BAD NUMBERS REVEALING WORSE TRENDS

Posted on July 17, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

By now, everyone interested in the job prospects for new lawyers has seen two recent headline items:

— Nine months after graduation, only 55 percent of the class of 2011 had full-time, long-term jobs requiring a legal degree, and

— The median starting salary for all employed attorneys in the class of 2011 has dropped to $60,000 — from $72,000 only two years earlier.

The New York City Bar Association just formed a task force to wring its hands over the lawyer oversupply crisis — as if it were something new. A closer analysis of the salary data reveals several underlying realities that are even worse than that declining number suggests.

Digging deeper

For example, NALP’s press release about the median salary number came with this concluding sentence: “Salary information was reported for 65% of graduates reported to be working full-time in a position lasting at least one year.” If that means 35 percent of such workers with full-time jobs didn’t report their salary information, then the published median probably overstates the actual number — perhaps by a lot.

A more detailed breakdown reveals that for the class of 2011, the $40,000 to $65,000 category accounted for 52 percent of all reported salaries. Compare that to the class of 2009: Two years ago, starting salaries of between $40,000 and $65,000 accounted for 42 percent of reported salaries. Today, more new lawyers are working for less money, but they’re still the lucky ones — law graduates who got full-time jobs.

The trend in law firm starting salaries is more dramatic: The median starting salary for law firms of all sizes dropped from $130,000 in 2009 to $85,000 in 2011.

Whither big law?

Two more bits of information offer some insight into what’s happening in the biggest law firms:

— Only eight percent of 2011 graduates landed jobs in big firms of more than 250 attorneys.

— Entry level jobs that paid $160,000 a year accounted for only 16 percent of reported salaries in 2011. Even for the class of 2009 — graduating into the teeth of the Great Recession and widespread big firm layoffs — the $160,000 category accounted for 25 percent of reported salaries. And the 2009 denominator was bigger: 19,513 reported salaries v. 18,630 salaries in 2011. Importantly, the decline hasn’t resulted because big law firms have reduced their starting salaries; most haven’t.

Rather, as NALP’s Executive Director James Leipold explains, “[T]he downward shift in salaries is not, for the most part, the result of individual legal employers paying new graduates less than they paid them in the past. Although some firms have lowered their starting salaries, and we are starting to see a measurable impact from lower-paying non-partnership track lawyer jobs at large law firms, aggregate starting salaries have fallen over the last two years because graduates found fewer jobs with the highest-paying large law firms and many more jobs with lower-paying small law firms.”

Big law firms’ self-inflicted wounds

Surely, things are better than they were during the cataclysmic days of early 2009; equity partner profits have returned to pre-2008 peaks. So what’s happening? One answer is that large firms are increasing the ranks of non-equity partners. According to The American Lawyer, the number of non-equity partners grew by almost six percent in 2011. They now comprise fifteen percent of all attorneys in Am Law 100 firms.

As The American Lawyer’s editor in chief Robin Sparkman explains, “Some firms deequitized partners and pushed them into this holding pen. Other firms expanded the practice of moving potential equity partners (either homegrown or laterals) into this category — both to keep their PPP high and to give the lawyers a little breathing room before they face the rainmaking pressures of equity partnership.” I’d add one more category: some firms have increased the ranks of permanent non-equity partners.

Perilous short-termism

Edwin Reeser and Patrick McKenna have described how non-equity partners are profit centers. Keeping them around longer makes more money for equity partners, but creating that non-equity partner bubble comes at significant institutional costs. One is blockage.

For any firm, there’s only so much work to go around. Ultimately, the burgeoning ranks of non-equity partners has an adverse trickle down impact on those seeking to enter the big firm pipeline. Whether new graduates should have that aspiration is a different question, but the larger implications for the affected firms are clear: There’s less room for today’s brightest young law graduates.

Some leaders have decided that maximizing current equity partner profits is more important than securing, training and developing a future generation of talent for their law firms. Sooner than they realize, their firms will suffer the tragic consequences of that mistake.

IS IT REALLY MORE COMPLEX THAN GREED?

Posted on July 10, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Revisionism is already obfuscating the story of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s demise. If facts get lost, the profession’s leaders will learn precious little from an important tragedy.

For example, the day after Dewey & LeBoeuf filed its bankruptcy petition, Clifford Winston and Robert W. Crandall, two non-lawyer fellows at the Brookings Institution, wrote an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal offering this analysis: “Dewey’s collapse has been attributed to the firm being highly leveraged and unable to attract investment from businesses outside the legal profession.”

Attributed by whom? They don’t say. Anyone paying attention knows that outside investors bought $150 million in Dewey bonds. But apparently for commentators whose agenda includes proving that overregulation is the cause of everyone’s problems — including the legal profession’s — there’s no reason to let facts get in the way.

Another miss

On the same day that the Winston & Crandall article appeared, a less egregious but equally mistaken assessment came from Indiana University Maurer School of Law Professor William Henderson in the Am Law Daily: “More Complex than Greed.” Bill and I agree on many things. I consider him a friend and an important voice in a troubled profession. But I think his analysis of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s failure misses the mark.

Henderson suggests, “One storyline that will attract many followers is that large law firm lawyers, long viewed as the profession’s elite class, have lost their way, betraying their professional ideals in the pursuit of money and glory. This narrative reinforces that lawyer-joke mentality that lawyers just need to become better people. That narrative is wrong.”

What’s wrong with it? In my view, not much, as “House of Cards” in the July/August issue of The American Lawyer now makes painfully clear.

What happened?

Rather than the greed that pervades “House of Cards,” Henderson suggests that Dewey & LeBoeuf reveals the failure of law firms to innovate in response to growing threats from new business models, such as Axiom and Novus Law. Innovation is an important issue and Henderson is right to push it. But as the story of Dewey’s failure unfolds, the inability to innovate in the ways that Henderson suggests — using technology and cheaper labor to achieve efficiencies and cost savings — won’t emerge as the leading culprit.

Rather, greed and the betrayal of professional ideals lie at the heart of what is destabilizing many big law firms. In that respect, most current leaders have changed the model from what it was 25 years ago. Am Law 100 firms’ average partner profits soared from $325,000 in 1987 to $1.4 million in 2011. Behind that stunning increase are leadership choices, some of which eroded partnership values. As a result, many big firms have become more fragile. If greed doesn’t explain the following pervasive trends, what does?

