contracting, out-sourcing and e-commuting. They are introducing sensitivity, transparency and flexibility not only into their vocabulary (see our entry Sullivan & Cromwell Proves Mom Right?) but also into their culture, providing professional development that promotes leadership skills and career planning in addition to CLE mastery, and reworking their retirement, work sharing and required billable hours policies.  In fact, there are so many changes afoot, that there is a good chance that not only will law firms of the mid-21st century look very different from their 20th-century antecedents, but they may also not look much like each other.  See our Leaving Behind the Medieval Model.

Lawyers are well-known for their risk aversion, and personality assessments bear out that propensity on the individual level.  But ruminating over these forays in experimentation brings one to the conclusion that the biggest change amongst us lawyers is that we are becoming demonstrably capable of, and willing to, change.  Ok, maybe only after a short walk past the gangplank, but still, at least when prodded, able to change.  Or at least willing to try to change.

And that's how we are going to get better at this business.

 

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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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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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There is no substitute for face time, as people in my business are wont to insist. But maybe there is.

During an interview with Mark Chandler, General Counsel of Cisco, to discuss the evolving legal marketplace, see Leaving Behind the Medieval Model, he demonstrated for me Cisco's newest entry (competing with Hewlett-Packard, Polycom and Tandberg, among others) into the web conference market— a small meeting room that boasts an IP (Internet Protocol) phone, three broadcast-quality cameras, three ultra-sensitive mikes, three 60-inch plasma screens, a crescent-shaped table that seats six and soft back-lighting. The result, as one satisfied client related, is that "you can literally see and hear a pin drop a continent away."  The sensation is of simply being in a small conference room with well-lit colleagues across the table--I admit to the eerie feeling of being able to reach out and touch someone, only I couldn't. 

At $300,000+ for each of these pods (and it takes two, of course) and monthly maintenance costs in the thousands, it would require a lot of deferred traveling to pay for the luxury of not having to sit on tarmacs. Nonetheless these systems seem to be enjoying brisk demand, with prices down from $550,000+ two years ago and double digit increases in sales annually. 

There are a number of circumstances that might prompt law firms to take advantage of these technospheres. In light of how time-consuming air travel has become, the need for rapid decision-making and the globally far-flung nature of more and more law firms and their clients, they offer a reasonable and efficient tool in law firms' management and delivery arsenals.

But my interest in this product (in case you've been wondering why I, a techie manqué, am going on about this) relates to something one of the true techies touting this system remarked when I saw it. "The name of the game today is collaboration," he said, and went on to discuss the myriad tech tools now available that promote collaboration—web-conferencing, intranets, extranets, wikis, individual attorney blogs, etc.

Unfortunately, as we all know, the name of the game at many, if not most, law firms has not historically been collaboration, whether we are talking about firm management, practice group, committee or even client and document issues. Lawyers are notoriously independent and skeptical/untrusting of others. The impact of many firms' broad dispersal of offices and lawyers has not necessarily been to produce more of what wasn't much there in the first place. Compounded with the arrival almost daily of lateral lawyers from different work and culture environments, cities, and even countries, the tendency among lawyers towards isolation is often only magnified.

So here comes the possibility of virtual face time, whether you think you need it or not. While we can agree that what needs face time, and what that term means, is often subjective, the absolute necessity of it among lawyers, their staff and clients is indisputable. I concede that web conferencing still lacks a certain something—building a critical relationship, hiring and firing, and even congratulating might still best be done in person. Real person. Where a shoulder to cry on, a slap on the back or a firm handshake can make a difference.

But if a firm determines to include one of these technologies amongst its tools or toys, it should not forget to put introducing, acknowledging, appreciating, recapping, explaining, consolidating, networking, socializing, rewarding, giving feedback, even gossiping and complaining on the list of things they are used for. It is an efficient way to build rapport and community and the productivity associated with that cost assuredly drops to the bottom line faster than whatever productivity associated with paying for either lunches at everyone's desks or sitting on the tarmac does.

