A month ago, I informed readers that I was taking a break from my ongoing commentary on the legal profession. Instead, I’ve focused my blog on my personal journey through modern medicine after my cancer diagnosis. The American Lawyer, which has republished all of my “Belly of the Beast” blog posts for the past five years, ran the post inaugurating my new series. But I haven’t asked it to republish my eight subsequent medically-oriented posts, which seemed beyond the interests of its primary readership. For reasons that will become evident, I’m inviting republication of this one.

Having spent almost 40 of the past 50 days in the hospital, I’ve had an intimate look at the medical care delivery system from inside one of the nation’s top institutions. I’m now convinced that many big hospitals and law firms share an important characteristic: a lost sense of mission.

This criticism doesn’t apply to most lawyers or to doctors individually. Dedicated, conscientious physicians and attorneys abound. But the devolution of the leading segments of both professions to short-term business-oriented approaches has resulted in structures and constraints within which many of those practitioners must operate. Ultimately, clients, patients, and the workers within those institutions are paying the price.

How Did This Happen?

Not that long ago, doctors ran many hospitals. Today in the United States, only four percent (235 out of more than 6,500 hospitals) are run by physicians. Along the way, the quality of a patient’s experience has suffered.

As the New York Times reported recently, “[N]ew research suggests that having a doctor in charge at the top is connected to overall better patient care and a better hospital.”

“Dr. [Amanda] Goodall [the author of the study] said the finding was consistent with her research in other fields, which has shown, among other things, that research universities perform better when led by outstanding scholars and that basketball teams perform better when led by former top players.”

Dr. Goodall goes on to observe, “M.D. C.E.O.’s are more likely to prioritize patients because patient care is at the heart of their education and working life as a physician. When it comes to making hard budgetary decisions or rationing choices, M.D. C.E.O.’s may be able to make more informed decisions.”

Keeping The MBA-Mentality In Check

I’m not an anarchist. I have a master’s degree in economics and understand the importance of data-drivien decisions. But I also appreciate the limitations of statistics and the dangers of a myopic MBA-type approach to management. There is nothing wrong with using accounting and business methods in the process running complex organizations, including big hospitals and law firms. But when those methods dominate institutional culture — setting the tone from the top of a hospital or law firm — those organizations no longer exist to serve people. Instead, they develop a new purpose: to serve the short-term bottom line.

As Dr. Goodall suggests, ““I think the pendulum may have swung too far in the favor of managers. This is partially because business schools have become so prominent, as has the M.B.A. These qualifications are helpful, but it is possibly not enough just to have a management education.”

Lawyers still run most big law firms, but the trends toward non-attorney CEOs and non-attorney managers developing increasing power and influence within big firms is well underway. More pointedly, many lawyers in big firms have obtained MBAs and are increasingly relying on their newly-learned “management tools” to run their firms. That can be okay, provided they do not become too fond of their “MBA-hats” and lose sight of their more important JD mission — to serve clients. It’s easier said than done because maximizing short-term partner profits is how such leaders — and their partners — measure successful leadership.

Back To Basics

Most undergraduates go to law school because they want to do good. That message has emerged loudly and clearly from my prelaw students over the nine years that I’ve taught undergraduates at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences and over the more than 20 years that I’ve taught trial practice and legal ethics courses at the Law School. A similar impulse drives most people into the medical profession. Just as every lawyer’s mission should be to serve clients, medical care should be about a single-minded mission: patient care.

The dominant big law firm model has evolved away from helping clients and toward maximizing a firm’s short-term profits through a handful of definitive metrics — billable hours, hourly rates, equity partner leverage. Likewise, big medicine — if I can call it that — has succumbed to similar pressures — maximizing relative value units (medicine’s equivalent to the billable hour metric), minimizing costs, and squeezing workers in an effort to improve “productivity,” to name a few.

Similarly, a dominant and incorrect perception in both professions is that bigger is always better. The number of law firm mergers sets a new record every year. Hospital merger and acquisition activity is ubiquitous.

Lost Along The Way

Bigger isn’t better. As with law firms, increasing the size of hospitals works against efforts to create a sense of community, collegiality, and shared mission. Likewise, cost-saving isn’t appropriate when non-medical CEOs with MBAs introduce efficiency measures that ignore the potentially adverse impact on patients.

For more than two weeks, I’ve lived through situations that illustrate my point. For example, I don’t know the metric by which administrators set what they regard as appropriate staffing levels. But one nurse told me that some floors are regarded as “heavy” — meaning that patients have conditions that can require a lot of attention. That translates into greater demands on a nurse’s time. But if there aren’t enough nurses to handle the workload, the burden falls on those who are around. Transferring to a different floor or facility becomes an escape route. It would be interesting to study the nurse “attrition rate” from the “heavy” floors.

Law And Medicine

In the prevailing big law firm model, overworking people — attorneys and staff — maximizes revenues while controlling costs. One consequence is a five-year associate attrition rate for big law firms averaging 80 percent. In other words, for every 100 associates who begin their careers at a large firm, only 20 will still be working there five years later. Other consequences are more difficult to measure so they get ignored: the decline in worker morale and the lost productivity that results.

Do extraordinary associate turnover rates serve client interests? No. Do they foster a climate in which a shared mission of client service becomes the institution’s dominant ethic? No. Do they reflect short-term profit-maximization goals that are completely inappropriate for a profession that should regard itself as better than that? You bet.

Other instances from my medical experience seem equally divorced from what should be a central focus on the patient. They may seem trivial, and none is life-threatening. But collectively they reveal something about institutional focus.

For example, a patient may require periodic blood draws, but the doctors defer the timing of those draws to whenever the phlebotomists are “doing everyone else on the floor.” That might be efficient, but on my floor, that designated time is 4:00 am. Why does efficiency in the use of phlebotomists trump the patient’s need for sleep?

Here’s another: At 11:00 pm, when all of the lights in my room were out and I’d just fallen asleep, someone came in and emptied all of the trash cans. The following morning, I asked the nurse, “Who decided that 11:00 pm was a good time to go around waking people up to empty their trash?”

“That’s just when they come around,” she answered.

These and many other dictates from above govern behavior throughout the hospital. Where does the patient fit in the process of pursuing worker efficiency? At least when it comes to blood draws and trash removal, nowhere, it would seem.

Shakespeare Updated

Scholars still debate the meaning of Dick the Butcher’s line in Shakespeare’s Henry the Sixth: “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Were the Bard’s words — speaking through that anarchist — backhanded praise acknowledging attorneys as the source of law and order? Or was he going for the laugh that the play evidently received from contemporaneous audiences that had become weary — as Shakespeare himself had — of the misery that litigious lawyers could inflict on a person’s life?

Regardless of that controversy, I hereby invite debate on a new version of that line. I’ve adapted it to today’s medical and legal worlds: “First thing we do, let’s kill all the MBAs in big law and big med — so doctors and lawyers can recapture their professions.”

Actually, we don’t have to kill the MBAs. We just have to keep them in their proper place.