— Short-term metrics — billings, billlable hours, leverage — drive partner compensation decisions in most big firms. Values that can’t be measured — collegiality, community, sense of shared purpose — get ignored. When a K-1 becomes the glue that holds partnerships together, disintegration comes rapidly with a financial setback.

— Yawning gaps in the highest-to-lowest equity partner compensation. Twenty-five years ago at non-lockstep firms, the typical spread was 4-to-1 or 5-to-1; now it often exceeds 10-to-1 and is growing. That happens because people at the top decide that “more” is better (for them). Among other things, the concomitant loss of the equity partner “middle class” reduces the accountability of senior leaders.

— Leverage has more than doubled since 1985 and the ranks of non-equity partners have swelled. That happens when people in charge pull up the ladder.

— Lateral hiring and merger frenzy is rampant. One reason is that many law firm leaders have decided that bigger is better. The fact that “everybody else is doing it” reinforces errant behavior. Growth also allows managers to rationalize their bigger paychecks on the grounds that they’re presiding over larger institutions.

Throughout it all, associate satisfaction languishes at historic lows. No one surveys partners systematically, but plenty of them are unhappy, too. Unfortunately, such metrics that don’t connect directly to the short-term bottom line often get ignored.

Innovation won’t solve the problem

A few successful, stable law firms have shunned the now prevailing big law model. They innovate as needed, but far more important has been their ability to create a culture in which some short-term profit gives way to the profession’s long-term values. What is now missing from most big law firms was once pervasive: a long-run institutional vision and the willingness to implement it. Too often, greed gets in the way.

With all due respect to Messrs. Winston, Crandall and Henderson, sometimes the simplest explanation may also be the correct one.

DEWEY’S L. CHARLES LANDGRAF: THE PLIGHT OF THE LOYAL COMPANY MAN

Posted on June 18, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

This is the last — for now — in a series profiling Dewey & LeBoeuf’s former leaders, especially its final four-man office of the chairman. L. Charles Landgraf (Rice University, B.A., 1975; New York University, J.D. 1978) had been a long-time partner at LeBoeuf Lamb when it merged with Dewey Ballantine in October 2007.

In the 1990s, when LeBoeuf Lamb needed someone to bolster its London presence, Landgraf went. When the firm established a Moscow office, he helped. When duty called to the Washington, D.C. office that he was heading in 2012, Charley landed in Dewey & LeBoeuf’s four-man office of the chairman. It quickly became a thankless job.

A partner’s predicament

According to a Wall Street Journal interview, Landgraf helped out after the firm had failed to meet profit targets for several years. Unable to pay everything owed to guaranteed compensation partners, he and Jeffrey Kessler “spearheaded” a plan (according to Martin Bienenstock in that interview). It would have paid off partners who had taken IOUs from the firm by dedicating six percent of partnership earnings from 2014 to 2020.

Always candid, Landgraf said recently that the plan was necessary because “the firm had a lot of built-up tension about the fact that we had a compensation schedule last year that exceeded the actual earnings, and that had been true for a couple of years.” “Built-up tension” is a delicate description of the plight facing a firm that organizes itself around so-called stars whose loyalty extends no deeper than their guaranteed incomes.

Go along to get along?

My hunch is that the plan to deal with this problem wasn’t Landgraf’s idea. He wasn’t among those listed in the “Senior Management” section of the firm’s 2010 private placement memorandum. Nor was he mentioned in April 2012 when Dewey & LeBoeuf identified for Thomson Reuters seven key players essential to the firm’s survival.

He may fit the profile of many big law partners who have spent years — even decades — in the same firm and retain a deep loyalty to something that has actually disappeared from their institutions, namely, a true partnership and all that it entails. Perhaps they defer too willingly to others who are supposed to be smarter, more knowledgeable and/or have superior judgment. But when things get rough, they step up and do what they can to salvage the situation.

Undue deference revealed

From that perspective, Landgraf’s interview for The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, May 12, 2012 was revealing. A day earlier, Dewey & LeBoeuf’s resident bankruptcy expert Martin Bienenstock had announced that he was leaving the firm. By the time the interview appeared, he was already on Proskauer Rose’s attorney roster.

But during The Wall Street Journal interview, Landgraf — who was then the only remaining member of the original Gang of Four comprising the office of the chairman — let his former partner do all of the talking for a firm that was no longer Bienenstock’s. In printed form, the interview transcript fills seven pages. Landgraf’s words barely consume a half-page.

Bienenstock credited Landgraf and Kessler for the plan that committed future partner earnings to pay guaranteed partner IOUs from prior years. Landgraf said that the lateral contracts were “something we’re looking at. Whether all the contracts were the subject of full discussion or simply known as a technique that was used…is still being reviewed.”

His next line suggested that others at the firm may have been a bit too persuasive in selling him a bad idea: “But the technique of using guarantees of all forms, especially in the recruitment of laterals and retention of key business users, is pretty widespread throughout the industry.”

For limited periods involving laterals? Maybe. For four- or six-year deals involving legacy partners? I don’t think so. For 100 members of a 300-partner firm? Not for something that should call itself a partnership.

Two days after that interview appeared, Landgraf was gone, too. As hundreds of remaining Dewey & LeBoeuf lawyers and staff around the world wondered what might come next, one gets the sense that he was trying to be a good partner to the end.

I don’t know if a final caution applies to Landgraf, but it’s an appropriate note on which to conclude this series: a team player serves neither himself nor his institution when he defers to others as they move the team in the wrong direction. It’s time to empower dissenting voices with Aric Press’s “Partner Protection Plan.”

DEWEY’S RICHARD SHUTRAN — RUNNING THE NUMBERS

Posted on June 7, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

This is the fourth of a five-part series profiling Dewey & LeBoeuf’s former leaders. Richard Shutran (Trinity College, B.A., 1974; New York University, J.D., 1978) joined Dewey Ballantine in 1986 and rose to co-chair of the firm’s Corporate Department and Chairman of its Global Finance Practice Group. He left his position on Dewey’s Executive Committee in 2010, but in 2012 became a member of the four-man office of the chairman tasked to save the firm.

The Dewey & LeBoeuf website described Shutran’s transactional practice as “counseling…with respect to leveraged finance and project finance matters, mergers and acquisitions, and restructurings and reorganizations….” That makes him a numbers guy, someone especially well-suited to the challenges facing his firm when it asked him to return to leadership as one of the Gang of Four.

The 2010 bond issuance

Dewey’s 2010 private placement memorandum included Shutran’s biography in its “Senior Management” section. At the time, Bloomberg news reported on the $125 million bond offering for which Shutran said that the bonds’ interest rates were more favorable than the firm’s bank loans. That was true.

