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

So here is the typical routine:  clients that demand not overnight but one-hour turnaround, associates that don't hand in assignments on time, working into the night to deliver a reasonable product (see the first two), phone conferences scheduled for 6 am, which turn out to be at 3 am in California, where you are that week, except that the number you have is wrong so you are still late to the call after getting up at 2 am, the managing partner on your case repeatedly for missing committee meetings or failing to finish firm administration projects, a significant other who complains about the unfair burden he/she has to carry while you sit in meetings at wee hours, kids or other family members who chide, ok snarl, about how infrequently you make it to family events, no consistent exercise since last year in spite of your second new year's resolution, drinking a little too much on the late side and getting up a little too early (or too late) on the early side, all of which can coalesce into an angry showdown with any one or more of these players--unless you succeed in your attempts to avoid them all.

Does that sound like your life or someone else's you know?

The first step in taking control of your life is being able to actually see how your life is currently organized.  Can you accurately say when you arrive for work and leave most days and how much time you spend evenings on work? And how much you spend on personal and/or family time? Do you shave off a little time when you tell the family what time to expect you or when you estimate time charges for the client? Are you plagued by back-to-back meetings, half of which seem unnecessary? Do you admit to friends and family what your workweek really looks like or do you downplay the time demands and the stress?

Pretend you are talking about someone else and write down your real schedule for all aspects of your life, your actual conflicts and stresses and, while you're at it, your free time (short list).  Would your colleagues and significant other/s agree?

Once you can honestly see your life, the second step is coming to understand whether your life is the way it is on purpose.  Or because you are unconscious of your choices. Do you honestly know which parts of your workday are enjoyable and which are not?  Are you always apologizing to others for those early phone calls, swearing under your breath at how exhausting they are? Or is it possible that you actually like how they get you up and off to a good start on a busy day?  Make you feel important that others need your input before they can proceed? 

So next to your typical day's activities, write down whether they are enjoyable (possibly another short list) or not, and to what degree for each--neutral, somewhat, very.

Now comes the time to figure out how you can reduce the amount of time spent on the most unpleasant parts of your schedule, and increase the amounts of time spent on the most pleasant ones.

Which is not to say that your choice can be to bypass all the hard personal stuff, lob off on your associates the difficult client stuff or be excused from getting enmeshed in the partnership stuff.  But you can make your preferences known as a first step to finding a balance between what we have to do and what we want to do.

You would think that lawyers with their reputations for combativeness would be the first to say what they want and how they want it.  But the reality is quite different.  Most lawyers loath confrontation, particularly in what they consider to be non-critical areas like scheduling, and thereby deprive the players in their lives of important feedback on what would make their lives better, and therefore their work better. Or, they take it for so long, victims of incompetence that they are, and then lash out in an angry fit.

You don't have to be the 300 pound gorilla to start putting some order into your life.  You simply have to think about possible alternatives, articulate those to the people involved and then take steps to move towards those alternatives that seem workable.

Of course it's helpful to know the other players' proclivities--another exercise in awareness.  Does your secretary sometimes switch numbers in a date or phone number?  Does your associate take long lunches and work later at night? Do your clients prefer face-to-face instead of telephone/email advice? Is the managing partner fond of early morning pow-wows?

Once you have others' proclivities clear, start informing everyone of your preferences.  Have you given your assistant clear guidelines on when you want phone calls, who is to be included, who should proofread the meeting invites, and when to give reminders?  Have you explained to your associates that due dates are sacrosanct and while everything can be discussed, something responsive has to be on your desk at a certain time of the day in any event? Do you explore with clients several possible times and dates for meetings or conference calls or do you feel you have to jump on the first suggestion? Have you told the committee chair or managing partner the best dates and times for you to meet? Here's one:  have you worked out with your significant other if there is a day during the week that s/he would prefer that you make it home earlier than midnight?

Then you have to abide by the guidelines and boundaries you yourself have asked for--no approving a late meeting after a day of meetings, no excusing a 3 am phone call, no extension for the associate's due date, even if you may have to replace him/her.  And you can't hit the reschedule button less than 24 hours before that special home date you've set up for the week.

if you don't affirmatively provide guidelines and boundaries to the players in your life, your staff, colleagues, clients and family will push and push until they meet resistance.  It's like ballroom dancing--a good partner gives some resistance to the other person to lean against. And if you don't provide any, you could and probably should get mowed down.

The first part of this endeavor is all in the mind--building an accurate awareness.  The second part is in the muscle--keeping promises to yourself and others.  While communicating your way through it all.

The key here is to be living on purpose and not by default.  Yes, everyone has to make compromises and your life will not suddenly be a bed of roses, but any small improvements in how you feel your life is lived will make you more empowered and the people you deal with more engaged. 

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In honor of the endings and beginnings at this time of the year and the personal and professional resolutions that each of us aspire to for the future, it is fascinating to look to the life of the founder of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud. A recent entry in "The People's Therapist," a blog by a former S&C associate, Will Meyerhofer, who is now a therapist to lawyers, recounts some interesting information on Freud's relationship to strong emotions, which is summarized below.

Oliver Sacks notes in his book "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" that Freud was known to not like music, quoting his nephew, Harry, who claimed Freud "despised" music.

Freud himself wrote about his reaction to music in the introduction to "The Moses of Michelangelo":

"I am no connoisseur in art...nevertheless, works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting...[I] spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me."

His friend, Theodor Reik, wrote that Freud feared giving himself over to the mysterious effects of music on his emotions. Reik felt that Freud's resistance to music amounted to:

"[a] turning-away...[an] act of will in the interest of self-defense...[and the] more energetic and violent, the more the emotional effects of music appeared undesirable to him. He became more and more convinced that he had to keep his reason unclouded and his emotions in abeyance."

Let's see.  Super-analytic type who is uncomfortable with strong emotions determines to not let himself "give in" to those emotions, but to remain as fiercely rational as possible. Sound like anyone you know?

While it is reassuring to know that even the grand man of psychology struggled with understanding emotions that overwhelmed him, his strategy of dealing with them is less than heartening.  It is no wonder that when Leonard Woolf, along with his wife Virginia, visited Freud in London late in his life, Woolf described Freud as "a half-extinct volcano... sombre, suppressed, reserved."

Only a few months later, at the age of 83, Freud arranged for a morphine overdose to end his life.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is the challenge that yawns most scarily right in front of us, the one we least understand and most want to avoid.

Meyerhofer points out that "the word 'freude' in German means 'joy.' The word 'dream' comes from the Middle English word 'dreme,' which means 'joy' and 'music.'"  He suggests that Freud may have retreated into joyful musical dreams at night, even if he wasn't able to embrace them during the day. 

Perhaps there is a hint in this etymology as to why Freud was so driven by his fascination with deconstructing dreams, dreams which like music reflect abstractions of emotions that he personally couldn't fully understand or give himself up to. If only analysis and rationality could provide all the answers.

Another rift on the etymology is that Freud possibly never truly lived up to his name because he wasn't open to the full panoply of emotion, wasn't able to experience the roller coaster that  both plummets us into the depths but also raises us up to the highest heights--a mysterious and sometimes painful ride that nonetheless informs every aspect of our feelings and ultimately our intelligence.

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No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus, but thankfully there is gratitude and hope, which I wish for all my subscribers during this holiday season and throughout the new year!  With these twin gifts come prosperity and peace--let us work together to make sure you are beneficiaries in the coming year of both. 

The Law People Management Gang

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Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the industry pacemaker in this matter, announced that it will keep associate year-end bonuses for 2011 the same as last year--$7,500 for a first year associate up to $37,500 for  the most senior associates.  Not only are these bonuses far below 2007, when first years received a total of $45,000 and seventh-years a total of $110,000 (in each case including a second year-end bonus), but the fact that that they are not being raised at all this year from low bonuses last year also indicates the continuing weakness of the legal industry, according to the article.

[It might be pointed out that early this year Sullivan & Cromwell offered associates a second bonus for 2010 ranging from $2,500 (first-years) to $20,000 (seventh-years). Cravath and others followed suit and even raised S&C, which could possibly happen again.]

