Tag Archives: associates

PUZZLE PIECES – Part 7

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With the added context of David Brooks’ article on leadership, “The Humble Hound,” (NY Times, April 9, 2010) (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/opinion/09brooks.html), we resume the imaginary cross-examination of a very real senior partner profiled in “Not Done Yet” (ABA Journal, April 2010) (http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/not_done_yet)  

Partner: “If you’re asking me whether we have very talented attorneys who don’t progress to equity partnership, my answer is yes.”

Q: “Compared to you and those who rose those through the ranks with you, it’s a lot of very talented attorneys, isn’t it?”

Partner: “Sure.'”

Q: “That’s because today’s big firm business model requires leverage — lots of non-equity attorneys and other time-billers for every equity partner, right?”

Partner: “Look, big law firms have become businesses. I didn’t make it that way and I can’t ignore the marketplace. If we don’t maintain high equity partner profits through appropriate leverage ratios and other means, we’ll lose our ability to attract and retain the best people. If that happens, the entire institution will be at risk and we’ll endanger the jobs of everyone who works there. It’s called free market capitalism and I didn’t invent it.”

Q: “You didn’t invent the phrase, ‘pulling up the ladder,’ either, did you?”

AND HUBRIS, too

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David Brooks is right on this one — and the legal profession is Exhibit A.

Before resuming my imagined cross-examination of a distressingly real biglaw senior partner in “PUZZLE PIECES,” I want to pause on Brooks’ April 9 NY Times column. He makes my point in a broader context: the pervasive absence of thoughtful reflection that passes for leadership is not unique to big law firms.

Looking at corporate America, he asks, “Who’s in charge?”

Then he answers his own question: “They are superconfident, forceful and charismatic.”

To these characteristics, I would add another: hubris.

Having navigated internal politics to reach the pinnacle of power in their organizations, they don’t revisit their guiding principles. Armed with an MBA (or at least, the equivalent mentality of misguided metrics), they validate their governance using the same criteria that swept them to the top.

As a result, attorneys who enjoyed every advantage as they rose through the ranks have now tied themselves to a mypoic view that encourages them to pull up the ladder on their kids’ generation. Compared to the growing national debt that preoccupies many with concern for our progeny’s well-being, baby boomer greed is wreaking far more enduring havoc.

Brooks argues in favor of an alternative style: the humble hound — a leader who combines “extreme personal humility with intense professional will” and “thinks less about her mental strengths than about her weaknesses…She understands she is too quick to grasp pseudo-ojective models and confident projections that give the illusion of control.”

To save them from themselves, big law firms need more such leaders. But who will mentor candidates through the daunting journey into equity partnerships and then upward?

Certainly not 64-year-old senior partners who don’t think about their own retirements until they receive lists of firm nominees for their management committees, only to find that because of advancing age their names aren’t on them.

What can you say about a leader for whom the approach of a 65th birthday comes as a surprise?

PUZZLE PIECES – Part 6

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Q: “OK, let’s get specific. Let’s talk about you. Your path to the top of your firm was a lot easier than it is for new associates today, right?”

Partner: “I don’t accept that. We’re a meritocracy. Cream rises to the top.”

Q:  “Just because cream rises to the top doesn’t mean you skim all of it off, does it?”

Partner: “That’s clever, but what’s your point?”

Q: “Are you saying that the path to equity partnership at your firm is no more difficult now than it was for you?”

Partner: “I don’t think about it that way.”

Q: “I’m sure you don’t. But I’m asking you to think about it that way now. According to Am Law, in 1995 your firm had 315 lawyers of whom 132 — more than 40% — were equity partners, right?”

Partner: “That’s what it reported.”

Q: “In Feburary 2010, American Lawyer reported that your firm ended 2009 with more than double that number of lawyers — almost 800 in all. But during that 14-year period, the number of equity partners rose by a measly 17 — to only 149 , right?”

Partner: “You’ve posed a compound question, but what’s your point?”

Q: “When you’re averaging only one additional equity partner per year on a net basis, every associate in an incoming class of 20, 30 or even more law school graduates faces pretty daunting odds against success, correct?”

Partner: “The best will still make it.”

Q: “And if your firm wants to preserve its equity partners’ multi-million dollar incomes, some highly capable attorneys — people good enough to have advanced if they’d been in your demographic group 30 years ago — won’t capture the brass ring of equity partnership today, will they?”

Partner: “We’ll always have room for the best.”

Q: “Your Honor, I move to strike the witness’ last answer as non-responsive.”

THE COURT: “Motion granted. The witness is instructed to answer the question.”

PUZZLE PIECES – Part 5

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Q: “According to Am Law, in a dozen years, your firm’s average equity partner profits soared by $2 million — from about $350,000 in 1995 to $2,350,000 in 2007, right?”

Partner: “That’s what they published.”

Q: “In 2007, you personally were at the top of the equity partnership, weren’t you?”

Partner: “I’m not going to apologize for success.”

Q: “I haven’t asked you to apologize yet, have I?”

Partner: “No.”

Q: “The point is: you were making a lot of money in 2007 when it first hit you that your 65th birthday was approaching, right?

Partner: “Yes.”

Q: “Millions of dollars a year?”

Partner: “Yes.”

Q: “That amount dwarfed what your mentors at the firm made 20 or more years earlier, didn’t it?”

Partner: “Sure. So what? All well-run big firms became more lucrative  over the past two decades.”

Q: “But not everyone in those firms — or yours — benefitted, did they?”

Partner: “Your question is too vague. You’ll have to be more specific.”

PUZZLE PIECES – Part 4

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[An imaginary cross-examination of the 67-year-old Dechert partner profiled in “Not Done Yet” continues…]

Q: “What about money?”

