Monthly Archives: December 2011

FED TO DEATH

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Most of today’s big law leaders think they’ll be able to avoid traps that have destroyed great firms of the recent past. Are they that much smarter than their predecessors? Or are they oblivious to the lessons of history?

My article, “Fed to Death,” in the December issue of The American Lawyer, suggests that most respondents to the magazine’s annual survey of Am Law 200 firm leaders have have forgotten what true leadership is. Consider it my seasonal gift to those who need it most — and want it least.

Happy Holidays and thanks for your continuing attention to my musings. I’m especially grateful to the thousands who have kept my novel, The Partnership, on Amazon’s Kindle e-book Legal Thrillers Best-Seller list for the past six months.

EYE OF NEWT

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This post is not about politics. It’s about much more.

The Republican Presidential debates have generated many surprising applause lines, but Newt Gingrich delivered this one on December 15 and it should scare all freedom-loving Americans. So should the crowd reaction.

“[T]he courts have become grotesquely dictatorial, far too powerful, and I think, frankly, arrogant in their misreading of the American people,” Gingrich proclaimed in the final debate before the Iowa caucuses. “I taught a short course in this at the University of Georgia Law School. I testified in front of sitting Supreme Court justices at Georgetown Law School. And I warned them: You keep attacking the core base of American exceptionalism, and you are going to find an uprising against you which will rebalance the judiciary.”

[“Testified in front of sitting Supreme Court justices at Georgetown Law School”? Maybe he means “giving testimony” in his newly-found religious sense.]

Anyway, Gingrich — the man who racked up a $500,000 Tiffany’s tab, but decries “elites” — then proceeded to explain exactly how he’d accomplish a “rebalance”: abolish courts that disagreed with his views; subpoena sitting judges for Congressional appearances; ignore Supreme Court decisions that he didn’t like.

For a candidate who fancies himself a historian, ironies abound. For someone who is given to rhetorical flourishes while comparing himself to Winston Churchill and analogizing his adversary’s policies to Nazism, the remarks are astonishing. They’d be funny, too, if they weren’t so frightening.

Newt justice

Stalwart conservatives, including Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, and former Bush administration Attorneys General, Alberto Gonzalez and Michael Mukasey, have roundly condemned Gingrich’s assault on the federal judiciary. So did the National Review.

Lest you think that his Iowa remarks were impromptu outbursts, Newt’s October 7, 2011 White Paper, “Bringing the Courts Back under the Constitution,” lays it all out. (Gingrich brags about not being a lawyer; unfortunately for Vince Haley, a 1992 University of Virginia Law School graduate, the White Paper lists him as its senior editor.)

This post considers just one of Newt’s ideas: subpoenaing judges before Congressional committees to explain their reasons for decisions that he doesn’t like. His White Paper describes it this way:

“Judicial Accountability Hearings

Congress can establish procedures for relevant Congressional committees to express their displeasure with certain judicial decisions by holding hearing [sic] and requiring federal judges come [sic] before them to explain their constitutional reasoning in certain decision [sic] and to hear a proper Congressional Constitutional interpretation.”

Problematic grammar aside, the stated rationale is disingenuous. In decisions that matter, federal judges routinely explain their reasoning in written opinions. The losing party may disagree, but the process is transparent. If there’s an appeal, at least three more judges review the case; they usually explain themselves, too. A few reach the Supreme Court, where yet more judicial elucidation occurs.

Unless the purpose is to pursue judicial impeachment — the constitutional remedy for misconduct — anyone who seeks to command a sitting judge’s appearance before Congress has a single goal: winning through intimidation. That takes me to Newt the historian, who sometimes ignores history’s most important lessons.

Precedent

Following World War I, Germany’s Weimar Constitution established an independent judiciary. On August 20, 1942, Adolf Hitler appointed Otto Thierack as Reichminister of Justice. Six weeks later, Thierack issued the first of his “Letters to All Judges.” According to an article from the U S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Letters set forth “the state’s position on political questions and on the legal interpretation of Nazi laws.” German judges understood the importance of following those “suggestions.”

But the article also notes that even Hitler’s SS grasped the potentially explosive implications of Thierack’s intrusions.  The fear of a public backlash led to classifying the Letters as state secrets. In a May 30, 1943 report, the Security Service of the SS declared, “The people want an independent judge. The administration of justice and the state would lose all legitimacy if the people believed judges had to decide in a particular way.”