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A grand old firm has gone through a rough patch recently—one of its associates not only sued for sexual orientation harassment and discrimination, but also proceeded to file partnership documents and communications that S&C certainly would prefer to not have circulating publicly. Further, an article in the legal press lampooned a memo S&C sent around to its partners exhorting them, among other things, to say "thank you," in case their mothers had forgotten to instill in them that finer point of social intercourse. The legal blogosphere enjoyed batting that one around.

But S&C may have gotten the last laugh. In the Midlevel Associates Review released last month by The American Lawyer, New York law firms (as defined there to mean firms with more than 45% of their lawyers in New York) were once again roundly denounced, with this year only 7 firms making it into the top half of the 162 firms surveyed. The New York associates registered their dissatisfaction particularly regarding relations with partners, training, communication about what it takes to make partner and openness about firm finances. While New York firms have always performed poorly in these ratings, several firms fell precipitously since last year's survey—Cravath Swaine slid 27 places, Paul Weiss was down 59, Debevoise Plimpton fell 64 slots and Wachtell Lipton plummeted 74 places.

Thumbing its nose at the rest of the straggling New York herd was Sullivan & Cromwell, which vaulted from number 153 on the list up to number 48. 

So now that all the chortling has died down, was it the "thank yous" that worked? Perhaps. But also, for the first time this past year, S&C leaders gave associates a series of briefings about firm finances, business strategy and the road to partnership.  Chairman H. Rodgin Cohen and vice-chair Joseph Shenker, among others, made in-person presentations and took questions. 

On those two most damning survey questions for New York firms, "communication about what it takes to make partner" and "openness about finances," S&C's ratings this year were 3.48 and 3.64 respectively, out of the ballpark compared to their prior year's ratings of 2.14 and 2.13, and even much higher than this year's average New York firms' ratings of 2.59 and 2.94. 

So it looks to me like Mom was right. Talking it out—even those tricky financial matters and partnership issues that several New York firms said, and continue to say, were either too confidential or essentially none of the associates' business—creates rapport, incentive and even, get this, trust in an environment that sorely needs all three. And it does so quickly—with the results showing up in the first survey! 

Mom would be so pleased.

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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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Ronda Muir's article "The Looming Associate Crisis" leads the July 2007 ALM Law Firm Partnership & Benefits Report, Volume 13, Number 6.   

After reviewing statistics that show an ever-tightening supply, and potentially less qualified pool, of associates who are paid more yet leaving earlier than in years past, Muir recounts some of the tried (and perhaps less currently true) strategies for coping, and also identifies some more radical solutions that innovative, forward-looking firms can benefit from.

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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. 

Continue Reading...

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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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Across the pond, the legal industry is addressing some of the same issues as US firms but with their own distinctive twist.  Facing attrition rates similar to those in the US, UK law firms are re-jiggering what it means to be a partner and whether lawyers even need to be one in order to stay over the long haul. One-third of the UK 100 law firms have over the last few years introduced non-partner career tracks, based on associate feedback that partnership and its lifestyle has lost its allure. 

On the legislative front, an NFO report in March 2001 on "Competition in Professions" recommended that unjustified restrictions on competition be removed. The government's report in response on competition and regulation in the legal services market concluded that "the current framework is out-dated, inflexible, over-complex and insufficiently accountable or transparent..."

Sir David Clementi, Chairman of Prudential pfc, one of Britain's largest insurance companies, was asked to do a wide-ranging independent review of the regulation of legal services in England and Wales, which is now known as the Clementi Report, was presented in December 2004 and was approved by British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government in October 2005.  It recommended allowing nonlawyers to own, manage, and finance law firms for greater access to management expertise and capital markets. 

The associated Legal Services Bill was introduced to Parliament on November  23, 2006 and is still pending.   It  proposes three key changes: 

•      creation of a new oversight regulator, the Legal Services board; 
•      a new Office for Legal Complaints; and 
•      new models of practice through alternative business structures.