As partners were checking out two years later, the Daily Journal reported that Dewey was renegotiating those bank loans: “Richard Shutran, co-chair of Dewey’s corporate department, described the negotiations as standard.” At that point, perhaps they were.

Another “bond” issuance

Meanwhile, the firm was pursuing what fellow Gang of Four member Martin Bienenstock described as “a plan to deal with the shortage of payments to some partners.” In particular, those with guaranteed compensation deals had taken IOUs during earlier years when profits had fallen short of targets. The “plan” was to dedicate six percent of the firm’s income for six or seven years to pay them off, starting in 2014.

In addition to ongoing bank debt, the first wave of 2010 bond payments came due in 2013 and would continue through 2023. Now another debt repayment plan — to a special class of so-called partners — would take another chunk of future partnership earnings from 2014 to 2020.

Funny numbers

At about the same time, Shutran moved to the center of another controversy – also not of his making – relating to his firm’s financial health. He assured a Bloomberg reporter that the departure of Dewey’s elite insurance group “had no impact on our firm’s profitability. That group was break-even at best.” But he also said the firm had earned about $250 million in profits for 2011. The American Lawyer didn’t think that number jibed with what Dewey had provided for the magazine’s annual rankings.

On March 21, 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported The American Lawyer’s retroactive revisions to Dewey & LeBeouf revenue and profits numbers for 2010 and 2011 — by a lot. For example, Dewey’s 2011 average partner profits dropped from $1.8 million to $1.04 million. Shutran suggested methodological differences were to blame:

“‘They’re just not comparable numbers,’ Mr. Shutran said. ‘That’s something people like to pick on.’ Robin Sparkman, the editor-in-chief of the American Lawyer, said Dewey & LeBoeuf’s numbers were given to them by the firm’s management.”

About that bank loan

On April 11, 2012, Dewey identified seven key players essential to the firm’s survival. Shutran wasn’t among them, but he responded to questions about whether the wave of partner defections had triggered bank loan covenants: “It has not had any effect under (the) agreements,” he said. There’s no reason to doubt him.

But the real problem by then wasn’t the bank loans. It was the accumulated amounts owed for annual distributions to partners in excess of the firm’s net income. As Bruce MacEwen’s analysis suggests, whether it’s called mortgaging the future or something worse, the result is the same.

Something went terribly awry at Dewey & LeBoeuf, but here’s the scary part: among big law firms, some of the things that created Dewey’s predicament aren’t unique.

DEWEY’S JEFFREY KESSLER: STARS IN THEIR EYES

Posted on June 1, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

This is the third in a series profiling Dewey & LeBoeuf’s former leaders. Apparently, Jeffrey Kessler (Columbia University, B.A., 1975; Columbia Law School, J.D., 1977) has become a prisoner of his celebrity clients’ mentality. A prominent sports lawyer, he analogizes big-name attorneys to top athletes: “The value for the stars has gone up, while the value of service partners has gone down.”

Kessler was a long-time partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges before joining Dewey Ballantine in 2003. After the firm’s 2007 merger with LeBoeuf Lamb, he became chairman of the Global Litigation Department, co-chairman of the Sports Litigation Practice Group and a member of the Executive and Leadership Committees. Long before he became a member of the Gang of Four in Dewey & LeBoeuf’s office of the chairman, he was a powerhouse in the firm.

Blinded by their own light

Some attorneys have difficulty resisting the urge to absorb the ambitions and ethos of their clients. Many corporate transactional attorneys have long been investment banker and venture capital wannabees, at least when it comes to the money they’d like to make.

Of course, not all corporate practitioners are myopic thinkers. Kessler proves that narrow vision isn’t limited to transactional attorneys. But the rise of such attitudes to the top of many large law firms has occurred simultaneously with the profession’s devolution to models aimed at maximizing short-term profits and growth.

Kessler was a vocal proponent of the Dewey & LeBoeuf star system that produced staggering spreads between people like him — reportedly earning $5.5 million a year — and the service partners, some of whom made about five percent of that. It was the “barbell” system: top partners on one side; everybody else on the other.

In such a regime, there’s no shared sacrifice. What kind of partnership issues IOUs to star partners when the firm doesn’t make its target profits? Something that isn’t a partnership at all.

Lost in their own press releases

Kessler regularly finds himself in the presence of celebrity athletes. That can be a challenging environment. But once you start believing your own press releases, the result can be the plan that he and fellow Dewey & LeBoeuf partner Charles Landgraf “spearheaded” (according to fellow Gang of Four member Martin Bienenstock).

To deal with outstanding IOUs to Dewey partners whose guaranteed compensation couldn’t be paid when the firm underperformed for the year, Kessler helped to mortgage its future: for “a six- or seven-year period, starting in 2014, [a]bout six percent of the firm’s income would be put away to pay for this….”

It’s a remarkable notion. Partners didn’t get all of their previously guaranteed earnings because the firm didn’t do well enough to pay it. But rather than rethink the entire house of cards, it morphed into a scheme whereby future partnership earnings — for six or seven years — would satisfy the shortfall. Never mind that there was no way to know who would be among the firm’s partners in those future years. The money had to be promised away because the stars had to be paid.

Sense of entitlement

Kessler gives voice to the pervasive big law firm attitude that without stars there is no firm. It’s certainly true that every firm has to attract business and that some lawyers are more adept at that task than others. But Kessler’s approach produced yawning income gaps at Dewey. Similar attitudes have contributed to exploding inequality afflicting many equity partnerships. For insight into the resulting destabilization, read the recent article by Edwin Reeser and Patrick McKenna. “Spread Too Thin.”

But does Kessler really think that he and a handful of his fellow former Dewey partners are the first-ever generation of attorney stars? Twenty-five years ago when average partner profits for the Am Law 100 were $325,000 a year, did his mentors at Weil Gotshal earn twenty times more than some of their partners — or anything close in absolute dollars to what Kessler thinks he’s worth today? Does he believe that there are no stars at firms such as Skadden Arps, Simpson Thacher or other firms that have retained top-to-bottom spreads of 5-to-1 or less?

Beyond his prominence in the profession, Kessler is shaping tomorrow’s legal minds as a Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia. For anyone who cares about the future, that’s worth pondering.

SPINNING DEWEY’S HEROES

Posted on April 25, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Dewey & LeBoeuf’s latest designated savior is Martin J. Bienenstock. The NY Times says that he faces “perhaps the most challenging assignment of his career: the restructuring of his own law firm.”