Commentators have busily sunk into a slug-out over whether these bonus rates are fair to associates when at least some firms, including Cravath, are reporting increased partner profits. According to The American Lawyer, in 2010 the overall average equity partner profits for the Am Law 100 of almost $1.4 million returned to pre-recession levels, while Cravath’s PPP has risen from $2.5 million in 2008 (sharply lower than in 2007) to $2.7 million in 2009 and $3.17 million in 2010.  It's enough to prompt at least one commentator to militate for an Occupy Big Law movement.

There is a lot that is distinctive about law firm bonuses--they are totally transparent within firms and outside, matched to the dollar by competing firms, and presume that law students and young lawyers are not able to compare firms on any basis other than raw compensation. In most cases, they are dished out in automatic response to whatever the last competitor has done.  In an era of severe client cost pressure and increasing competition from alternative legal providers, such a reflexive approach to compensation seems, well, unbusinesslike.

And there is also good reason to believe that it's a waste of money--according to an analysis by the American Lawyer of their survey of midlevel associates.

"An examination of the results of our 2011 Midlevel Associates Survey shows that there is no statistically significant relationship between associates' ranking of their compensation and benefits and their expectation that they will still be at their firm in two years... Our finding echoed a 2007 study that Indiana University Law professor William Henderson did based on our 2004 Midlevel Associates Survey—he also found that the relationship between compensation ratings and the expectation that associates would stay two more years at their firm was close to zero."

The correlation between the second bonuses given in the spring of 2010 and how associates rated their compensation was also tenuous, with the associates at S&C--the firm that started that round of bonuses--giving lower marks to their firm for satisfaction with their compensation than two firms that didn’t award spring bonuses.

So maybe we shouldn't be so presumptuous after all?  The highest paying, largest law firms still lose 18%+ of their associates every year, according to NALP.

The challenge is to understand the positives and negatives of differing approaches to compensation--lock-step, merit, semi-merit--in this market environment.  How do these approaches affect recruitment, attrition, productivity, teamwork and work environment?  It may be easier to just blanket repeat what Cravath has done, but there are much greater rewards for taking a more thoughtful and current tack.

 

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Lawyers suffer from a high rate of depression--the highest of all professions--and the peak time for depression to hit is around the holidays.  Add to that the stress that many are feeling now over the economy and whether they will have a job come the first of the year, and you have a recipe for poor performance, strained relationships and general year-end blues. 

Positive psychology is the study of what drives optimal functioning.  It focuses on the positive emotions, individual traits and institutions that improve productivity and satisfaction and that also have been determined to lengthen longevity by 20%.  But lawyers are world-class pessimists, a trait so clearly aligned with their profession that law students who score the highest on pessimism also have the highest grades.  So practicing positive emotions seems sentimental and unrealistic to many lawyers.

The proof, however, is in the pudding.  Don't let moping through the holidays be your "realistic" approach.  Here's a list of things that positive psychology research has found can help you beat back the depression demon. Even though it may sound too much like kittens and flowers and light, you might just find that one or more things on this list can help make your holidays happy. 

1. Keep a gratitude diary.  Spending even 5 minutes a day writing down what you are grateful for has a demonstrated positive impact on satisfaction, physical health and energy levels. For a bigger kick, send a note to someone you are grateful to.
2. Start the day with a smile.  If you can maintain a positive attitude through the first hour, you have a much better chance of keeping it all day.  Research shows that even if you don't feel positive at first, the positive feelings will follow that physical smile.  Laughter is good for you too, And a positive mood is contagious.
3. Perform an act of kindness.  One daily act of kindness, regardless of how small--like complimenting a coworker, bringing someone coffee, or large--volunteering at a food bank, mowing an elderly neighbor's lawn, builds strong connections and adds a sense of purpose and meaning to life.
4. Spend time with friends and family.  Plan regular time together.  And even if a late brief or closing keeps you physically away, phone calls and emails can keep you connected in the meantime. 
5. Replay those special moments.  When you're stuck in a conference room late at night, give yourself a break to replay those special memories you have--visualizing the moment and exactly how it felt.  It's a mini-vacation in the mind.
6. Manage your physical health--eat well, sleep well, exercise and stretch daily. The positive effects of good physical health--on your immune system, heart and dopamine levels--is the foundation for high functioning and lasting satisfaction.
7. Just minutes of meditation daily for as few as 6 weeks, using music or chanting to further the relaxation, has proved powerful in developing the ability to cope with stress and lighten mood.
8. Visualize!  Imagine vividly your goals and aspirations. Write down the specific details of your ideal life and incorporate them wherever you can into the life you have now.
9. Upgrade your self-talk.  Stop trash-talking to yourself--remember to congratulate yourself for your accomplishments and remind yourself of your strengths.
10. Release yourself from responsibility for what you can't control or change. Keep a discerning eye on what those things are and don't beat yourself up over what you can't do.
11. Forgive. Staying angry is like trying to kill someone else by drinking poison.  It only hurts you in the end.  Unburden yourself from the weight of resentment and anger over what others have or haven't done. Forgive their weaknesses, their bad intentions, their failure to be who you thought or want them to be.  Then embrace your lightened life.

 Happy holidays!

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This past August a court dismissed an EEOC discrimination suit against Bloomberg contending that the company had systematically discriminated against pregnant women or those who recently returned to work from maternity leave. The judge, New York district court judge Loretta Preska, saw the EEOC's essential charge to be that  Bloomberg, as a company policy, did not provide work/life balance for its employees, which policy disproportionately discriminated against women employees.

The judge found insufficient evidence of such discrimination, but went further: the law, she opined, "does not mandate work/life balance"--"balance" is not a corporate obligation. A company like Bloomberg, she adds, explicitly states that it expects "all-out dedication" from its employees in return for a hefty paycheck. Indeed, the company Code of Standards states that Bloomberg “is your livelihood and your first obligation.” And she noted that both men and women have complained about work-life balance there. Thus, "making a decision that preferences family over work comes with consequences. But those consequences occur for anyone who takes significant time away from Bloomberg, not just for pregnant women and mothers.”

"The law does not require companies to ignore or stop valuing ultimate dedication, however unhealthy that might be for family life,” she wrote. “Whether an individual in any family wishes to make that commitment is an intensely personal decision that must account for the tradeoffs involved, and it is not the role of the courts to dictate a healthy balance for all.”

As may have been expected, a firestorm of controversy erupted over this decision, evidenced by the comments not only on the ABA Journal site above but also on the Careerist, NY Times, Wall Street Journal and Ms. sites.

And it didn't help that Judge Preska quoted Jack Welch, the long-retired chairman of GE, on his take on work/life balance:  “There’s no such thing as work-life balance.” This is the same Jack Welch who in a book titled Winning, co-written with his third wife, gives this advice:

There’s lip service about work-life balance, and then there’s reality….  You need to understand that reality:  your boss’s top priority is competitiveness. Of course he wants you to be happy, but only inasmuch as it helps the company win.

An article in the Wall Street Journal today, noting that the number of women in corporate leadership positions in New York State has not appreciably increased over the last few years, brought this Bloomberg decision to mind. A report conducted by Columbia Business School and the Women's Executive Circle of New York, the third in a series of biannual surveys tracking the number of women executives and board members at the state's largest 100 publicly traded companies, found that women held 15.9% of high-level leadership positions in 2010, up from 14.7% in 2006--a little more than a 1% increase.

Back in 2006, our entry "Five New Studies on Diversity in Law" pointed out the disadvantages that women, particularly those trying to have families, experience in legal practice, effectively limiting the number of women partners to approximately 17% at that time, a number that is not much changed today.

Also in 2006, an article published in The New York Times entitled "Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?" similarly elicited a barrage of comments.  But Karen M .Lockwood, a senior female partner in Howrey, a Washington D.C. firm, who was the president of the D.C. Women's Bar Association, was quoted as making a distinction, saying that "Law firms are way beyond discrimination—this is about advancement and retention. Problems with advancement and retention are grounded in biases, not discrimination." 

Ms. Lockwood correctly identified a distinction. Discrimination is overt, explicit and legally actionable--not what Bloomberg is guilty of, while bias is implicit and often unconscious, covertly undermining the actions and opinions of some of the most overtly committed supporters of women. 