Surveys of UK law firms find them staunchly in favor of many of the proposed provisions.  Ninety-two percent of surveyed law firms welcomed the introduction of multidisciplinary practices (MDPs), and found the most suitable prospective partners to be accountants (69 %), banks (19 %) and tax planners, IP agents and others.                                                             .

Fifty percent of UK law  firms are considering external funding, while more than half are considering adopting alternative business structures (ABSs).   Eighty-five per cent of firms questioned had discussed the issue of MDPs and  ABSs at board level, while 56% were considering adopting an ABS.

The idea of multi-disciplinary practices has been bandied around in the US for years, and the growth of global law firms, and the prospect of competing with UK multi-disciplinary firms, may again suggest that model as a possible development of the future.  What is interesting is the extent of support that UK firms are giving the idea. 

Stay tuned.

                                         

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See Muir's article for guidelines on making your law practice (and life) more innovative, creative and collegial.

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An extraordinary and convincing vision of a revolution in big law's future was presented by Mark Chandler, SVP and General Counsel of Cisco, in a speech in January at Northwestern School of Law's 34th Annual Securities Regulation Institute.  I would like to join other legal commentators in paraphrasing Chandler's comments and commending him on his far-sightedness.

Driven as are other GCs to realize productivity improvements in his department, Chandler is committed to reducing Cisco's legal expenses as Cisco gets bigger.  Chandler points out that information, a law firm's stock in trade, will only get easier, and therefore cheaper, to access over time.  Already standardized on-line legal data is available, with residential leases and individual tax returns now largely done by software.

But even Cisco's first tier corporate legal work is being drilled down to a cost-effective, accessible product.  Contracts are drafted, executed and archived by employees using on-line software. Cisco pays a fixed fee for patent prosecution and intends to pay at least 5% less each year, requiring its firms to find ways to lower costs.  It also pays a fixed fee for the review of license offers, which Baker & Botts has been able to make profitable by developing a more efficient systematic approach.   In the corporate secretarial area, Cisco has replaced a group of outside firms with a one-firm solution that aims for a 20% reduction in legal expenses in part by using standardized forms and open interfaces. 

In litigation, Cisco has a fixed fee arrangement with Morgan Lewis to manage all of its US commercial litigation, which has made litigation avoidance the firm's key goal, aligning perfectly with Cisco's interest.

Counseling will be the next frontier, Chandler believes, as online tools like tax counseling via www.taxalmanac spread to other legal areas, such as export regulations, human resources and employment and eventually securities law compliance.  Cisco is already working with eight other Fortune 500 companies and a number of law firms on a site called Legal On Ramp to allow direct access to search law firms' knowledge management systems.  See www.legalonramp.com.

And in each instance, what was novel in Cisco's legal management strategies five years ago has become more commonplace among its peers today and may well eventually become available for purchase as packaged software.

The current law firm business model, according to Chandler, reflects a fundamental misalignment of interest between clients who are driven to manage expenses and law firms compensated by the hour.  Clients are not in the market of buying time, he points out, but value.  The current system not only mis-serves clients, but also the lawyers themselves, particularly associates, who Chandler says are beating down his doors because they don't want to work for law firms any more--enslaved by a billable hour-based compensation system that is inefficient in producing a valuable product and that offers them little chance of making partner.

Chandler recognizes that law firms are currently profitable as structured.  Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School calls large American law firms "the most profitable businesses in the world.  Speedier information-gathering capabilities allow large law firms to increase utilization of less experienced lawyers without passing cost savings on to their customers."  But Chandler is convinced that the very source of success for firms today--the ability to control client access to expertise, requiring 1:1 delivery--will be the source of their failure in the future.  It is top quality boutiques that Chandler is betting will change and survive, and it is in Cisco's interest to help make them profitable while doing so.  Chandler views slower-moving, cost-heavy large centralized firms to be at risk. 