According to the Times, his challenges include bank negotiations to restructure Dewey’s outstanding loans, consideration of reorganization options, and avoiding liquidation. Given the complex array of fiduciary duties accompanying such a job description — as a partner to his fellow partners while also acting as counsel to the partnership as a whole without favoring any individual partner or group of partners — it’s a daunting task.

Last month’s star was Steven H. Davis, whose assurances during an interview for Fortune magazine produced an article titled “Dewey & LeBoeuf: Partner exodus is no big deal.” Right — Dewey started the year with 300 partners; 30 were gone by the time of Davis’s interview; 40 more have left since then. Among his least prescient remarks: “If the direction we’re taking the firm in was somehow disapproved of, then the reality is that there ought to be a change in management. But I don’t sense that.”

The more things change…

Less than a week later, a five-man executive committee replaced Davis. One member of the new “office of the chairman” is Bienenstock. It’s ironic because he exemplifies Dewey’s business strategies that may have worked well in his case, but less so in others’, namely, lateral hiring and compensation guarantees. Prior to joining Dewey & Leboeuf in November 2007 (a month after the merger creating it), he’d spent 30 years at Weil, Gotshal & Manges. While he sat on Dewey’s management committee that Davis chaired, his new firm became one of the top-10 in 2011 lateral partner hiring.

According to The Lawyer, Bienenstock was reportedly among those who recently agreed to cap personal earnings at $2.5 million. That’s a start, but the article also said that some partners’ deferred income took the form of promissory notes due in 2014. It’s interesting that a firm already on a $125 million hook for something that law firms rarely do — offering bonds that begin to come due in April 2013 — would add even more short-term debt to its balance sheet. Add it to the list of unexpected complications that accompany partnership compensation guarantees.

The real Dewey heroes

This rotating focus on a handful of lawyers at the top obfuscates the importance of everyone else. Rainmakers come and go — and their seven-figure incomes survive. Bienenstock is an example. So are the many former Dewey management committee members who have already left, including John Altorelli, whose parting words showed little compassion for his former partners, associates, paralegals and staff. Even top partners who managed firms that went bust seem to land on their feet. After Howrey failed, its former vice chairman, Henry Bunsow, got a reported multi-million guaranteed compensation deal at Dewey in January 2011. Welcome to the lateral partner bubble.

Lost in the headlines about the stars are the worker bees with limited options and real fears. An Above the Law post from a seasoned Dewey paralegal captures the angst:

“I know these facts do not necessarily make for sexy headlines but I do ask that you report on the following. While some laugh and play their lyre as the city of Rome burns, it will be well over one thousand staff members who will also be gainfully unemployed.”

Add the nearly one thousand Dewey lawyers who have been watching quietly at the unfolding public relations nightmare since Davis’s bizarre interview. As Dewey’s publicity machine pumps out celebrity saviors of the moment, each has drawn more unwanted attention to the firm’s plight than the last. Martin Bienenstock’s appearance in the Times along with the proffered “pre-packaged bankruptcy” option is the latest example.

If Dewey survives the current crisis, Bienenstock’s suddenly magical touch won’t be the reason. Rather, it will survive because an entire law firm — partners, associates and staff — kept noses to the grindstone. The real heroes didn’t go looking for more media coverage of a troubled situation.

Perhaps Dewey’s leaders thought that better press could solve the firm’s crisis. But that approach reverses the relationship between public relations and crisis management, which is simple: manage a crisis properly and the resulting story will write itself.

Here’s the obvious corollary: manage the firm properly and there is no crisis to manage.

THE GOLDMAN CULTURE

Posted on March 20, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

After twelve years at Goldman Sachs, 33-year-old Greg Smith decided he’d seen enough. He resigned because, as he put it, “The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.”

Let’s do what lawyers do best: distinguish him away and move on.

The Times op-ed describes Smith as former executive director and head of the firm’s U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. After Smith’s public condemnation, CEO Lloyd Blankfein and President Gary Cohn sent employees a memo saying that he was one of 12,000 vice presidents out of 33,000 employees. He reportedly earned $500,000 last year, which would put him far down the Goldman food chain.

Analogizing to a big law firm, Smith would probably be the equivalent of a non-equity partner. That doesn’t make his observations irrelevant or wrong, but context matters.

As for what Goldman stands for, what did Smith think the firm was when he joined in 2000? An eleemosynary institution? It seems unlikely that the radical transformation he depicts occurred only after Blankfein and Cohn took over in 2006. After all, they rose to the top for reasons relating to the firm’s culture and values.

Case closed. Move on.

Any big law analogies?

Not so fast. If Goldman has accelerated in a particular direction, it’s not alone. In that respect, some parallels between trends at Goldman and the prevailing big law model are interesting:

– Management

At the top of Goldman, traders displaced traditional investment bankers. That bespeaks a shift from long-term thinkers to short-term profit-maximizers. Once in power, Blankfein (a former commodities trader) surrounded himself with “like-minded executives — ‘Lloyd loyalists,’” according to the Times in 2010.

Transactional attorneys have similarly risen to lead many big law firms. Along the way, they have absorbed the business school mentality of corporate clients. Dissent is not always a cherished value.

– Resulting culture changes

Goldman’s determination to represent all sides of a deal recently became the subject of Delaware Chancellor Leo Strine’s highly critical opinion of the firm. Likewise, large law firms have perfected techniques to maximize their representational flexibility. Those techniques have been essential to the remarkable growth that many firms have experienced.

– Metrics

Goldman’s leverage ratio is stunning: 442 partners out of more than 33,000 employees. As a group, large law firms have pulled up ladders, widened the top-to-bottom range within equity partnerships, and doubled attorney-to-equity partner leverage ratios since 1985.

– Partner Wealth

Goldman’s partners are famously rich. Many big law equity partners now enjoy seven- and even eight-figure incomes previously reserved for media celebrities, professional athletes, corporate CEOs, and — yes — their investment banker clients.

Yet the most important question is mission. Smith’s op-ed suggests that Goldman had become focused on squeezing money out of clients. Last year, The Wall Street Journal wrote about “Big Law’s $1,000-Plus an Hour Club” — senior partners who command four-figure hourly rates from clients. It quoted Weil, Gotshal & Manges’s bankruptcy leader Harvey Miller: ”The underlying principle is if you can get it, get it.”

A year earlier, Miller was resisting discount requests from the court-appointed monitors in the Lehman and GM bankruptcies:

“If you had cancer and you were going into an operation, while you were lying on the table, would you look at the surgeon and say, ‘I’d like a 10 percent discount’? This is not a public, charitable event.”