Most experts agree that the Bloomberg decision is correct on the law.  Everyone, women included, is entitled to trade leisure or family time for a bigger paycheck.  And this of course is particularly likely to happen in industries such as law where, still, time is considered the currency of value: the more time you spend on work, the more valuable you are.  Perhaps, in the end, that is the key to the "glass ceiling" problem that persists:  women are simply less willing to make that tradeoff. 

But there is another issue that the Bloomberg decision raises.  Few lawyers and law firms today would admit to outright discrimination against women, and even fewer could be convicted of it.  But unconscious bias is another matter.  Has the Bloomberg decision fueled unconscious bias against women? 

Ranier Kuchl, the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic, expressed a commonly held opinion when he said that he could instantly tell the difference with his eyes closed between the sounds produced by male and female musicians, particularly those playing "male" instruments, such as tubas, trombones and French horns, which, the theory went, required the greater lung power of a man.

Nonetheless, over the past thirty years the use of screens and rules to assure anonymity have become standard in music auditioning. During the same time, the number of women in the top US orchestras has increased fivefold. The first time new audition rules were in place at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, all of the four new positions were awarded to women, more than doubling the number of women at that time in the entire orchestra.

What the classical music world thought was a pure experience—listening to someone play—was demonstrated in fact to be biased by conscious and unconscious gender cues. Another lawyer, Jennifer L. Bluestein, head of professional development for Baker & McKenzie, was quoted in the above New York Times article as saying that "Some of this is left over from the sexual harassment cases from the 90's, but I think that it's more because of the fact that we don't look like men." The evidence from the classical music industry seems to support Ms. Bluestein's comment--those visual cues can obviously undermine a purportedly unbiased person's perceptions of actual performance.

Similarly, in identical speeches delivered by equally talented speakers, the male is invariably judged to be the more persuasive speaker, even by women in the audience.  And men who excuse themselves from work to go to a soccer game or relieve a babysitter are consistently viewed positively for being involved with their families, while women who do the same thing with the same regularity are viewed negatively, as being not fully committed to their work.  And so it goes.

What is evident is how important gender is in shaping our unconscious biases. Company policies that reinforce those traditional biases are likely to breed--even stronger biases.  And as a result even fewer women will be afforded the opportunity to turn over their lives to their work.  If women are the ones who are opting out of an industry's or company's workforce because of work/life balance concerns, it will be all women, whether they will also eventually make the same choice or not, who will suffer from the bias that those experiences reinforce. 

Today the number of lawyers, both men and women, and particularly those stalwarts of Gen X and Gen Y, who are adamant about the importance of work/life balance are greater than ever.  Which makes the likelihood of peopling with the best talent any business that devalues balance much more challenging. 

Plus, there are substantive advantages realized by a business that affords employees a healthy lifestyle--as a recent New York Times article on “decision fatigue” reports, those who’ve made too many judgment calls in a day “take illogical shortcuts and tend to favor short-term gains and delayed costs. … [T]hey become inclined to take the safer, easier option even when that option hurts someone else.”

Or as psychologist Roy F. Baumeister puts it: “Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested…”

A recent article on the Bloomberg decision concluded: "Allowing people to have full lives, in short, isn’t a favor to women—it’s a better way to run a business."

Or as Jack Welch has also said: “If there was ever a case of ‘Do as I say, not as I did,’ this is it. No one, myself included, would ever call me an authority on work-life balance.”

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The following entry won the BlawgWorld Pick of the Week. BlawgWorld is a free weekly email newsletter that links to the best articles on the Web for lawyers and law firm administrators.

 

                                                     

House Speaker John Boehner teared up when introducing two newly elected Republican congressmen during a closed party meeting on September 15th, not the first time Boehner has choked up in public. A lengthy list of public cries just over the last few years include tears at a commencement speech, while thanking colleagues for their support during budget negotiations, during a talk about schools, discussing at various times his wife and his 11 brothers and sisters, celebrating election night, singing "America the Beautiful," talking about American security and American families who are suffering economically and simply upon taking the speaker's gavel, many of which sobs are commemorated on YouTube.

 

While Boehner seems to get away with it, The New York Times columnist Gail Collins contends women particularly must avoid tears in order to maintain their credibility:

One of the best-remembered moments in the Obama/Clinton campaign — Hillary Clinton cries in New Hampshire — is an excellent example of the difference between what men and women can get away with, tear-wise...With her back to the wall and the presidency on the line, Clinton approached the edge of a sniffle and we are still talking about it. Boehner is driven to great, noisy sobs when he contemplates the fact that as a youth, he mopped the floor at his father’s tavern...

[Nancy] Pelosi, of course, does not cry in public. We will stop here briefly to contemplate what would happen if she, or any female lawmaker, broke into loud, nose-running sobs while discussing Iraq troop funding or giving a TV interview.

Vivien Chen, of the Careerist, concludes that women can cry to diffuse a bully, but, otherwise, crying's probably not so cool.

According to the Harvard Business Review, Boehner can get away with crying "because of three key differences between John Boehner and the rest of us above-average professionals looking to progress in our careers: first, he's the boss, second he's not crying about workplace issues, and third, he's old (or older, depending on where you sit)."

The unwritten corporate rule is simple, according to HBR: "It is never okay to cry in your office, with your colleagues, or, god forbid, in front of your boss." So if you feel tears coming on, HBR advises that you either excuse yourself and "then get the hell out of your office...And if you can't keep it together to excuse yourself, simply exit the building quickly and worry about explaining later."

Does it surprise you, then, to learn that a study conducted by recruitment consultants Michael Page International found that mounting stress of all sorts leads one in three lawyers to cry?

Probably most lawyers would be loathe to admit to crying, so such a statistic looms rather large. If there are behind-the-door sobs, the question becomes whether tears are ever a good response during your working day, public or not.

Human beings are the only species that cries emotional tears, so there isn't any animal data available, but there's some interesting research about the differences in the crying habits of men and women.

Evidently women are biologically wired to shed tears more than men. Cells of female tear glands look different than men's and her tear ducts are smaller, so if a man and a woman both tear up, the woman's tears will spill onto her cheeks more quickly.  A hormone in tears called prolactin, a lactation catalyst, also aids in tear production. By the time women reach 18, they have 50% to 60% higher levels of prolactin in their bloodstream than men do.  Age is also a factor.  In an extensive study, researchers found that women under 45 are 10 times more likely to cry at work as men 45 and older.

A study of 37 countries determined that women in developed Western economies not only cry much more than men, but also much more than women in societies where women have fewer rights.

The male reticence to tear up seems to be related to testosterone levels.  As men age, and their testosterone levels decrease, they cry more. There are also powerful cultural inhibitions that make men less likely to cry, although those are relatively new, according to Tom Lutz, a University of California, Riverside professor. In the context of centuries and millennia, "male tears are the norm and males not crying is a recent historical aberration," he says, traceable to the late 19th century, when factory workers—mostly men—were discouraged from indulging in emotion lest it interfere with their productivity.

Which brings us again to lawyers in modern offices, wary of demonstrations of vulnerability, weakness or failing to spend time productively.  Yet evidently still shedding tears, even if behind closed doors.

What is one to do with those exasperating feelings of frustration and anger that would like to express themselves fluidly?

We have reason to believe that not only do men and women have different crying profiles but that they experience strong emotion differently--men have a stronger and longer-lasting physical response to emotion than women do, with higher heart rates and blood pressure, and it is more debilitating to their cognitive functioning--they aren't able to think as clearly and they remember fewer details of what happened during the emotional experience than women do. 

So what looks like a ban against emotional displays in the office for fear of reducing productivity more likely reflects the male experience of debilitation.  It is the male experience that may in fact give some justification to keeping one's emotional experience at the office more serene--let's not impair our functioning with this kind of stuff.  That attitude becomes the cultural norm, and women are often branded as the ones who breach it.  But women, unlike men, can move through their emotional experience more quickly and with less impairment, making their aversion to an office episode less likely, at least for reasons of reduced productivity. 