"If the economic system of law firms is frustrating to associates and even some partners, I can tell you that from the standpoint of a metric driven general counsel, it is more than incomprehensible.  It looks like the last vestige of the medieval guild system to survive into the 21st century."

 

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There is an associate recruitment and retention crisis looming for which there are no easy solutions.

Supply and Demand

Law schools continue to graduate 40,000 students a year, as they have for the last 20 plus years. The AmLaw 200 law firms have been steadily hiring an average of 4%+ more associates each year, resulting last year in an average incoming associate class of 50. That means that AmLaw 200 firms now hire about 10,000 new associates a year, or about 50% of the graduates from the top 100 (hardly the Ivy League elite) of the nation's 200 law schools.  

Every year the number of associates those firms will be trying to hire will be higher.  And the competition from hedge funds and investment banks offering attractive alternatives will increase.  Not far along the horizon is a point when nearly every associate in the top half of every law school, whatever the law school, is likely to have several high-dollar offers to choose from.  Which means many firms will be left with fewer incoming associates than they want, or certainly fewer of the caliber they are seeking.

The Starting Salary Piece

As day follows night, associate salaries are rising.  Entering associates are now earning $160,000 before bonuses at the largest law firms across the country (essentially the same that federal district judges make), thanks to Simpson Thatcher’s opening volley. Starting salaries (not including bonuses) at firms of 500+ lawyers are thus up 130% since 1994, with the annual rate of increase averaging more than 10%--significantly above both the rates at firms of other sizes and the average for all firms (6%). And with each new class's salary increase, the salaries of associate classes up the ladder must also be increased.

The Profitability Piece

One estimate is that this year's salary bump will result in an average hit to partners in big firms in the range of $40-70,000 per partner. But that is hardly where the impact on profitability stops.  Until this year, associates were usually not profitable until their third or fourth year.  Higher salaries stretch that time out even further.  With average associate attrition rates at big firms pushing above 20% annually, culminating in 78% of associates leaving by their fifth year, firms have less and less time to recoup their initial recruiting/training/salary/overhead investments in associates, let alone realize a significant profit.  

The graph showing the curves of how long it takes to realize a profit on associates and how long they are likely to stay make it clear that these two lines are coming perilously close.  What used to make for good document review/bill plumping fodder may start looking more like loss leaders in the business of looking for good lawyers who will actually stay.  It has already been noted that we have reached a state where partners often bill more hours than their associates.  How does it  feel to be working for those you supervise?

What's to Be Done?

The traditional solutions are few and running out of steam.

As always, billable rates can be raised, banking on good evidence that at least some clients will pay whatever they have to to get the best legal advice.  But there will be some clients insisting that their rates be reduced or hours written off while others may simply leave. 

You can try to recoup salary increases by raising billable hour requirements. But given the current associate sentiment about billing, ratcheting requirements up runs the risk of ratcheting up attrition rates as well. See our February 14, 2007 entry "What All That Money Is Buying You."

Recruiters may have to become modern conjurers, ranging broader among law schools and deeper down classes, looking for the proverbial gem in the rough.  Medium and smaller law firms may have to change recruitment strategies altogether.  Some have already publicly declared themselves to be out of the business of hiring first-year associates, like Philadelphia's Kleinbard Bell & Brecker, or recruiting at national law schools, like Pittsburgh-based Tucker Arensberg.  Instead, they will wait for those associates to come to their firms after they've spent a few years at larger firms willing to bear the cost of training them. 

The dire truth is that what ultimately may have to change is the current law firm structure, and possibly in several respects.  See our upcoming entry "Leaving Behind the Medieval Model."   And the fallout may include the hardest pill to swallow:  a reduction in the high profitability that partners have long enjoyed.  See our upcoming entry "The End of Profitability As We Know It?"

There are ways to read your firm's tea leaves and then progress toward a new vision, cognizant of the prevailing hiring and retention realities.  Is your firm taking the steps necessary to survive the looming associate crisis?