(Miller’s concluding line was ironic. At the time, his firm had already billed $16 million for the GM bankruptcy, which “public” taxpayer money was facilitating. Through January 31, 2012, Lehman ran up a $383 million tab at Weil Gotshal. Meanwhile, Weil recently reported average profits per partner of more than $2.4 million — an all-time high.)

Attitudes such as Miller’s are pervasive. It’s easy to single him out because he’s been publicly blunt about them. Greg Smith’s indictment was his way of revealing truth as he saw it. Sometimes statements from those at the top of large law firms allow the truth to reveal itself for all to see. Often, it’s not pretty.

DEWEY’S DILEMMA

Posted on March 7, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Dewey & LeBoeuf has talented lawyers, great clients, and 2011 average equity partner profits exceeding $1.7 million. So what required a March 2 firmwide memo from Chairman Steven H. Davis in response to “press stories on U.S. legal blogs”? If the firm paid some media relations consultant to advise him on the missive, it should demand a refund.

Lessons about communicating

Davis says that he planned to outline cost-cutting and other measures when he “knew exactly how they would impact individual offices and departments, but given the press attention,” he advanced his timetable. There’s the first lesson to learn from his approach: When management makes decisions, it shouldn’t attribute the timing of announcements to outside media influences, even if they are a factor.

The second lesson is to avoid firmwide memoranda on sensitive issues. That’s not because transparency is bad (although sometimes less is more). Rather, it’s because difficult news should be communicated in a way that best serves the institution, its people, and its clients.

In the age of global mega-firms, it’s difficult to bring all personnel — or even all partners — together for a candid conversation about what’s happening and why. But there’s no better use for all of that fancy videoconferencing technology than promoting the right narrative, rallying the troops, and instructing partners to inform clients and staff directly about internal firm situations that generate press.

Mixed messages

The substance of the memo presents other issues. Davis starts with the “many successes last year” and “improved financial performance” in 2011 that continued during the first two months of 2012. The problem, he suggests, is a “significant increase in our cost base.” Taking “proactive steps to align the firm’s resources with anticipated demand,” he notes that “[s]ome recent departures have been consistent with the firm’s strategic planning for 2012, and we expect some additional partners to leave.”

That leads to a third lesson about these situations. If a firm is pushing some partners out, don’t make a big deal about it while also touting the firm’s improved financial performance. As they’re losing their jobs, let subpar performers who were once valued firm assets keep their dignity. In fact, public characterizations invite scrutiny. For example, attrition and pruning are one thing, but did the firm’s strategic plan really contemplate losing current and former practice group leaders?

Then comes the punch line: the firm will reduce another five percent of attorneys and six percent of staff. Perhaps, as Davis suggests, the firm does “very much regret the impact” on affected colleagues, but with average equity partner earnings well above the million dollar mark, describing layoffs of 50 to 60 lawyers as “necessary to ensure the firm’s competitiveness” seems disingenuous to most observers.

Misleading metric?

Underlying all of this could be the fact that a key firm metric — average equity partner profits — is misleading. Perhaps, like many big firm trends, the real story is the internal gap between the highest and lowest equity partners.

According to the February issue of The American Lawyer, “Davis says that the firm resisted making mass lateral hires for three years after it was created in October 2007 through the merger of Dewey Ballantine and LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, choosing to focus on integration first. ‘Now, we’re moving into a new part of the cycle….'”

One new part of the cycle is lateral partner hiring, for which Dewey was among the top ten firms in 2011. Some of its newest partners were probably expensive, such as former chairs of their previous firms’ practice areas. In 2009, Davis said that the firm rewarded superior performance and denied giving compensation guarantees to rainmakers. If, as recent reports suggest, that policy changed, guarantees could present risks. When a lateral bubble pops, it can inflict significant collateral damage.

Even so, Dewey remains a great firm. On the strength of its ranking surge from 33 to 14 in the Midlevel Associate Satisfaction survey, together with its numerous awards for diversity and pro bono initatives, the firm made the 2011 Am Law “A-list.” That requires decent people creating a culture worth preserving. Hopefully, “moving to the new part of the cycle” hasn’t taken the firm in an errant direction — or, alternatively, any detour is temporary.

THE BIG LAW PARTNER LOTTERY

Posted on February 29, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

In last Sunday’s The New York Times Magazine, Adam Davidson suggests that many of today’s most intelligent and educated young people have entered an employment lottery. He draws on the best-selling Freakonomics by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, who use the unlikely prospect of hitting it big to explain otherwise irrational economic behavior in drug dealer gangs: legions of foot soldiers seek to become kingpins someday.

Davidson focuses on the entertainment industry where people with solid academic credentials and big dreams go to work in mail rooms. In passing, he identifies large law firms as another example where, for most young attorneys, analogous dreams meet a similarly unfortunate fate.

The topic is particularly timely. The National Law Journal just released its annual list of the NLJ 250 “Go-to law schools” from which the nation’s biggest firms draw the most new associates. In 2007, the top twenty law schools sent fifty-five percent of graduates to big firms; in 2011, that percentage was down to thirty-six.

As the job market for new attorneys languishes, most of last year’s 50,000 law school graduates would count those new associates as already having won a lottery. But the real story is that they have actually acquired a ticket to one or two more.

The long odds

As more firms have developed two-tier partnerships, the big law lottery has become a two-step ordeal. Merit still matters, but attaining even the highest skill level is only a necessary and not sufficient condition for advancement. To get a sense of the odds against success, consider the most recent data on NLJ 250 associates who were promoted to partner last year (non-equity partners in two-tier systems).

In 2011, forty-seven Harvard law graduates went from associate to big firm partner. That sounds like a lot, except that five years earlier — in 2006 — Harvard sent 338 graduates into large firms. Although that fifteen percent rate isn’t as bad the lottery, winnowing the number down to include only those who will become equity partners gets closer. (A time lag of five years isn’t quite long enough for the groups of new and promoted associates to match exactly, especially as partner tracks have become longer. But it’s adequate to illustrate the point.)

Other top schools’ graduates face even worse odds. Columbia law sent 313 graduates to big firms in 2006; thirty-one of its grads went from associate to partner in 2011. In 2006, 143 Northwestern law grads got big firm jobs; in 2011, fourteen NU graduates advanced from associate to partners. The University of Pennsylvania’s 2006 class sent 187 into big firms; those firms promoted fifteen U Penn associates to partner last year.