The alternative is to suppress emotions, and the adverse impact of suppression is much more dramatic for both sexes. Cognitive functioning declines significantly when the required energy is devoted to choking off emotional expression, leaving little energy for rational thought. And suppression means the cause of the emotion is not being dealt with--the culprit is not being confronted--and therefore there is no relief in sight.  So suppression both traumatizes more significantly and lengthens the period of damage.

What can we as practitioners conclude from all of this?  If you are a Boehner and feel those tears start to flow, go ahead and find a place to let them flow.  Preferably one that is not immediately in sight of your clients, colleagues or staff.  Wring out all the emotion--anger and hurt-- from those tears and then, when the storm has passed, sit down and analyze what brought on those emotions.  Are you frustrated with your situation?  Angry at someone's words?  Worried about the impression you made?

Once you have a handle on what feelings prompted the tears, go directly to the source and articulate those feelings.  "When the client told me how dissatisfied she was with my brief, I was devastated since I  had worked so hard on it." 

Then come up with a plan to get you back on the road forward.  "I would like to have a conference call where we go over each complaint so I can produce a second draft that suits us both."

And if you find your tears flowing because you're so proud of your team, just let them go wherever you are.

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According to the recently released 2011 Associates Survey, third- through fifth-year associates billed the highest number of billable hours in 2010 since 2007, working more than two extra weeks (80 billable hours, or a total average of 2,037 hours) compared to the 1,975 average  hours billed for 2009.  Which may account for the fact that the average firm composite score in terms of associate satisfaction declined for the second straight year to the lowest level since 2004.

While they may find consolation in their at least having a job in this economy, and also in their salaries, which are at their highest level in five years, whatever bump these associates get from those facts obviously hasn't done much to get their satisfaction rates out of the cellar.

On top of this survey comes the results of a survey conducted by Captivate Network, the company that publishes news headlines on elevator and lobby screens, of more than 670 North American white-collar workers.  The unhappy white-collar worker is an unmarried 42-year-old professional female, identified as a doctor or lawyer, making @ $100,000.  The typical happy white collar worker, on the other hand, is a 39-year-old married man with a household income between $150,000 and $200,000 in a senior management position, with one young child at home and a wife who works part-time.

Certain of the survey results may help explain our unhappy associates: 

• 89% of happy people leave work at a reasonable hour, compared to 49% of unhappy people.
• 93% of happy people take vacations, compared to 79% of unhappy people.
   

There is a significant difference in income between our two profiled workers, although one hopes that $50,000 doesn't mark the difference between happiness and unhappiness.  And certainly the literature is full of data showing that personal relationships are what makes us happy, which our hapless lawyer does not seem to have. If happy people leave work at a reasonable hour, do our mid-level associates even have a shot at being happy?  Also, commentators have pointed out that the woman is not described as being in a "senior" position, which may reflect years of banging her head against the glass ceiling.

There is also always an issue about causation in this kind of data.  Maybe unhappy people spend more time at work or don't take vacations because they are...unhappy.

But the bottom line is that the trend line for lawyers is not good, either in hours worked or work satisfaction.  Are we individually or collectively going to do something about it?

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The rate of depression among lawyers is widely recognized as a multiple--in some studies a double-digit multiple--of the rate of depression in the general population and also in other professions.  This rate is high by the second semester of law school and only escalates over time.

There has been speculation as to whether depression in lawyers is a condition that is coincident with their predominant attribute of pessimism or is itself a separate attribute that might be a career enhancer in its own right.  Swiss watch makers have for generations piped downbeat music into their work rooms to produce a higher rate of accuracy in work that is technical and painstaking but also repetitive. Are lawyers naturally better suited to do the personal services equivalent of master watchmaking because of their inclination towards depression?

A recent study seems to provide at least a partial answer.  In "Performance benefits of depression: Sequential decision making in a healthy sample and a clinically depressed sample," by Bettina von Helversen et al, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, the following conclusions were reached:

"Previous research reported conflicting results concerning the influence of depression on cognitive task performance. Whereas some studies reported that depression enhances performance, other studies reported negative or null effects... [W]e studied the performance of individuals - in a complex sequential decision task - who are nondepressed, depressed, and recovering from a major depressive episode. We found that depressed individuals perform better than do nondepressed individuals. Formal modeling of participants' decision strategies suggest that acutely depressed participants have higher thresholds for accepting options and make better choices than either healthy participants or those recovering from depression."

So exactly how were these depressed people functioning better? 

"[D]epressed participants accepted options less readily, which led to longer search and better choices. These results suggest that depression, by fostering greater persistence, may improve performance in certain tasks."

In other words, depressed people persist by passing up okay alternatives for a longer time and therefore eventually find a better choice than non-depressed people do.  The implication is that the depressed feel less pressure to come up with a solution quickly.

There are some other, less dramatic advantages to management to having a depressed work force--depressed workers are more likely to agree to what would otherwise be perceived as an over-reaching schedule and other onerous work conditions. Depressed workers are less likely to demand higher compensation or promotions.  They are also less likely to insist on using their own approach to managing a matter or staff.  Most of these advantages stem from the fact that the depressed don't have the psychic energy to devote to these peripheral matters--they are intent on getting the difficult meat of their work done and need all that they can muster to do that alone.

Lest we sound like we are glorifying depression, also note the long-standing disadvantages to depression.  Again, quoting the above article: 

"Depression modifies eating and sleeping habits, changes psychomotor patterns, and impedes cognitive functioning (for a review see Levin, Heller, Mohanty, Herrington, & Miller, 2007). Moreover, depressed people find decision making challenging (Monroe, Skowronski, Macdonald, & Wood, 2005; Radford, Mann, & Kalucy, 1986; Saunders, Peterson, Sampson, & Reardon, 2000) and tend to ruminate about problems (Ewards & Weary, 1993). In addition to these challenges, depressed individuals perform poorly in memory (Jackson & Smith, 1984), reasoning (Sedek & von Hecker, 2004), and choice tasks (Conway & Giannapoulos, 1993; Gillis, 1993; Murphy, et al., 2001)."

That list gives us some insight into why, if depressed lawyers are making better decisions in at least certain circumstances and offer other advantages to management, we aren't embracing the depressed lawyer model in recruiting and advancement. In short, a depressed work force doesn't perform at its highest level.

But to quote further the authors of the study: "Despite these findings, recent work has attempted to detect whether depression offers benefits that offset its negative consequences and, thus, explain its evolution (Andrews &Thompson, 2009; Hagen, 2002; Keller & Nesse, 2006; Nesse, 2000; 2009). These investigations have found that negative affective states can promote analytical reasoning, which facilitates systematic and thorough information processing (e.g., Schwarz & Bless,1991). In this vein, Andrews and Thompson (2009) contend that depression may be an adaptation that enables complex problem solving, suggesting that depression may improve performance on tasks that demand rumination and persistence. This resonates with literature suggesting that negative affect promotes more systematic and thorough processing of information (e.g., Schwarz & Bless, 1991), and it also dovetails with investigations showing that depression inhibits goal disengagement, increases persistence (Andrews & Thompson, 2009), and leads to difficulties in decision making (Radford et al., 1986; Saunders et al., 2000)."

These depressed ruminations may also challenge managers trying to motivate their lawyers to work more quickly in a fixed fee environment.

All in all, isn't depression as a career advantage a bummer for the industry?

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Perhaps your mother's adage about what makes for beautiful is not entirely correct.  It was recently announced that economists at the University of Texas-Austin analyzed data from five large surveys of more than 25,000 people conducted between 1971 and 2009 in the US, Canada, Germany and Britain and came up with what may or may not be a surprising conclusion:

Physical beauty gets you both money and happiness.

Participants in the top 15% of people ranked by looks were more than 10% happier than those in the bottom 10% of looks and the extra economic benefit that resulted from beauty accounted for at least half of that extra happiness--evidently better-looking people generally earn more money and marry people both better-looking and also higher-earning.

Another economist at the University of Texas-Austin, Daniel Hamermesh, a leading researcher of beauty and success,  presided over a series of surveys in the United States and Canada just over a decade ago which showed that for men the ugliness “penalty” was -9% in earnings while the beauty premium was +5%.  For women, perhaps surprisingly, the effect was less marked: the ugliness penalty in earnings was -6% while the beauty premium was +4%.