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The legal industry's current strategy for hiring and keeping lawyers seems to be to throw more and more money at them, a strategy which has succeeded to date in producing unprecedented attrition and dissatisfaction rates.

Major law firms around the country just upped the ante for hiring a baby lawyer to $160,000 @ year, before bonuses, or roughly what seasoned federal judges in our country make.

Why more money?

Jack Nusbaum, Chairman of Willkie Farr & Gallagher, says "We expect our associates to work hard… maybe this will make them feel better about the Saturdays and Sundays."  

Has anyone taken note of the American Bar Association survey conducted just this past November?   Of the 2,377 respondents (most of whom were between 26 and 35 and had been practicing law for five years or less), 84.2 percent said they'd prefer to work fewer hours for less money.  More than 30 percent would like to work 20 percent less and said they'd give up between 25 and 30 percent of their pay in exchange.  The next largest group-- 27.8%--would settle for a 10% cut in hours.  Did you get that?  Associates would prefer to give up proportionally more money for incrementally less work.

So are we paying these high salaries--surprise!--for the clients? To show them that our firm can attract the best players?  

"When I saw the announcement about the raises, I said ‘Oh God,” says Michael Roster, executive vice president of World Savings, a subsidiary of Wachovia Corp.  But maybe not for the reasons you would expect.  Salary raises mean law firms will put more pressure on associates to bill, but paying more for legal services, Roster says, is less bothersome to him than associate turnover.  He says he and other general counsel prefer to work with associates with whom he has a history and who know his business well.  "It hurts when firms can’t keep qualified people.”

“From my standpoint, I would view [lowering billable hour requirements] as a creative and enlightened way to reduce associate turnover and keep the best and brightest young lawyers,” says Barry Nagler, who chaired in 2006 the Association of Corporate Counsel’s board of directors.

Susan C. Robinson, associate dean for career services at Stanford Law School, also thinks that lowering billable-hour requirements could be a great recruiting tool, particularly for attracting lateral associates.

There is no question that firms are struggling with the phenomenon of associates not wanting to work as hard as generations past.  Many studies indicate, in fact, that partners often bill more hours than their associates, turning the law firm pyramid model topsy-turvy. 

And attracting and retaining associates over the next decade may be even harder. The standard characterization of “millennials”—those who graduated from high school after 2000 and will be graduating from law school starting in 2008--is that they are unwilling to compromise life and family for work.

The obvious hit from reducing billable hour requirements would be to partners' bottom lines.  See our upcoming entry "The End of Profitability as We Know It?"  But there are some countervailing tactics that can help improve profitability.  Ida O. Abbott, former partner at Heller Ehrman White and McAuliffe, contends that billable-hour requirements could be lowered without cutting partner profits if the change involved more planning and better management.  And law firms have not yet even begun to explore the types of management strategies that have produced the super-sized profits recounted in the newly released Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose by Rajendra Sisodia, David Wolfe and Jagdish N. Sheth.  See our January 31, 2007 entry "Firms of Endearment."

Steve Susman, whose 85-lawyer Houston/New York litigation firm Susman Godfrey gave 2006 associate bonuses of up to $125,000, contends that "Any lawyer who is unhappy with their compensation should check into a mental institution."

Based on the adage about the mental state of people who keep doing the same thing but expecting a different result, there may be a few managing partners who should be joining those associates there.

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The Center for Work-Life Policy’s latest research, titled “Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek,” published in the December 2006 Harvard Business Review, reports that 35% of high earners work more than 60 hours a week and 10 percent work more than 80 hours a week.  Their conclusion is that 20% of high earners in the US have “extreme” jobs, that is: 60 hours or more of work a week that often includes unpredictable work flow, tight deadlines, work events outside of regular work hours, availability to clients 24/7 and/or a large amount of travel, among other things. And 48% of extreme workers say they’re working an average of 16.6 hours more per week than they did five hours ago.

Sound familiar?