During the final Iowa debate, Gingrich listed U.S. Supreme Court Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito as his favorites. That endorsement should make them squirm and, as another history lesson confirms, react publicly:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Socialist…”

A NEW LAW SCHOOL MISSION – PART II

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The second and final installment of “Great Expectations Meet Painful Realities” — my latest contribution to the debate about the legal profession’s growing crisis — is now available in the December 2011 issue of Circuit Rider, the official publication of the Seventh Circuit Bar Association. My article begins on page 26. For those who are interested, here’s the link to Part I.

OCCUPY BIG LAW

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The encampments are gone, but Occupy Wall Street leaves behind a slogan that should make any history student shudder and some big law leaders squirm:

“We’re the 99-percenters.”

It’s not a leftist fringe rant. During a recent Commonwealth Club of California appearance, presidential debate moderator Jim Lehrer said that, if becoming President turned on the answer to a single question, he’d pose this one to every candidate:

“What are you going to do about the growing disparity of wealth in the United States of America?”

Once-great civilizations collapsed under such weight. A similar internal phenomenon is quietly weakening some mighty law firms.

Destabilizing trends

“Don’t redistribute wealth — that’s class warfare” has become a popular rhetorical rallying cry. (See, for example, the Wall Street Journal‘s lead editorials on December 2  and 7.) But a stealth class war has already produced massive economic redistribution — from the 99-percenters to the one-percenters.

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz writes in Vanity Fair that the top one percent control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth — up from 33 percent 25 years ago. In a recent interview, Jeffrey Winters of Northwestern University notes: “[In America], wealth is two times as concentrated as imperial Rome, which was a slave and farmer society. That’s how huge the gap is.”

Both Winters and Stiglitz suggest that today’s oligarchs use wealth to preserve power. One effective tactic is to encourage the pursuit of dreams that, for most 99-percenters, are largely illusory. My favorite New Yorker cartoon is a bar scene with a scruffy man in a T-shirt telling a well-dressed fellow patron: “As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy.”

For today’s young attorneys, one largely illusory dream has become the brass ring of a big firm equity partnership atop the leveraged pyramid.

Big law winners

So far, wealthy lawyers have avoided public outrage. But between 1979 and 2005, the top one percent of attorneys doubled their share of America’s income — from 0.61 to 1.22 percent. For the Am Law 50, average equity partner profits soared from $300,000 in 1985 ($630,000 in today’s dollars) to $1.5 million in 2010.

Even so, the really big gap — in society and within large law firms — is inside the ranks of the privileged, and it has been growing. By one estimate, the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans captured half of all gains going to the top one percent. Similarly, management consultant Kristin Stark of Hildebrandt Baker Robbins observes that before the recession, the top-to-bottom ratio within equity partnerships “was typically five-to-one in many firms. Very often today, we’re seeing that spread at 10-to-1, even 12-to-1.”

So what?

Meritocracies are vital and valuable, but for nations as well as for institutions, extreme income inequality reveals something about the culture that produces it. A recent study found that only three nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — Chile, Mexico and Turkey — have greater income inequality than America. Perhaps it’s coincidental, but all OECD countries with less inequality — including Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, Germany, Austria, and Britain — likewise surpass the U.S. in almost every quality of life measure.

In big law, exploding inequality is one symptom of a profound ailment: The myopic focus on short-term compensation metrics that reward bad behavior — hoarding clients, demanding more billables, raising leverage ratios. As the prevailing model creates stunning wealth for a few, it encourages attitudes that poison working environments and diminish the profession.

Unlike imperial Rome, today’s large firms won’t fall prey to Huns and Vandals. Rather, modern casualties include mentoring, training, collegiality, community, loyalty, and building institutional connections between clients and young lawyers. Those characteristics once defined the very concept of professional partnership. Today’s business of law makes precious little room for them. Clients who think that these relatively new trends aren’t compromising the quality and cost of their legal services are kidding themselves.

A meaningful Occupy Big Law movement would require that: 1) clients (and courts approving attorneys’ fees petitions) finally say, “Enough!” and 2) would-be protesters stop viewing themselves as future equity partner lottery winners. Meanwhile, senior partners need not worry about disaffected lawyers and staff taking to the streets.