An article in the Economist a few years ago entitled "To Those That Have Shall Be Given" reported on research finding that as a general matter physical attributes associated with beauty also "give clues about intelligence, and that such clues are picked up by other people."

So where do we lawyers stand on the good looks=happiness/earnings/intelligence calculation?

Fortunately, Dr. Hamermesh has looked into that question also.  In his paper  "Beauty, Productivity and Discrimination: Lawyers' Looks and Lucre," examining the careers of graduates of a large, unnamed American law school (University of Michigan), he found that

• Those rated attractive on the basis of their matriculation photographs went on to earn higher salaries than their less attractive classmates.
• Better-looking attorneys who graduated in the 1970s earned more after 5 years of practice than their worse- looking classmates, other things equal, an effect that grew even larger by the 15h year of practice. There was, however, interestingly enough, no impact of beauty on earnings among 1980s graduates.  
• Women who graduated from law school in the 1970s were better looking overall than women in the 1980s.
• Attorneys in the private sector were judged better-looking than those in the public sector.
• Attractiveness may determine which practice group you are in--regulatory lawyers were the worst looking and litigators the best looking.
• Male attorneys' probability of attaining an early partnership rose with beauty, which was not true for female attorneys.  

Or, as the question was posed by Above the Law: Are Attractive People Better Lawyers? According to that entry, quoting Hamermesh: “They’re not necessarily better lawyers. They just get paid more.”

Hamermesh also found evidence that beautiful people bring more revenue to their employers than the less-beautiful, at least in the advertising industry.  Among Dutch advertising firms, those with the most beautiful executives had the largest size-adjusted revenues—a difference that exceeded the salary differentials of the firms in question.

Hamermesh conceded that he could not determine from the data whether the beauty effect occurred because clients discriminated in favor of the good-looking or because better-looking lawyers were able to obtain greater financial gain for their clients.

Even more recent research seems to support these findings--such as the role that beauty at a young age may play in making people extroverted, and therefore more likely to have higher earnings and enjoy more happiness-producing relationships, and the advantage that physically attractive children of both sexes have in being seen by their peers as socially skilled (Vaillancourt & Hymel, 2006).

There may also be some anecdotal support for these findings. The looks of attorneys at DavisPolk, one of the more profitable firms in the country, have long been lauded, and started getting extra attention when photos began appearing on the firm website.

However, not everyone is convinced of the reliability of Hamermesh's and others' data--for a sampling of the responses ranging from dismissal to skepticism to giving the benefit of the doubt, see comments at the ABA report.

In sum, as the Economist article points out, "sadly reminiscent of the biblical quotation to which the title of this article refers... there is a feedback loop between biology and the social environment that gives to those who have, and takes from those who have not."

By the way, are there any odds in investing in the improvement of our looks?

In Shanghai, where the difference between the ugliness penalty and the beauty bonus was greatest, Dr. Hamermesh looked at the relationship between women's spending on their cosmetics and clothes and their income.Higher beauty expenditures did correlate with a small increase in earnings, but not enough to pay for them in a strictly financial sense--the beauty premium generated earnings worth only 15% of the money expended.

What about the benefits of plastic surgery? Soohyung Lee, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Maryland in College Park, found by studying before and after photos of members on a dating website “that plastic surgery is not profitable in a monetary sense.” “I can’t comment on the happiness,” she added.

So what do we do with this information?  Hamermesh points out that it is not illegal to discriminate on the basis of looks, and, all else being equal, it might be a perfectly legitimate business strategy to hire the more beautiful candidate.  In these times of continuing economic pressure on law firms, being attractive may be more important than ever for gaining employment and hiring attractive lawyers may be just the kind of hedge that law firms can live with--at no cost added.

 

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How stressed-out are you feeling today?  A UK study has concluded that 10 AM on Tuesdays is the peak period of stress during a lawyer's work week, and that 47% of lawyers carry their stress home from work, "leading them to drink (every now and then)."

That may be an understatement.  Data from around the world demonstrates that lawyers are arguably in the most highly stressed profession, unfortunately coupled with some of the weakest coping skills, resulting in dysfunctional self-medicating behaviors such as addictions. 

Hence, Hazelden recently announced that they are opening an initial 50-bed rehabilitation program specifically for legal professionals struggling with addiction, staffed by 3 former attorneys who have overcome their own substance abuse.

"The Legal Professionals Program incorporates the typical month-long inpatient Hazelden program with several added elements specifically for lawyers. Lawyer-patients meet several times individually with the counselor-lawyers, and they also meet each week for group sessions with other patients who are lawyers. They also attend an outside, all-lawyer 12-step meeting in the Twin Cities. Volunteers from the area's local Lawyers Helping Lawyers program also visit Hazelden to offer counseling. Once attorney-patients leave Hazelden, the program offers career restoration assistance such as writing letters to the bar on behalf of clients and helping them get their practices back in order."

LawCare, a UK health advice line for the legal profession, has reported that the recession has led to record numbers of lawyers suffering from stress and depression.

"LawCare opened 517 new case files in 2010, making it the second busiest year in its 13 years of operation. In addition, there were over 1,000 additional calls relating to carrying matters forward and to ongoing cases from earlier years. Staff also found that many of the calls that they dealt with in 2010 were more lengthy and complex than had historically been the case. They also required more time-consuming follow-up. 74% of calls related to stress. During the latter part of 2008 and much of 2009, a large percentage of calls (up to 28% in some months and 26% in 2009 as a whole) related to the economic downturn."

In response, UK firms Denton Wilde Sapte (now SNR Denton) and Herbert Smith offer stress recognition and management training to all attorneys in an effort to reduce the costs associated with on-the-job mental illness and substance abuse.  While Herbert Smith is still in the implementation phase, extending the program to all employees, SNR Denton says it has seen reductions in those costs for its professionals in the UK as a result of the program.

Here in the US, a number of different approaches help lawyers lead more productive and satisfying personal and professional lives.  One enlightened example is Day Pitney's arrangement with Dr. Mark S. Braunsdorf, of The Avalon Psychological Group in Hartford, CT, which gives Braunsdorf regular access to the firm's offices, allowing him to get to know the entire legal staff and therefore provide meaningful confidential individual advice as well as highly targeted group presentations on topics such as stress and civility.

Lawyer distress is an issue that will not go away.  The stress will only increase as clients and firms struggle to find the right balance of cost and performance; the incidental support of colleagues and non-lawyers will be inadvertently whittled away by staffing reductions; and the individual attributes that make lawyers burrow into dysfunction instead of asking for help will remain.  The result is that clients and culture suffer and the firm is put at risk.

Do your clients and your colleagues a favor by taking a serious look at how your firm or department can affirmatively tackle this boulder rolling downhill.  We are here to help you build an effective, informed program.

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Muir's "Emotional Intelligence for Lawyers" reviews the history of the development of emotional intelligence and how it applies to lawyers.

Muir's "The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Making Partners" was awarded the Edge International Law Practice Magazine Award for excellence in writing. 

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The results of the AmLaw 200 Midlevel Associate Survey make for some interesting prognostications about our future. The average composite score from 5,092 associates fell to 3.728, the lowest overall score since 2004, which includes one of the lowest scores--3.96--for the associate's own firm in recent years. 

While worries about being laid off declined significantly and 72% believed they were on track for partnership, they gave low scores to their benefits and salaries, communication by their firms (especially about becoming partner), depleted staff levels, heavier workloads (double the complaints from last year) and new promotion models. The upshot was that the number of respondents looking for another job nearly doubled to @16% and those who thought they would still be at their firms in 5 years as a partner or senior counsel dropped 9% to 35%--even though twice that percentage considered themselves on a partnership track.

First, it's important to point out that these are the very associates who weren't axed over the last few years. They are the lucky ones who kept their jobs, the survivors, or in the old parlance, the "keepers"--the ones that firms are hoping to keep. 