A few schools fared better in this comparative sweepstakes: the University of Texas placed 194 of its 2006 graduates in big firms; last year twenty-nine UT grads went from associate to big law partners. Vanderbilt also broke the twenty percent barrier.

Irrational behavior?

Why do associates continue to play such long odds in a game that doesn’t yield any outcome for years and, for the vast majority of participants, turns out badly?

Understandably, some associates take big law jobs solely to burn off student loan debt before pursuing the dreams that actually took them to law school in the first place. But others are playing the big law lottery.

Meanwhile, those at the top of law firm pyramids have worsened the odds. They have pulled up the ladder by lengthening the equity partner track, reducing the rate of new equity partners, increasing leverage, and running their firms to maximize short-term equity partner wealth at the expense of long-run institutional stability and their colleagues’ personal well being.

Rationalizing these actions, many big law leaders have convinced themselves that the current generation of young lawyers is inferior to their own. They complain about those who act as if they’re entitled to everything and unwilling to work hard, as they once did. Three concluding points:

First, many large firm attorneys in the baby boomer generation act entitled, too.

Second, when today’s big law leaders were associates, no one was telling them to get their hours up.

Third, motivation and behavior follow incentive structures. If some of today’s young attorneys sometimes behave as if they don’t have a reasonable shot at winning the equity partner lottery, it’s because they don’t.

THE LATERAL BUBBLE

Posted on February 15, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Most big law leaders say that they have to keep pushing equity partner profits higher to attract and retain rainmakers. They have repeated that mantra so often and for so long that the rest of the profession has accepted it as an article of faith.

Perhaps it’s true, but two items in the February issue of The American Lawyer prompt this heretical question:

What if the lateral hiring frenzy is creating a bubble?

Victor Li’s “This Time It’s Personal” describes the state of play: lateral hiring is way up. Law firm management consultants, including my friend Jerry Kowalski, predict more of the same for 2012 as firms counter revenue losses from departing partners to prevent the death spiral that can result. Such fear-driven behavior can easily lead to overpayment for so-called hot lateral prospects that turn out to be, well, not so hot.

As I’ve observed previously, the reasons for the lateral explosion have much to do with big law’s evolution. Its currently prevailing business model encourages partners to keep clients in individual silos away from fellow partners, lest they claim a share of billings that determine compensation. Paradoxically, such behavior also maximizes a partner’s lateral options and makes exit more likely. In other words, the institutional wounds are self-inflicted.

But the article quotes several firm leaders who emphasize that, while money was important in motivating some of the partners they acquired, the search for a global platform also mattered. Frank Burch, cochair of DLA Piper, acknowledges that enticing a lateral hire requires that the money offered be comparable. But he also says that his firm “did a lot of hiring from firms that reported higher profits per partner” than DLA Piper. The article cites four: Paul Hastings; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; White & Case; and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.

Except “Crazy Like a Fox” by Edwin B. Reeser and Patrick J. McKenna (also in The American Lawyer February issue), makes the correct observation that a firm’s average PPP is not all that informative. The authors’ focus principally on the growing cohort of non-equity partners in a climate where clients are unwilling to pay for first- and second-year associates. But they make a telling point on a seemingly unrelated topic: the income gap within equity partnerships has exploded.

They note that a few years ago the equity partner pay spread was typically three-to-one; some places it’s now ten-to-one or even twelve-to-one:

“Over the last few years there has been a dramatic change in the balance of compensation, to a large degree undisclosed, in which increasing numbers of partners fall below the firm’s reported average profits per equity partner (PPP)…Typically, two-thirds of the equity partners earn less, and some earn only perhaps half, of the average PPP.”

(Trying to justify this trend, some firm leaders have offered silly explanations, such as geographical differences.)

Now apply this learning to Li’s article. A firm’s average PPP isn’t luring high-powered lawyers; the money at the top is. Perhaps the desire to provide clients with a better global platform plays a role in some laterals’ decisions, but most of the firms experiencing the highest number of lateral partner departures in 2011 are already worldwide players. In fact, four firms — DLA Piper, K&L Gates, Jones Day, and SNR Denton — are simultaneously on both the most departures and most hires list.

Consider an example. Last year when Jamie Wareham became big law’s highly public $5 million man, did leaving Paul Hastings for DLA Piper improve his ability to serve clients? Doubtful. But the bubble question is far more important to the firm: Has Wareham been worth it? Only he and his new partners know for sure.

That leads to a final heretical question: Where a lateral bubble develops, what happens when it bursts or, perhaps more pernicious, develops a slow profitability leak? Nothing good. For the answer, ask those who once worked at Howrey, Heller Ehrman or one of the many other now-defunct firms whose leaders thought that acquiring high-profile laterals offered only upside.

THE ULTIMATE LATERAL HIRE

Posted on January 25, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Among 2011’s “Lateral Partner All-Stars,” Tony Angel’s symbolic importance seems unrivaled. As I write, I don’t know who will make The American Lawyer‘s annual February list. But when Angel became DLA Piper’s leader, his new firm became the definitive poster child for big law’s transformation. Celebrate at your peril.

Whither goest thou?

DLA Piper resulted from the combination of several large firms comprised of once-independent enterprises: DLA’s three U.K. components were Dibb Lupton Broomhead, Alsop Stevens, and Wilkinson Kimbers; Piper Rudnick’s predecessors included Baltimore-based Piper & Marbury, Chicago-based Rudnick & Wolfe, and San Diego-based Gray, Cary, Ware & Freidenrich.

According to its website, DLA Piper grew from 2700 lawyers in January 2005 to 4200 today. The attorneys it added during that period would comprise one of the 20 largest firms in the world — eclipsing Kirkland & Ellis, Weil Gotshal & Manges, and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

But is it really a law firm? K&L Gates chairman Peter Kalis makes the telling point that, as a verein, it may be more like a confederation of different firms that share a common name, but not profit pools. Still, adding 1500 attorneys in six years makes any observer wonder about DLA Piper’s global partner conferences. The 2010 meeting took place in Orlando, Florida, home of Disney World. There’s a metaphor in there someplace.

Ascertaining shared values and visions

According to Am Law Daily, the whirlwind courtship between Angel and DLA Piper began with a May 2011 breakfast meeting that included Frank Burch and others on the leadership team. The idea of naming him global co-chair gained momentum as Angel lined up partner support from the firm’s 76 offices. On November 7, he got the top spot. How?

“He’s got great values and he believes in what we’re trying to do and he shares our view of what’s going on in the world,” said Burch, who now shares DLA Piper’s global chair with Tony Angel. “So, we didn’t hesitate for a second and worry about the fact that the guy was not in the firm.”