After all, there’s no way to bill that time.

BONUS TIME — AND ANOTHER UNFORTUNATE COMMENT AWARD

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Above the Law’s David Lat wins my Unfortunate Comment Award with this assessment of Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s recent 2011 bonus announcement:

“My own take: these amounts — which are the same as the 2010 and 2009 bonus scales at CSM, except for the most-senior associates — are fair. The past three years — 2009, 2010, and 2011 — have been fine for Biglaw, but not amazing. To the extent that firms are treading water a bit, it’s reasonable for them to keep associate compensation at the same levels.”

“Treading water a bit”?

Let’s start with the suggestion that “the past three years have been fine for Biglaw, but not amazing.” According to The American Lawyer, Cravath’s 2008 average equity partner profits were $2.5 million — admittedly a sharp decline from 2007. But it’s still pretty good and, since then, equity partner profit trees have resumed their growth to the sky.

As the economy struggled, Cravath’s average partner profits increased to $2.7 million in 2009 and to $3.17 million in 2010, according to the Am Law 100 surveys. That’s not “treading water.” It’s returning to 2007 profit levels — the height of “amazing” boom years that most observers had declared gone forever. Watch for 2011 profits to be even higher.

“It’s fair [and] reasonable to keep associate compensation at the same levels as 2009 and 2010″

If Lat’s comparative baseline is the American labor force generally, his view of fairness has superficial appeal. To most people, Cravath’s bonuses atop base salaries starting at $160,000 are impressive — ranging from $7,500 (first-year associates) to $37,500 (seventh-year associates). Couple those numbers with big firm partner complaints that law schools fail to train lawyers for tasks in the big law world and perhaps associates should consider themselves fortunate that they’re not being asked to rebate a portion of their pay for the privilege billing long hours.

(There are problems with current legal education in America, but the critique that graduates aren’t prepared for big law practice misses several key points, including: Eighty-five percent of lawyers will never have big firm jobs, the vast majority of those who do won’t keep them for more than a few years, and most of the remaining survivors will find their careers surprisingly unsatisfying. For more, take a look at “A New Law School Mission.”)

But I digress. For now, the question is fairness. In law firms, it’s a relative concept — a point that causes Lat’s analysis to miss the mark badly.

As Cravath’s 2010 average equity partner profits have been returning to their 2007 high-water mark, compare them to associate bonuses, which haven’t:

Associate bonus after first full year

2007: $35,000, special $10,000

2011: $7,500

Second-year

2007: $40,000, special $15,000

2011: $10,000

Third-year

2007: $45,000, special $20,000

2011: $15,000

Fourth-year

2007: $50,000, special $30,000

2011: $20,000

Fifth-year

2007: $55,000, special $40,000

2011: $25,000

Sixth-year

2007: $60,000, special $50,000

2011: $30,000

Seventh-year

2007: $60,000, special $50,000

2011: $37,500

Earlier this year, Sullivan & Cromwell offered spring associate bonuses for 2010 ranging from $2,500 (first-year) to $20,000 (seventh-year). Cravath and others then followed suit. Even if that happens again this year, recent classes will still be far worse off than their 2007-era predecessors.

Meanwhile, law school tuition has continued to rise, so the newest associates have the biggest educational loans to repay. In the current buyer’s market for young attorneys, that’s more good news for big firms. Their associates — whose average billables are back over 2,000 hours again — won’t be going anywhere. Unless, of course, the staggering attrition rates needed to sustain the leveraged big law pyramid push them out the door. Viewed as an integrated system, the prevailing model functions effectively to produce and exploit an oversupply of lawyers.

Most big firms will follow Cravath’s lead. But they can afford to do better — a lot better — and they should. As associate bonuses have stagnated, the overall average equity partner profits for the Am Law 100 have returned to pre-recession levels — reaching almost $1.4 million in 2010.

How much is enough? More, apparently. According to the latest survey of Am Law 200 firm leaders currently appearing in the The American Lawyer, managing partners expect the upward profits trend to continue. Keeping the lid on associate compensation is a key to that strategy. It hasn’t been a great ride for the non-lawyer support staff, either.

Now you know why my next post will be titled, “Occupy Big Law.” I’m not kidding.