The reasons for such long hours?  Among the external drivers: globalization and the round-the-clock availability it requires; vastly improved technology, allowing same-day delivery everywhere around the world; enhanced communication; increasing competition; and decreasing job security.  Among the internal motivators: stimulating work, high quality colleagues, high compensation, power and status.

Sound familiar?

Noted were the sacrifices that these schedules require in personal and family life.  More than two-thirds (2/3) do not get enough sleep, half don’t get enough exercise, and a significant number use alcohol, drugs, or food to alleviate their stress.  The sleep deprivation alone can work havoc on professional and personal lives:  a week of sleeping 4-5 hours a night induces an impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol level of .1%, which is legally equal to being drunk.  Forty-two percent (42%) of extreme workers take 10 or fewer vacation days a year and more than half regularly cancel vacations. This in spite of data that shows that regularly taking vacations lowers the risk of death by nearly 20% among men between the ages of 35 and 57, often your most valuable age-range.

More than half say their sex lives have suffered; and nearly half say their work has interfered with their ability to have a strong relationship. According to the report, it is physically impossible to have a meaningful conversation with your significant other after a 12-hour work day.  The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers identifies a preoccupation with work as one of the top four causes of divorce. 

Extreme workers also note the negative impact their work has on their children.  The study pointed out that women, 20% of the extreme workers, are more likely to feel personal responsibility for these down-sides, particularly with respect to their children  Three-quarters (3/4) of the women said their work interfered with their ability to maintain their homes (66% of men said the same thing),and 57% of women (and 48% of the men) do not want to continue their work pace for more than one year.

The part that doesn’t sound familiar is that two-thirds (2/3) of high earners in a range of professions and three-quarters (3/4) of top managers in multinational corporations say they love their jobs. “The big surprise of the data was just how much these extreme professionals love their work,” said Sylvia Ann Hewlett, president and founder of the Center.

Surprise, indeed.

Many doctors, lawyers and candlestick manufacturers may fall into the extreme category based on many of these standards but one thing is for sure:  loving their jobs is not usually part of the extreme lawyer package.  Attrition rates and simple "expressed dissatisfaction"--whether in surveys or on-line-- that have reached astronomical levels attest to that. 

The take-home is that we can not blame the hours alone on lawyer dissatisfaction.  There could be such a thing as an extreme lawyer who loves his/her job.  And there are steps that can be taken to move your extreme lawyers towards that happier (and ultimately more profitable) place.  Are you taking them?

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

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

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

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

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

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The 100 Best Employers

From over 400 organizations surveyed, five law firms, down one from last year and with most of the survivors heading down the list, made Fortune magazine’s 2007 list of the best 100 employers to work for: Alston & Bird, Arnold & Porter, Nixon Peabody, Perkins Coie and Bingham McCutchen, with Morrison & Foerster having dropped off.

The list is based on two criteria: an evaluation of the policies and culture of each organization, and the opinions of the employees, which is given more weight. Two-thirds of the total score comes from responses to a 57-question survey, on attitudes towards management, job satisfaction, and camaraderie, sent to at least 400 employees from each company. The remaining one-third of the score is based on demographic makeup, pay and benefits programs, and culture.

It's a tough competition, with No. 1-rated Google providing employees free gourmet meals, a swimming spa and free doctors on site.

But apart from offering outsized bennies, there are some lessons Google may be able to offer us legals.

Hiring for the Right Reasons

Google has doubled the number of employees in each of the last three years, and now with 10,000 employees, expects to double in size again this year, resulting in about 200 hires a week. It also enjoys an attrition rate of 4%, low by Silicon Valley standards. Historically, much like law firms, Google has relied on grade requirements and interviews to make hiring decisions. The challenge is to continue to find valuable employees at such an astounding rate of growth.

A recent review of over 2 million data points made it clear that Google's hiring criteria were not necessarily correlated with success at the company. So Google has revamped its hiring process, using assessments of existing personnel to produce a more quantitative measurement of success in terms of skills, intelligence, personality and integrity. All incoming applicants will now take a personal survey, which Google is already finding produces better matches for its work and culture.