Didn’t hesitate for a second? Didn’t worry about the fact that the guy was not in the firm? Why not? When Burch said that Angel has “great values,” “believes in what we’re trying to do,” and “shares our view,” what did he mean?

DLA Piper’s press release offered a hint:

“Tony will work with the senior leadership on the refinement and execution of DLA Piper’s global strategy with a principal focus on improving financial performance and developing capability in key markets.”

Translation: Get bigger and make surviving equity partners richer.

Consultant Peter Zeughauser said that Angel is a hot property: “It’s hard to get a guy that talented. There just aren’t that many people out there who have done what he has done.”

Zeughauser was referring to Angel’s management of Linklaters from 1998 to 2007. When he left, it had a global presence and average partner profits of $2.4 million. Although DLA Piper’s 2010 average partner profits exceeded $1 million in 2010, Angel’s job is to take them even higher.

Ignored in the financial shorthand are questions no one asks:

— Most big firms prospered wildly during big law’s go-go years. Does the person at the top deserve all the credit? The partners who bring in clients, orchestrate deals, and win trials don’t think so.

— Conversely, according to Am Law‘s Global 100, by 2010 Linklater’s 2010 average profits per partner slipped to $1.8 million. Does anyone think that happened because Angel left three years earlier? Not likely.

— What gets sacrificed in the myopic quest for growth and short-term profits? That’s becoming clearer: things that aren’t easily quantified, including a sense of community and a culture that mentors home-grown talent from which a firm’s future leaders can emerge.

Rather than consider the heresy implicit in such questions, the spin zone focuses on what legal headhunter Jack Zaremski called a “brave move” that “might very well pay off.”

Pay off, indeed. In the latest Am Law Mid-level Associates Survey, DLA Piper ranked 99th out of 126 firms. In reviewing their shared values and vision, did Angel and his new DLA Piper partners discuss the rewards that might come with addressing the firm’s attorney morale problems?

Probably not. After all, Linklaters ranked 108th.

FED TO DEATH

Posted on December 20, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

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.

OCCUPY BIG LAW

Posted on December 7, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

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

Posted on December 1, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

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.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER LAW FIRM MERGER

Posted on October 26, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

It’s now ancient history, but in 2002 Chicago-based Mayer, Brown & Platt (850 lawyers) joined with U.K-based Rowe & Maw (250 lawyers) in a law firm merger that seemed breathtaking. Today, combining firms has become a universal business strategy. Fourteen law firm mergers in the third quarter of 2011 alone brought this year’s total to 43.

Evaluating these ultimate lateral hiring events — wholesale combinations of independent enterprises — is a two-step process: first, defining success and, second, allowing sufficient time (measured in years) to observe results. Senior partners orchestrating such transactions have vested interests in making them look good. So do the management consultants cheering them on. Once they undertake a merger strategy, leaders take herculean steps to vindicate it. Their spin can distract from the downside, but it’s there.

Defining success

Management and its outside consultants often define success in deceptively simple terms: getting bigger and growing equity partner profits. That can be superficial and misleading.

Growth alone doesn’t create value. Recently, Minneapolis-based Faegre & Benson and Indianapolis-based Baker & Daniels announced the creation of Faegre Baker Daniels. Whatever economies of scale exist in the delivery of legal services, firms the size of Baker (320 lawyers) and Faegre (450 lawyers) seem large enough individually to have triggered them long ago. Will their 770-attorney firm operate more efficiently than two components half that size? Doubtful.

But this is certain: combined firms face more potential client conflicts than if they’d remained separate. That results from the interaction between the Rules of Professional Responsibility and arithmetic.

Some leaders promote a “bigger platform” as a way to entice prominent laterals. But bringing in seasoned outsiders makes preserving any firm’s culture even more challenging.

Culture shock

Then again, maybe there’s little culture to preserve after most significant combinations. Baker & Daniels is in the Am Law 200; so is Faegre. Together they’ll move into the Am Law 100. Is that a good thing?

Merger leaders always proclaim their determination to preserve each firm’s culture. But, those attending the first Faegre Baker Daniels partnership meeting won’t know half the people in the room. Likewise, being one of 100 equity partners is different from being one of more than 200 — and not in a way that enhances collegiality or a sense of community. Looking for a central identity or a geographic core from which senior partners working together can produce common principles? The new Faegre Baker Daniels firm won’t even have a national headquarters.

The winners

In the end, most merger proponents pander to the simplistic hope that synergy of the combined entity will produce value greater than the sum of its partner profits parts. If that happens, it’s a good deal economically for the survivors at the top. But many others may find themselves on the wrong side of a merger’s “restructuring opportunities” — a euphemism for shrinking the new equity partnership.

According to the latest Am Law listing, Baker & Daniels’ partnership has two tiers (equity and non-equity) and an equity partner leverage ratio of 1.71. Faegre has a single equity partner tier and a leverage ratio of 1.09. Something’s gotta give.

Faegre’s chairman Andrew Humphrey, a transactional attorney who will serve as the combined Faegre Baker Daniels chief executive partner, said the new firm would have a “unified compensation structure.” He plans to manage “partner expectations” and “incentivize people the right way.” I don’t know what he has in mind, but some current partners probably won’t like the results of that exercise.

Likewise, mergers put pressure on leaders to push everyone harder. They want to cite increases in billings, billable hours, and leverage as proof that the new institution is better. Never mind that no one will ever know what the base case — no merger — would have produced for either firm independently.

Even a short-term increase in partner profits doesn’t prove the long-term value of the transaction. For example, Howrey’s merger and lateral hiring binge began in 2001. Seven years later it had record profits, but by early 2011 the firm was gone.

I know, I know — Howrey was different. As I warned at the outset, beware of that spin-thing.

THE COST OF DISSATISFACTION

Posted on September 28, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

This month began with the publication of The American Lawyer‘s annual Mid-Level Associate Satisfaction Survey results. The dismal descent to historic depths continues. Let’s end it with this question: Why should law firm leaders care?

Answer: Because dissatisfied lawyers are costing them money.

That’s the conclusion of Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile and fellow researcher, Steven Kramer, in The Progress Principle. They reported their findings in the Labor Day edition of the New York Times. At a time when most workers feel fortunate to have jobs, Amabile and Kramer have a tough sell in convincing employers, including law firm leaders, to worry about the psychological state of their employees.