So what do they have to say about their privileged position?  They are more likely than in previous years to want to leave their firm, both now and in the near future.  Why would they leave? Nearly 45% said if they left, it would be for a better work/life balance, a 5% increase from last year. It's apparent that many feel their workload has been ratcheted up while their salaries and benefits have been put on hold or reduced. And as a Morrison & Foerster associate wrote, “Work/life balance is important to more people than . . . [just] mothers and lazy people.”

It's easy for firms in this economy to blow off concerns about associate work/life balance and other "soft" benefits, assuming that most associates are white-knuckling any job they have. 

That would be a mistake.  Associate morale still matters and firms will pay a price in the currency of keepers if they are not able to figure out a way to both be profitable and allow their talent to lead reasonably balanced lives.

So here are the top ten firms, where associates are feeling pretty good:

1. Nutter McClennen
2. Thompson Coburn
3. Gibson Dunn
4. Harter Secrest
5. Best Best
6. Dorsey & Whitney
7. Paul Hastings
8. Harris Beach
9. Gibbons
10. Ropes & Gray

And here are the firms that should definitely be worrying about their future:

128. Dechert
129. Armstrong Teasdale
130. White & Case
131. Stroock & Stroock
132. Bryan Cave
133. Winston & Strawn
134. Taft, Stettinius
135. Kaye Scholer
136. Curtis Mallet
137. Blank Rome

And for the full list... 

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The most interesting question, in my opinion, that was asked of me and Peter Zeugheuser at last Thursday's CCM audio conference on Origination Credit and Partner Compensation for the New Legal Landscape was not really within the purview of the topic.  It was "does compensation really work as an incentive?"  

The topic--for a broadly diverse audience--was an overview of law firm partner compensation systems and the forces that are shaping changes in those systems. Of course the assumption underlying all law firm compensation systems, and the concomitant imperative to align compensation with firm goals, is that they do work in achieving at least some part of our objectives.

But the truth is that the answer to that critical question is not at all clear cut--and the research that has been done could and probably should disrupt many of our settled ideas about partner pay. 

By happenstance,on Friday, October 1, the day after the audio conference, I had the good fortune to participate in a conversation with Daniel Pink.  Pink is the author of  the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, in which he summarizes decades of research that business has essentially ignored:  extrinsic rewards (i.e. compensation) are not the best motivators of productivity and profitability. Pink is an engaging speaker on the subject, as this video demonstrates (he along with my college Psych professor Barry Schwartz was named one of TED's Ten Best Speakers ) and has a particular perspective about the practice of law.  Although he is a Yale Law School graduate-- "something I regret" --"to his lasting joy, he has never practiced law," as his website says. 

Pink's position is that while carrots and sticks worked successfully in the twentieth century, that’s precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today’s challenges.  In Drive, he identifies three "true motivators"—autonomy (the ability to control your work), mastery (of skills or subject matters), and purpose (which gives a personal meaning to your work).  In support of his premises, he gives a number of examples of solid research in which those motivators soundly trounced financial rewards, even in such objectively hard results as sales and profits. 

Pink's conclusions rest on a line of research starting in the 40s with Maslow's "Theory of Human Motivation," which posited a "hierarchy of needs," in which, after a minimal amount of compensation, other benefits like appreciation, mastery, meaning, etc., were more motivating. In that vein, David Maister did an interesting study  of 139 law firms a number of years ago looking at what most aligned with profit, and found that attitudes held throughout the firm were more predictive of profit than compensation policies.

With demonstrated high levels of pessimism and need for autonomy and also low resilience and sociability (among other attributes), coupled with the expectations of the workplace, lawyers are a particularly challenging, and perhaps even unique, group to motivate.

In response to my question about his take on the world of lawyers, Pink said that he had spoken to a number of law firms and that good motivators weren't in place at most firms--young attorneys are given very little autonomy to direct their work or careers, they are kept in a hierarchical ladder that doesn't recognize individual mastery and they find little personal meaning or purpose in what they do. In fact, Pink has devoted several pages of Drive (pp 98-101) to law firms as the poster boys of outdated industrial-age thinking.

Pink's views have to be taken in the context of an earlier book, A Whole New Mind, in which he contended that the era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, is giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities--inventiveness, empathy and meaning--predominate.  According to Pink, the future belongs not to the analytical types--lawyers. accountants and computer programmers are the examples he mentions--but to "a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind."  In other words, the analytical skills are susceptible to being out-sourced.  In a fast-moving, inter-related world, innovation, empathically identifying with others' experiences and providing purpose can't be.

Pink's emphasis in looking at motivation, therefore, is to find what will bring those critical 21st Century skills to the fore.

But if extrinsic rewards are not that motivating, how is it that we lawyers are obsessed with PPP and compensation? Given how many lawyers game their comp systems to make the last nickel or change firms for an extra dime, it's hard to see how money isn't a motivator, right?  One explanation for this behavior is that in a one-metric world, highly competitive lawyers are going to reach for the top of that metric, whatever it is. 

But compensation doesn't have to be the only metric and it is by all knowledgeable lights not the motivational tool of choice.  Our experience is that firms who are concerned about their lawyers being dissatisfied about the level of compensation usually find that in fact the fiercest dissatisfaction comes not with regard to financial rewards but other aspects of the work experience---communication, respect, recognition, investment in training, etc. In nearly every case, lawyers will trade compensation for non-financial benefits--better support for their career objectives, a seat at the governing table or more control of their working lives.

These three factors are certainly not the final words in the discussion about motivation and compensation. We will be looking at positive psychology's contribution to the field and some startling results achieved simply by raising the mood in the work force (something many law firms could benefit from). There are also some amazing insights that have been achieved into the best function of rewards, whether we are better off rewarding efforts or results, which I will elaborate on in a later post.

But according to Pink, if we could start from scratch to build a system that motivates the highest performance,  we would make sure we offer our lawyers the opportunity for more automous, individually purposeful work that provides them with a sense of mastery. 

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The American Lawyer recently published its A-List, AmLaw's "look beyond pure dollars to quantify the 20 most successful law firms."  What it "looks" at to make that assessment is revenue per lawyer, pro bono commitment, diversity and associate satisfaction. 

AmLaw tips its hand about the continuing importance of dollars by double weighting revenue per lawyer, but also double weights, interestingly enough, pro bono commitment. The latter almost single-handedly accounts for the two new arrivals -- Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker and Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner. 

But the biggest movement in the A-List this year compared to last is in the widening range among these firms in rates of associate satisfaction--an average 23% swing--and the impact that has on which firms are designated most successful. 

Lower associate satisfaction scores contributed to the exit of four firms from last year's A-List: Howrey, Irell & Manella, Kirkland & Ellis, and Sullivan & Cromwell.  And a 44% increase in its associate satisfaction score, reflecting a commitment to lockstep pay and communication, according to AmLaw, propelled Debevoise & Plimpton up to number three.

Of course this is the first list to emerge since the 2009 layoff/furlough/delayed entry debacle, so perhaps some volatility should be expected. 

AmLaw concludes its roll-out of the A-List with the statement that "Associates' power may have diminished during the recession, but not when it comes to the A-List." 

The question is:  Why not?

During a period of short-term cost cutting and expectations of long-term reduced growth, when law schools continue to churn out the same number of graduates, many of whom are competing with the lawyers already axed for a smaller number of law firm jobs, why does associate satisfaction really matter much any more?  Aren't there enough junior lawyers out there who will knuckle under and produce results sufficient to fuel the chugging machinery of our law firms without law firms expending the money and effort needed to prop up associate satisfaction rates?  Aren't law firms, in a long-awaited pendulum swing, back in a buyer's market?

The short answer is yes and no.

Yes, there are plenty of bodies for sale.  While law school applications fell for awhile (prompting concern that the quality of graduates must be going down), they have most recently gone up again. In any event law schools continue to produce the same number of new lawyers, and many of those grads continue to prefer to join larger practices (instead of joining the ranks of solo practitioners, for example, which account for over 70% of lawyers in the United States).  All of which puts law firms that boast nothing more than jobs to fill in an enviable position.

So can't a firm ease up on its satisfaction efforts?  Where else, exactly, are these lawyers going to go?

