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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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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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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Will Meyerhofer is a lawyer who worked at Sullivan & Cromwell before chucking it and getting his MSW to become a therapist. He is also gay. He writes the blog The People's Therapist and occasionally ties in issues relating to the legal community. His latest entry is about a recent podcast he did with the American Bar Association Journal on "Work/Life Balance." The only male among the panelists and the moderator, Meyerhofer clearly resented that the work/life topic got turned into a gender issue. Here's a sampling of his points:

"The unspoken “women’s lib” angle on the “work/life balance” at law firms is this: women give birth to children, and it’s impossible to raise a kid if you are a partner at a law firm, so women are less likely to become partners. If they did, they wouldn’t have time to raise a kid. It’s also impossible to meet anyone you want to have a kid with when you’re working 70-hour weeks...

Plenty of male partners have kids. They become absentee fathers, and their kids never see them. Nothing new there. But a social stigma kicks in when your kid tells his friends he only sees mommy an hour a week.

You also have to find time to be pregnant. If you put it off until you make partner, you face fertility problems. That’s a fundamental bummer about being a woman who wants a kid – when you’re mentally prepared your body gives out. At sixteen, anyone can get pregnant. At 39, you can only get pregnant if you don’t want to...

The solution to all this is obvious – have a kid while you still can, and let your husband do the raising.

That’s more or less where the other panelists ended up, but only after spouting “women can have it all” slogans and fabricating visions of “part-time partners.” The law professors on the panel had no concept of law firm reality. The young lawyer running an internet-based T&E firm receded politely when I pointed out the obvious: plenty of women would rather stay at home with the kids than work at a firm. Hell, I’ve worked with couples where the husband and wife fight over who has to do law for a living. They’d both rather stay home and play with junior. Wouldn’t you?

A second yawning gulf between me and the other panelists came with their determination to defend law as a profession. They were “pro-law” and I was “anti-law.” That’s understandable, since the ABA Journal represents the official propaganda ministry for Law, Inc. Law professors need to herd eager young things into school – that’s how they earn big bucks. And the internet lady was trying to drum up business, too – she has loans to pay.

I’m not from that world. I’m a psychotherapist who cleans up the wreckage of young lives decimated by the law school/law firm machine."

Meyerhofer's conclusion? "Homo or hetero, male or female we are all in the same boat... Humanophobia is the issue."

According to Meyerhofer, at least the last 10 minutes of the podcast were deleted from the ABA Journal recording made available to the public. What went missing?

"Work/life balance is impossible so long as the billable hour remains the holy grail of law firm life. Working “only 2200 hours per year” makes it impossible to have a family or any sort of personal life.

Sorry. That’s the truth.

And that’s what I was saying in those missing 10 minutes of tape that got cut.

In years to come, you’ll be treated to a few hundred fresh hours of Richard Nixon’s disquisitions on the racial inferiority of blacks and Jews – but if the ABA Journal has its way, you’re never going to hear those last 10 minutes of why it sucks to be a lawyer."

As Meyerhofer embodies, more men are claiming that the quality of law firm life is not an issue just for women or even for those raising families. In the 2010 AmLaw 200 Midlevel Associate Survey, the number of associates planning on leaving their jobs in the near or mid-term rose again. Nearly 45% said if they left, it would be for a better work/life balance, a 5% increase from the prior year. It's apparent that many feel that during the economic crunch their workload has been ratcheted up while their salaries and benefits have been put on hold or reduced. One Morrison & Foerster associate wrote, “Work/life balance is important to more people than . . . [just] mothers and lazy people.”

One might also question the sustainability of giving well-reasoned legal judgments through an endless series of caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived 70+ hour work weeks, regardless of which gender you are. As well as the meaning of living such a life.

I will let you decide how legitimate these observations are -- whether, as Meyerhofer claims, work/life balance is nonexistent in firms and that its absence creates an issue not just for women.

But is there a female perspective on work/life balance that is unique to women?

Let me hear your view.
 

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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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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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Muir participated in a panel discussion last week at the Women Lawyers Alliance first Annual Conference, held in Chicago.  Muir and fellow panelists author Shaunti Feldhahn, eminent psychologist Dr. Florence Denmark and psychologist/coach Karen Kahn identified some of the challenges and facilities women have in making their mark as leaders in law firms, and also addressed specific questions on how to improve rainmaking skills, solve the perennial work/life dilemma, and give effective feedback to junior lawyers. 

Attendees had this to say:

• "Ronda Muir is terrific." 
• "Frank and pragmatic." 
• "Ronda knows so much--I would like a substantive presentation from her alone."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, back to work...

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Linklaters is reported having decreed, in a fit of concern for work/life balance, that lawyers leave their Blackberrys at home while on holiday (vacation to us). The order is designed to insulate associates, in particular, from the relentless rat race for a few sweet weeks a year, according to management. "Sometimes it's the small things that count," one partner averred. While another lawyer confessed that "I feel naked without my Blackberry and there are times when you just have to be reachable." Whether the firm is successful in enforcing this edict is not yet clear.

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Muir will be participating in an IOMA audio conference presentation entitled "Associate Compensation: New Alternatives for a Difficult Economy" on July 22, 2-3:30 pm EST.  For more information or to register, go to www.ioma.com/audioconferences/1053.html. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women lawyers seem particularly effected by these developments:

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

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

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

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

What Makes Us Happy?

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

The Pursuit of Happiness, by David G. Myers

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

Happiness, A History by Darrin M. McMahon

Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman

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

The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

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

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

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

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

Could We Be Happier?

Continue Reading...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Touche.

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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?

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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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In a study conducted last fall of managing partners, general counsel, and other legal leaders, Altman Weil identified five key market trends and critical concerns.  It noted that people management was one of the highest priorities on everyone's list, with one partner saying that he goes to sleep "never knowing who might be leaving tomorrow."  The limited pool of quality law graduates, the "free-agent mentality" of lawyers from new associates to rainmakers, Gen-Xers emphasizing work-life balance and achieving diversity were all cited as challenges to people management by this august group. 

To my mind, the other four critical areas identified-- growth, competition, client service and even pricing-- are also each dependent on achieving effective people management.  Growth requires wrestling with "cultural, office and practice integration," competition is felt most dramatically in the "war for talent," with quality people, superior client service skills and strong training and development programs giving firms the competitive edge.   Client service requires superior communication and relationship, among other, skills, and "improved project staffing." (See our entry today on KPMG's success with their staffing model.)  Even pricing is acknowledged as a function of the quality of a firm's work and service-- which general counsel have consistently linked to people skills.  (See our entries Do You Know Why You Were Fired? dated November 8, 2005 and Companies Unhappy with Their Law Firms dated December 20, 2006.)

So why do law firms and law departments not take advantage of the extensive body of expertise available on hiring, retaining, developing and motivating people?  Maybe, as David Maister has suggested, it is the herd instinct that keeps them from going for the glory-- rather go down as a group than risk a "new-fangled" approach.  Interestingly enough, that is what our psychological profiles of lawyers tell us-- that they are risk-averse, often low in resilience, optimism, and emotional intelligence, all of which has helped mire them in an 18th-century business model. 

Here's the question-- which firms will be the real leaders, the ones who actually take the out-of-the-legal-box steps toward addressing these critical people management areas?  Because there seems to be a consensus that that is the only effective way forward.

 

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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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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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