Lessons for Law Firms

Law firms with spiraling growth requirements are competing to hire from the same number of law graduates with good grades from the same number of top-rung law schools as 20 years ago. The lesson from Google, the best company to work for and possibly the hiringest company as well, is that grades and an interview don't do it anymore. Now is the time to identify your real indicators of success and hire candidates with those.

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In a December 13, 2006 Legal Times article extolling the energy and talents of Pamela Rothenberg, the managing partner of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice’s Washington D.C. office, Rothenberg stressed how much she relies on The Gallup Organization strengths, an assessment that is described in the book First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, in managing the firm. 

Martin Seligman, the Fox Leadership Professor of Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, has worked with The Gallup Organization to expand and refine their strengths assessment to make it particularly relevant to lawyers. Seligman is so certain of the usefulness of the Gallup strengths assessment in raising productivity, that he has issued a challenge to assess free of charge the members of any firm willing to participate, on the condition that he be paid 10% of their increased profits. 

We have used the Gallup strengths assessment in a number of client projects for law firms and law departments. If you are interested in participating in Seligman’s challenge, or simply want to know more about these strengths and how they could be useful to improving productivity in your firm, contact us.

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Two recent books highlight some of the challenges in building strong practices:  retaining and promoting women and balancing life and work.

Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women's Success in the Law (Thomson/Legalworks, 2006) by Lauren Stiller Rikleen, a partner at the Massachusetts law firm Bowditch & Dewey, reviews the lack of professional fulfillment and the unsustainable personal sacrifice that the current law firm structure engenders in its lawyers, and identifies how these struggles are even more acute for women trying to succeed. While Ms. Rikleen suggests that leaving behind the billable hour fee structure, improved mentoring and other changes within firms can start a transition, it is her opinion that clients and law schools are the ones who have the power to make radical changes in the legal profession and its treatment of lawyers, particularly women.

The ABA's "The Lawyer's Guide to Balancing Life & Work: Taking the Stress Out of Success" by George W. Kaufman (2006) explores the ways that legal practice supports or undermines all lawyers' quest for success, advocating a personal self-assessment to gauge expectations, values and goals and the use of an individual action plan to realize a future more attuned to those issues.

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The National Law Journal has carried stories on several firms or regions where diversity has taken a front seat. On July 2, 2006, it reported that several Chicago firms had announced their intention to build their diversity numbers, responding to the Chicago Bar Association’s initiative, the “Alliance for Women.” So far, the firms involved are outperforming both their old diversity percentages and the national averages, climbing to as many as 27% female partners. The key, they report, is not in their hiring, which has long been attentive to females, but in creating better environments for female advancement. 

Similarly, the NLJ reported on July 10, 2006 that firms in Texas are making a concerted push to raise diversity levels, hiring internal diversity directors, moving women into leadership roles, and creating scholarship and other support programs. Their efforts have resulted in increased women and minority percentages.

California’s new law that requires managers in businesses with 50 or more employees to undergo two hours of training on sexually harassment each year has been applied to law firms, possibly both partners and associates. Connecticut and Maine also require mandatory harassment training. 

The California State Bar is also working to improve diversity by trying to set up a support network that would help guide poor kids of all races into a legal career, as well as crack down on not only harassment, but simply rude, uncivilized behavior from attorneys.

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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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Sexual harassment came to the legal profession in 1994, when a secretary at Baker & McKenzie filed a discrimination case against the firm and a partner. In 1998, a California Superior Court jury awarded her $7 million and the landscape of law firm conduct was trumpeted as being in the midst of a major change.  Last spring the news broke that a male partner at Holland & Knight’s Tampa office had been given the job of chief operating partner, prompting a number of complaints about his history of sexual harassment, which had, interestingly enough, not been brought to the attention of the firm’s administrators earlier. After extensive local and national news coverage, he resigned from his management position. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Part of the growing managerial team at law firms over the last decade or so has been the addition of the Professional Development or Career Development Officer. The goal, according to one firm, is happier, more productive attorneys who in turn are less likely to leave. The trend began several years ago, when large firms, such as Paul Weiss, whose current Director of Professional Development is David Cruickshank, realized the benefits of actively directing and supporting their attorneys' career development. 