Contrary to that recently spreading, though often unspoken, line of thinking, associate satisfaction is still important--firms should shoot for the competitive advantage that higher satisfaction produces. 

Getting the right answer to a client is not what distinguishes a firm from the rest of the pack these days.  Senior partners at good firms across the country are able to deliver spot-on expertise and client service.  What distinguishes top-tier firms from the rest is the depth of their teams--allowing them to truly leverage their partner skills through the use of competent junior lawyers. Educating and keeping the "keepers"--the young lawyers who are able to do more than just warm the bench, who can bring real value to a firm and its clients--is still the big challenge for firms that want to be at the top, regardless of the drop in industry attrition rates.  

Gen Yers in particular, in search of a portable career, are often going to firms to build their resume, pay off loans and get some substantive training.  Not necessarily to stay, regardless of their credentials.  A recent study indicated that 3/4 of the best reviewed associates are not interested in a biglaw practice. In the UK, the percentage of associates wanting to stay for partnership has dropped from 50% to 38% just in the last 2 years.  Whatever these statistics mean in terms of attrition, they do not bode well for firms who want to provide the best client service.

Nor is this just an issue for today. Fewer associates will be going through most firm pipelines, making the value of each of them even greater and the importance of a high rate of retention more critical.  So we must recruit carefully, train well, and provide reasonable support --to deepen the bench, yes, but also to be in a position to nimbly address opportunities to expand and to replace retiring partners. 

So looks like AmLaw may be right.  There is power in having bright associates interested in and well suited to firm life who are committed to their firms and enjoy what they do.

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According to a recent article in the ABA Journal, "Law schools need to do more than teach the legal basics--they also have a moral obligation to produce healthy and satisfied lawyers."  Specifically, Michael Serota, a recent law grad, suggests in his opinion column in the New York Law Journal that law schools "help students identify their professional values and make individual career decisions that correspond to those values."

Serota cites the Peterson study finding unusually high rates in lawyers of depression and other signs of distress, such as heart disease, alcoholism and drug use (see also our entry The Depression Demon Coming Out of the Legal Closet), and four ABA studies conducted over the last 25 years confirming chronic professional dissatisfaction--one out of every four lawyers is dissatisfied with her job. The Peterson study found lawyers suffer from the highest rate of depression of all professionals after adjusting for socio-demographic factors and are 3.6 times more likely to suffer from a major depressive disorder than the rest of the employed population, as well as being more likely to develop heart disease, alcoholism and drug use.  Professor Susan Daicoff has noted approximately 20% of the entire profession suffers from clinically significant levels of substance abuse, depression, anxiety or some other form of psychopathology. Let us add to these studies various others that have identified very high rates of suicide, divorce and mental illness among lawyers.  According to Serota, researchers have also found that mental illness and distress are responsible for the majority of attorney malpractice and disciplinary proceedings.

These findings point to a massive amount of individual suffering across the country, as well as significant costs to society in the form of increased health and malpractice expenses and a plethora of poorly or under-served clients. This circumstance is one clearly worth addressing, and one that can in fact be remedied.

We are often asked if the culture or pressures of legal workplace environments cause these mental health problems.  We believe that pervasive personal traits in lawyers--such as high levels of pessimism, competitiveness, introversion and conflict-avoidance and low levels of resilience and sociability--as well as ignorance about how to manage their implications underlie many of these disheartening statistics. And we have good evidence that those traits are already in place when students enter law school. The law school environment of similar personal types simply intensifies those attributes and can exaggerate their negative tendencies. 

Further, most law students enter law school with a different vision of how they are going to practice law than law schools (and most of their law firm clients looking for talent) envision, resulting in the poor alignment of values that Serota notes.  Research done in the area of positive psychology has determined that promoting the use of personal strengths is a means to higher job productivity and satisfaction.  As is the alignment of personal values with that of the workplace.  Unfortunately, research by Sheldon and Kasser found that as early as their first semester of law school, students begin to shift from focusing on their internal value systems (that which gives them pleasure and meaning) toward an increased emphasis on external values (such as grades and competition), leading to decreased satisfaction and overall well-being. 

Using strengths and aligning values requires, of course, understanding one's strengths and values and how well they match with those of the profession and individual firm one hopes to join.

Unfortunately, the level of this kind of awareness among lawyers must be one of the lowest of all professions.  And even fewer lawyers, if aware, know how to affirmatively use that information for greater productivity and satisfaction.

Thus, it is not surprising that studies find, for example, that within six months of entering law school, students experience significant decreases in well-being and life satisfaction, and substantial increases in depression, negative affect and physical symptoms. 

The American Bar Association, the Association of American Law Schools and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have all devoted substantial time to making recommendations as to how law schools might address these concerns. We and other consultants to the industry offer our viewpoint and suggestions.  See among others our entry Growing Leaders at Harvard and Other Business Schools. 

Law schools have responded by doing little, if anything.  Staff members with little training in the underlying psychological issues continue to offer ad-hoc, after-hours "career counseling" that doesn't help students recognize or address the personal challenges of lawyering. "By ignoring the topic of professional satisfaction in their curricula, law schools create an institutional misconception that the personal challenges of lawyering are peripheral to the practice of law. But because the individual is part and parcel with the professional, personal problems will necessarily affect the professional environment," Serota asserts. 

Does the mandate to educate lawyers include educating them in how to ply their trade with satisfaction and in good health? Will law schools ever put in place programs that further those ends? Lots of different perspectives on this one--see the comments.   

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In a recent interview about her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dr. Carol Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, explained how a person's mindset can account for success. 

She identifies two major mindsets--fixed and growth.  In a fixed mindset, we think we know our strengths and weaknesses, believe that they are "fixed" and think we should only attempt undertakings that use those strengths.  This type of person often cites genetics or background as limiting factors to their productivity.

With a growth mindset, we believe that we can grow into the skills needed for success. That is, we have the attitude that with analysis and persistence and feedback, we can stretch and extend our abilities over time.  The basis of these differences in mindset lie in one's sense of control and optimism--attitudes that have long been associated with greater success and sense of well-being.

Dr. Dweck's research on athletic performance is intriguing--the more athletes believe that their success is a function of effort and practice (as opposed to "natural talent"), the better they do.  Even more importantly, the more they believe that their coach thinks their success is a function of effort and practice, the better the athletes do.  

She also points out that in India and Asia, the common belief that children are blank slates at birth who can learn anything help people there succeed.

Her research also has relevance to those of us practicing law.  As measured by various assessments, lawyers are highly pessimistic and also have low resilience to setbacks (an indication of low sense of control). When gauging ourselves, and particularly in mentoring others, it is important to focus on the process--how much time and energy is being put into the effort and how persistent the person is.  Encouraging those traits will pay off with better performance over time than praising how "smart" someone is or how "natural" they are at something.  In fact, that type of praise is shown by Dr. Dweck's research to actually lower productivity--trapping the person in the narrow range of their perceived ability and making them fearful that they can't always live up to that talent or go beyond it.

Lawyers are also not inclined to take risks and therefore are less likely to proceed, whether personally or as a firm, when they are not certain they are likely to succeed.  In this time of fast-paced changes, however, Dr. Dweck points out  the disadvantage of such a fixed mindset.  With law practice undergoing tremendous transition, that reluctance can put both a person and a firm at the back of the evolutionary process that will produce better services. 

Dr. Dweck has developed an assessment to determine one's mindset and strategies for changing a mindset from a fixed one to one of growth, both of which we can offer as a part of your complete professional development plan, whether for one attorney or a large group.

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Steve Brill, the initial publisher of The American Lawyer, some 30 years ago invented the AmLaw 100 and began reporting comparative financial figures for that group of firms. Surprisingly enough, firms submitted that information for him to publish, showing definitively how much money lawyers make on the backs of their clients.

Unclear Payoff

Why do private law partnerships, who are under no regulatory or other compunction to do so, publicize their personal financial information?  Is it just sheer competitive cussedness? Does the “status” of being in the AmLaw 100, primarily a gross revenues barometer, actually improve marketing success?  Does a client check who has the highest Profits Per Partner (PPP) before hiring a firm? Or is the “market” firms are courting primarily new law school graduates and potential lateral hires, whom they can point toward “data” that shows “Here is where you make the biggest bucks.” Perhaps it is just another example of herd mentality: once a group of law firms signed on to report, other firms couldn’t abide being left out.