Partner: “What about it?”

Q: “Do you think your equity partner income made you reluctant to admit — even to yourself — that someday you’d have to retire from your firm?”

Partner: “I don’t know why it would. Wealth creates options.”

Q: “Perhaps. Or maybe it fuels the lesser angels of our nature. Forty years ago, you didn’t become a lawyer because you thought it would make you rich, did you?”

Partner: “No. As I told the ABA reporter, early American lawyers such as Daniel Webster and Henry Clay inspired me.”

Q: “When you started your career in the early 1970s, no one talked much about billable hours, did they?”

Partner: “No.”

Q: “Or partner leverage?”

Partner: “Nope.”

Q: “Or other law firms’ average equity profits per partner?”

Partner: “How much money people made was not the subject of polite conversation. There’s more information today.”

Q: “I take it that you’re referring to the Am Law 100. What’s that?”

Partner: “The annual listing of the nation’s largest law firms.”

Q: “Do you remember when the first list appeared?”

Partner: “Sometime in the 1980’s, wasn’t it?”

Q: “1985; it started as the Am Law 50. Ten years later — in 1995 — what did Am Law report the total number of lawyers in your firm to be?”

Partner: “Probably around 300.”

Q: “You’re close. 315. How many of those were equity partners?”

Partner: “I don’t recall.”

Q: “Let me refresh your recollection. The July/August 1996 issue of American Lawyer says you had 132 equity partners — more than 40% of your firm’s attorneys. Do you know what Am Law said Dechert’s average equity partner profits were in 1995?”

Partner: “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

Q: “$345,000 in 1995. Do you know what Am Law reported your firm’s average equity partner income to be a dozen years later — in 2007 –when you had the revelation that, alas, you were getting older?”

Partner: “Go ahead.”

Q: “$2.35 million.”

Pause.

Q: “Let’s talk about how that happened.”

PUZZLE PIECES – Part 3

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As he himself described it, one of the top partners at Dechert LLP was 64 years old when he first realized that on his next birthday he’d turn 65. Now 67, he’s quoted in “Not Done Yet”:

“It made me start to think, ‘I’m in the traditional retirement zone without having spent one day thinking about it.’…Every time I set a timetable for a decision, I move it.”

That’s a witness statement I’d like to cross-examine — even if only in my dreams.

Q: “You’re an intelligent, accomplished attorney at one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, aren’t you?”

Partner: “I suppose you could say that.”

Q: “Don’t be modest. You have Ivy League undergraduate and law degrees sandwiched around an MBA, right?”

Partner: “Yes.”

Q: “You’re a senior partner at one of the nation’s elite firms — a group known as the Am Law 100, right?”

Partner: “Yes.”

Q: “You say that you didn’t think about retirement for a single day until you were 64?”

Partner: “Right.”

Q: “The light dawned when a list of nominees for the firm’s policy committee circulated and you saw that your name wasn’t on it, right?”

Partner: “That’s correct.”

Q: “You must have been pretty busy worrying about other things?”

Partner: “I’ve cultivated a very demanding practice. Law has become a 24/7 job.”

Q: “In your case, the job was so demanding that it completely distracted you from any awareness that you were getting older, is that what you’re saying?”

Partner: “Well…”

Q: “Before you answer, let me ask if you think anything else might have been contributing to your denial of the inevitable?”

Partner: “What do you mean?”

WHY LISTEN TO ME?

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Before spending your most precious commodity — your time — reading what I have to say, you’re entitled to enough information about me to decide whether my words matter.

The title of this blog is no accident, but I’m not a bitter online screamer who uses internet access as a substitute for anger management classes. Born into a working class family during the middle of the baby boom, I eventually surprised myself when I wound up at Harvard Law School and, immediately after graduation, one of the country’s biggest law firms. “Big” meant something different in those days; I was lawyer number 150 or so.

My job afforded me great opportunities to do what I enjoyed, gave me a sense of personal autonomy, and provided my family with financial security. Still, as demanding as it was, being a lawyer never defined me exclusively. When I wasn’t out-of-town trying cases, I was home for dinner. I coached all of my kids’ little league and girls’ softball teams and am still married to my first wife. All of our adult children are making the world a better place.

I don’t take credit for all of the good things that have happened in my life, nor can I pretend that my priorities are right for everyone. But my approach helped to make me part of an increasingly rare breed: attorneys who are satisfied with their careers and happy with their lives.

Retirement in my early-50’s hasn’t dimmed my outlook or diminished my enthusiasm, but distance has sharpened my perspective on how the legal profession has changed. For those now entering it, career satisfaction seems to be more and more elusive. The reasons become clearer to me every day.

Even more importantly, they have a universal application that goes far beyond the law.

More about that in the days ahead.

PUZZLE PIECES

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Connections are not always obvious.

In a single 24-hour period last week, two seemingly unrelated articles appeared in national publications. They addressed opposite ends of the legal profession’s pipeline: entry and exit.

An April 1, 2010 report in the New York Times, “At Law Firms, Reconsidering the Model for Associates’ Pay,” described a growing phenomenon that should interest all prospective lawyers and many others. The essential point: big law firms (where most graduates think they want to begin their legal careers) are looking for ways to pay their new associates less.

A day later, the April issue of the ABA Journal included “Not Done Yet: If 65 is the new 50, how will baby boomers remake retirement?” It described aging big firm attorneys who were approaching (or had already passed) the traditional retirement age.

In an upcoming series of posts, I’ll describe the profound connections between these two articles in the context of the profession’s recent trends. But before that, we’ll continue next time with some background information about me so readers can assess whether I have anything useful to offer them.

For starters, let me admit that for 30 years I was a litigator at a large law firm.