Over time more firms have signed on to the concept, such as Chicago’s Gardner Carton & Douglas (soon to merge with Drinker, Biddle & Reath), which in 2004 appointed their first Chief Career Development Officer, responsible for the summer associate program, orientation of new associates, assignments and feedback, mentoring, training and formal performance reviews. Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal also hired at that time its first Chief Learning Officer, as have Holland & Knight and Arnold & Porter. Each position is tailored to the individual firm’s goals and requirements-- some focus primarily on providing targeted training to associates and partners, some attempt to manage quality assurance or reach out to alumni, while others take a more free-wheeling approach. Cordell M. Parvin, the lawyer at Jenkens & Gilchrist who became their first official Attorney Development Officer a few years ago, said at the time that his firm was moved to formalize the position in order to help their lawyers make for themselves a career that they love. “We’re in an era where young lawyers have never been paid more money, and they’ve never been more unhappy.”   

Adding Internal Coaches

A recent twist has been the inclusion of individual coaching responsibilities in the Professional Development officer’s role, or, as in the case of some firms, such as Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe (soon to merge with Dewey Ballantine), Arnold & Porter and Fenwick & West, the addition to the team of an internal full-time coach. Like the Career Development position, the coach's role can be defined in many different ways, depending on the values and goals of the firm. And the coaching methodology could differ significantly depending on which of the myriad coaching approaches are used.

The Challenges of Coaching Lawyers

Dr. Martin Seligman, the Fox Leadership professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, founded the school of Positive Psychology, which focuses on factors that make for professional and personal success, instead of following the traditional diagnostic model of addressing weaknesses. His work identifies optimism particularly as producing sizeable psychic benefits. A widely successful coaching program based on Marty's positive psychology model encourages “learned optimism.”  

According to Marty's research, however, lawyers are strongly pessimistic-- so much so that law appears to be the only career where pessimism is a career enhancing attribute. So the question arises as to whether changing lawyers' pessimism to optimism will kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Ideally, such coaching would give lawyers the ability to switch out of their day-job mindset, not only when socializing or in family situations, but also when engaging in non-lawyering professional activities like managing their firms and courting their clients, producing bottom-line benefits. 

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The Fifth International Positive Psychology Summit 2006 was held October 5-7 in Washington DC.  Dr. Martin Seligman, the Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, founded the school of Positive Psychology, which focuses on factors that make for professional and personal success, rather than following the traditional diagnostic model of addressing weaknesses.  There were a number of presentations of interest to lawyers.

Richard Florida, an economist, Hirst Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, author of the bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic Books, 2002) and The Flight of the Creative Class (HarperCollins, 2005), was the keynote speaker.  The dramatic results of his research found that highly talented people will overcome financial disincentives to join communities and businesses that promote subjective well-being, such as supporting diversity and encouraging tolerance.  His astonishing findings are that it is the people, the "soul of the city," that drives the production of jobs and financial success, rather than the other way around, as classic economics theory maintained.

These findings fit nicely with the results of David Maister's survey on the factors that drive financial success in personal services businesses.  Maister asked simply "Are employee attitudes correlated with financial success?"  In his book Practice What You Preach:  What Managers Must Do To Create A High-Achievement Culture, he expands on the results of that survey.  Not only is the answer "yes", but, more importantly, Maister found that it is attitudes that drive financial results and not the other way around.

The message for law firms and law departments is that, in a world of escalating pay raises but ever-increasing movement, the soul of the firm-- and how it influences employee attitudes and their sense of well-being-- cana be the key to achieving financial success.

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