Yet this disclosure practice seems as likely to backfire as help, particularly in this climate.  It used to be that high end real estate and flashy interior decorating were thought to be the indicators of a firm that made too much money and therefore must be charging clients too much.  These days, touting the highest industry profits is rarely applauded—see the response to the profitability of Goldman Sachs. Why would those announcing the highest law firm profits get a different reception? A recent Lexis/Nexus survey found that 58% of in-house general corporate counsel believe their outside lawyers are simply making too much money--no doubt further emboldening them in their demands for reduced hourly rates and alternative fee arrangements.

Suspect Data

Whatever the reasons firms decided to publish this information, the data itself is usually highly suspect. Firms often manipulate their finances in order to report the best possible numbers. There are no GAAPs on this unmandated reporting, no audited statements, no footnotes or explanations, no requirements to disclose material information, so in determining PPP, for example, income is moved, equity partners are de-equitized, accounting years are redefined, and PPP magically rises, all without changing the reality of profits.

Which has produced some interesting results.  For example, the difficult year of 2009 saw generally decreased revenues and wholesale elimination of timekeepers, yet many firms nonetheless reported increased profits, and without any note of their having significantly ramped down their operations, a negative indicator for future performance. Further, results reported in one media outlet for a number of firms do not always correspond with the results reported in others.

"No More PPP"

So it is of great interest that Ralph Baxter, chairman of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliff, announced on May 12, 2010 that Orrick will no longer publicly report Profits Per Partner. According to the announcement:

"When law firms first started reporting the Profits Per Equity Partner metric in the 1980's, partnership structures were more traditional; partner roles and contributions were less varied, and the legal business much simpler. Today, firms have made significant changes to their partnerships and business models. These changes, among others, mean that Profit Per Equity Partner data actually provides little insight while maintaining an aura of undeserved transparency."

The American Lawyer's A-List, which measures the top 20 firms based on a mix of associate satisfaction, diversity and pro bono contribution, and revenue per lawyer, exemplifies the direction in which Orrick is moving its law firm scorecard.

"Today, more than ever, the Profit Per Equity Partner metric simply does not tell the market how profitable a firm is, how efficiently it is run, how well it serves its clients, how well it treats its people, or how committed a firm is to pro bono work, its community, and diversity," said Baxter. "Clients and others have made it clear that the metric actually creates the impression that firms manage to the metric to make themselves look good, rather than managing for their clients, their people, and a sound long-term strategy. "

While many firms have been wary of Orrick's decision, most consultants' reactions, as recently reported, have been uniformly favorable:

•  “In a rational world, firms would either keep their financial numbers private or would disclose information according to a uniform and regulated set of accounting guidelines, backed up by an accountant’s certification.” Jerry Kowalski, founder of legal consulting firm Kowalski & Associates
•  “1 think one of the most misleading of all public financial figures of law firms is in fact PPP.” Gary Klein, founder of legal recruiting firm Klein Landau & Romm Inc.
•  “The weaknesses of the profits per partner model ‘hit home’ during the recession, when law firms in the midst of unprecedented layoffs also posted excellent PPP results.” Toni Whittier of Whittier Legal Consulting

Of course, the next question is what, if any, metric should replace PPP.  Evidently Orrick is working on a law firm equivalent of “earnings per share.” One easy alternative that is already being calculated at many firms is Revenue Per Lawyer (RPL), a figure that takes into account gross revenue minus expenses, divided by the number of full-time lawyers at a firm.

Considering the changes in the legal industry, additional metrics like rates of growth in revenue, operational efficiency, lateral hires, major representations, alternative fees and, especially, client satisfaction could all be informative.  But assigning numerical values to these “soft” measures can be a challenge.

Client Satisfaction

We expect that rates of client satisfaction, an index that attests to the overall ultimate value of legal services, will become a more touted metric. Checking in with your clients offers the additional advantage of simply being good business—something 80% of corporate general counsel say they expect and only 20% of law firms do.  

We have the technical and interpersonal capability to help you design and implement a protocol for insuring that clients are contacted at the appropriate time via an appropriate method with expert followup and analysis to produce high client satisfaction ratings, as well as high client satisfaction.

 

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An article based on Muir's blog entry "What do Women Want? Challenging the Diversity Myth" has been published in the ABA's April 2010 webzine Law Practice Today. The issue focuses on effective diversity strategies in law practice management.
 

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From 2:00 pm to 3:15 EST on Thursday April 29, 2010 Muir will lead an audio conference discussion hosted by the Center for Ccompetitive Management (CCM) entitled "Lateral Partner Hires: Selecting and Integrating the Best Fit for the Firm," centering on the issues associated with hiring and integrating lateral partners. A record number of lateral partner moves were made in 2009 and 2010 is shaping up to be another record year.  Don't miss this chance to maximize your firm's efforts to grow while avoiding the expensive pitfalls of lateral partner attrition.

For further information and to register, go to http://www.c4cm.com/lawfirm/lateral-partner-hires.htm. 

 

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It was my great pleasure--something I don't often say about a conference-- to attend this invitation-only gathering last week, March 21-23, of both august and up-and-coming law industry professionals as they prognosticated the future of our practice and what that might in fact look like up close for a broad array of providers and clients. 

While I will digest and relay over the next few weeks a number of interesting findings and tantalizing predictions that were discussed, let me summarize a few currents that are of particular interest to me.

One, notable is the influx and rising success of non-lawyer services in this emerging marketplace, whether those services are provided by in-house specialists in law firms, wholly-owned subsidiaries of firms, or independent companies.

Two, changes making their way into law firms are both reducing incoming associate classes and also raising the ante for efficiently training and promoting those associates, with the result being that firms are experimenting with more discriminating approaches to hiring and more sophisticated methods of providing professional development.

Three, perhaps as a corollary of at least the first point above and probably the second point as well, law firms are becoming truly more diverse workplaces that respect and rely on the contributions of non-lawyer sociologists, MBAs, IT specialists, project managers, psychologists, accountants and other professionals to more efficiently analyze, structure and deliver services responsive to client needs.

Stay tuned for the  review of this conference's exciting topics.

 

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Muir will be a panelist at the Women Lawyers Alliance's (WLA) Inaugural Spring 2010 Conference: Rainmaking Equals Influence to be held May 13 and 14, 2010 at the Wyndham Hotel in Chicago, Illinois. The conference is designed to help women achieve their full potential and will focus on equipping them with the skills to help them reach their individual rainmaking goals.

Muir will participate in the panel entitled "Is It All in My Head?" with two other experts discussing how gender and gender differences affect women and their aptitude for developing business and becoming successful leaders in their firms.

For more information, visit WLA’s website at http://www.wlalliance.org/conference.html.

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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. Eighty percent 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% 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? If clients and firms resolve to be gender blind, shouldn't all this work out fairly to both genders in the end?  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?  Or are women not in fact up to the heavy lifting that firms require?  Or perhaps we as firms are doing a poor job of delivering and following through on those diversity initiatives that women want?  Or maybe the initiatives are out of touch with want women are looking for? 

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. Eighty percent 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 third 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 fourth 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 goal 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 likely to be good lawyers 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 in many respects, forestalling every advantage that real diversity might bring.  

And let there be no question about the value of true diversity--diversity of perspectives, of styles, of strengths--to the quality of problem-solving, decision-making and ultimately the product provided.

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 also 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. 

Our  diversity 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."

And this attitude would also make for a more hospitable workplace not only for women and lawyers but also for all the male flexibility seekers, called lawyers and willing workers as well.

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 successfully changed from an hours to outcomes based 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 more 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, given the hue and cry from clients about the conflict the billable hours approach creates between client and lawyer.  Here is a chance to align with client goals and also align with the goals of a major portion of your potential workforce.

In the end, making the "how long you worked at it" no longer the critical yardstick may be very good for women. A new emphasis on creative thinking, efficiency and good client management draws on what women often have a great knack for.

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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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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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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"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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