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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...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.
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.
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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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:
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."
The Center for Work-Life Policy’s latest research, titled “Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek,” published in the December 2006 Harvard Business Review, reports that 35% of high earners work more than 60 hours a week and 10 percent work more than 80 hours a week. Their conclusion is that 20% of high earners in the US have “extreme” jobs, that is: 60 hours or more of work a week that often includes unpredictable work flow, tight deadlines, work events outside of regular work hours, availability to clients 24/7 and/or a large amount of travel, among other things. And 48% of extreme workers say they’re working an average of 16.6 hours more per week than they did five hours ago.
Sound familiar?
The reasons for such long hours? Among the external drivers: globalization and the round-the-clock availability it requires; vastly improved technology, allowing same-day delivery everywhere around the world; enhanced communication; increasing competition; and decreasing job security. Among the internal motivators: stimulating work, high quality colleagues, high compensation, power and status.
Sound familiar?
Noted were the sacrifices that these schedules require in personal and family life. More than two-thirds (2/3) do not get enough sleep, half don’t get enough exercise, and a significant number use alcohol, drugs, or food to alleviate their stress. The sleep deprivation alone can work havoc on professional and personal lives: a week of sleeping 4-5 hours a night induces an impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol level of .1%, which is legally equal to being drunk. Forty-two percent (42%) of extreme workers take 10 or fewer vacation days a year and more than half regularly cancel vacations. This in spite of data that shows that regularly taking vacations lowers the risk of death by nearly 20% among men between the ages of 35 and 57, often your most valuable age-range.
More than half say their sex lives have suffered; and nearly half say their work has interfered with their ability to have a strong relationship. According to the report, it is physically impossible to have a meaningful conversation with your significant other after a 12-hour work day. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers identifies a preoccupation with work as one of the top four causes of divorce.
Extreme workers also note the negative impact their work has on their children. The study pointed out that women, 20% of the extreme workers, are more likely to feel personal responsibility for these down-sides, particularly with respect to their children Three-quarters (3/4) of the women said their work interfered with their ability to maintain their homes (66% of men said the same thing),and 57% of women (and 48% of the men) do not want to continue their work pace for more than one year.
The part that doesn’t sound familiar is that two-thirds (2/3) of high earners in a range of professions and three-quarters (3/4) of top managers in multinational corporations say they love their jobs. “The big surprise of the data was just how much these extreme professionals love their work,” said Sylvia Ann Hewlett, president and founder of the Center.
Surprise, indeed.
Many doctors, lawyers and candlestick manufacturers may fall into the extreme category based on many of these standards but one thing is for sure: loving their jobs is not usually part of the extreme lawyer package. Attrition rates and simple "expressed dissatisfaction"--whether in surveys or on-line-- that have reached astronomical levels attest to that.
The take-home is that we can not blame the hours alone on lawyer dissatisfaction. There could be such a thing as an extreme lawyer who loves his/her job. And there are steps that can be taken to move your extreme lawyers towards that happier (and ultimately more profitable) place. Are you taking them?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Muir Conducts Associate Compensation Audioconference
On Wednesday, March 12, 2-3:15 pm EST, Muir will be conducting an audioconference for the Center for Competitive Management on Associate Compensation: Remain Competitive Without Breaking the Bank. Included in the discussion will be a review of current trends and out-of-the-box ideas for dealing with the impact of escalating associate compensation, how to find the best strategy for your own law firm and overcoming the problems and pitfalls in making that strategy work.