We all know the mantra: No one is required to accept any job. The market allocates resources. A labor market clears at the point where buyers and sellers agree on a price for services sought and rendered. Workers take into account the factors that matter to them and get paid appropriately for the jobs they’re willing to do. Case closed.

Not quite. Such an analysis makes dubious assumptions about the market. On the employee side, bad or incomplete information can distort outcomes. A prospective law student might hope to emulate popular media images that merge with law school promotional materials promising a secure, well-paying future. Once in school, individual financial imperatives — such as the need to repay staggering educational debt — can constrain post-degree options. Meanwhile, the anticipated job often turns out to be neither secure nor well-paying.

Likewise, employers take false comfort in the misconception that a new hire is simply exercising free will in a free market. A firm assumes that if young attorneys’ experiences diverge from rosier expectations, any resulting psychological distress isn’t its problem. Never mind that the firm’s underlying business model produces behavioral incentives and a culture that exacerbate the disconnect.

“We’re just trying to run a business,” most law firm leaders would say. “There’s no metric for assessing the impact of career dissatisfaction on performance. If I can’t measure it, how can I consider it when making decisions?”

As long as everyone keeps billing hours, the profits beast continues to be fed. As unhappy associates alone bear the burden of their discontent, leaders rationalize their indifference to growing dissatisfaction with a simplistic analysis: if it gets too bad, people can leave and find another job. In the current buyer’s market for associates, boatloads of replacements are waiting in the wings anyway.

The work of Amabile and Kramer offers an intriguing rebuttal to myopic managers who can’t see past next year’s profits. In a longitudinal study encompassing ten years and 238 professionals in seven different companies, they asked people to make daily diary entries about their emotional states. Negative inner work lives resulted in “a profound impact on workers’ creativity, productivity, commitment and collegiality.”

The findings challenge the conventional wisdom that pervades many big firm cultures, namely, that pressure enhances performance. According to Amabile and Kramer, the data suggest that the opposite is true: “[W]orkers perform better when they are happily engaged in what they do….[O]f all the events that engage people at work, the single most important — by far — is simply making progress in meaningful work.”

The authors note Gallup’s estimate that America’s “disengagement crisis” costs $300 billion annually in lost productivity. They also observe that the vast majority of 669 surveyed managers shared an important incompetence: the managers “failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary [employee] motivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses.” The catalysts that enable such progress are worker autonomy, sufficient resources, and learning from problems.

Big firm leaders determine the extent to which their workers experience these three catalysts. The leveraged pyramid and its billable hour regime enslaves associates while inhibiting partners from becoming mentors. In other words, the prevailing big law model cuts the wrong way for everyone. The resulting work environment produces dissatisfaction that’s costing the equity partners money.

How much money? William Bruce Cameron’s observation (sometimes attributed to Einstein) was right: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

COMMENDABLE COMMENT AWARD

Posted on September 21, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

Rare candor at the top deserves recognition.

The September issue of The American Lawyer honors the magazine’s 2011 Lifetime Achievers — an impressive group. The list is alphabetical, which made Richard Beattie first. Now 72, he has enjoyed a long and distinguished career since joining Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett in 1968. Complementing a wildly successful big firm transactional practice, he also served the public in many capacities, including general counsel to the former U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare under Secretary Joseph Califano, Jr. in the 1970s.

In 1991, Beattie was elected to Simpson Thacher’s executive committee. He became chairman in 2004. By any measure, he has certainly earned his latest accolade. Yet another — my “Commendable Comment Award” — results from his response to The American Lawyer‘s question about his biggest regret:

“I regret the number of vacations with my family I missed as a result of working on transactions.”

Succeeding in big law requires talent, hard work, sacrifice, and — dare I say it — luck. Only the most reflective of big law leaders credit fortuity to their rise and even fewer discuss the downside — the personal cost that they and their families bear.

Mr. Beattie’s candor comes with a bit of irony. The same issue of the magazine reports this year’s Midlevel Associate Satisfaction survey. Overall, Simpson Thacher is tied for 56th out of 126 firms in the survey. It’s 36th out of 85 Am Law 100 and Global 100 firms. And remember, overall associate satisfaction for the survey group dropped again this year to an all-time low; being in the middle of the pack is, at best, a mediocre finish.

Going behind the numbers, Simpson scores below average in “family friendliness” — 3.47 out of five (the national average is 3.62). The firm is also below average in its associates’ stated likelihood of staying two years (3.44 compared to 3.58 nationally).

One more notable statistic from this year’s 2011 Am Law 100 listing: Simpson Thacher’s 2010 partner profits increased by more than nine percent over 2009. Its average profits per equity partner were $2.64 million — eighth place.

Being a lawyer has always been demanding. That won’t change. There are times when a situation requires sacrifices that only a particular lawyer (and his or her family) can make in responding to a client’s genuine emergency. But when it comes to big firms, clients in such situations rarely require the services of any particular mid-level associate.

In fact, during thirty years of practice, I never heard a client say, “I need associate X to cancel his or her family vacation to meet with me.” The seasoned senior partner may seem indispensable. Even the best midlevel associate? Never.

Which takes me back to Beattie and his firm. He gets high marks for admitting that work impaired his family life, but as a member of Simpson Thacher’s executive committee for two decades and chairman for the past seven years, he’s also had a unique power to shape his firm’s culture. His accomplishments are worthy of The American Lawyer‘s Lifetime Achievement Award, but he and others who set the profession’s tone have a special obligation to foster working environments in which young lawyers avoid what Beattie now describes as his biggest regret. Indeed, if they can’t, who can?

No leader of any big firm can single-handedly reverse the last two decades of unfortunately myopic and often short-sighted trends. But all should consider adopting “The Misery Index” — an informational tool that free market disciples should embrace. Such a metric might influence institutional behavior for the better, even if only marginally. Those willing to try it could, perhaps, improve the profession in ways they never thought possible back when they were missing all of those family vacations. There’s still time to keep others from missing theirs.

Anyone receiving honors recognizing a lifetime of achievement could leave no better legacy than empowering young proteges to avoid regrets similar to their own. Of course, the problem isn’t unique to Beattie or Simpson Thacher. It’s wrapped into the larger question of defining long-term success — a question that every big law leader should ponder for his or her firm. Regrettably, few will. There’s no way to bill a client for the time.

INFLATED PPP?

Posted on August 29, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

Recently, the Wall Street Journal broke the story, but it’s not new. Five years ago, The American Lawyer‘s then editor-in-chief Aric Press posed this question after hearing about presentations that Citi Private Law Firm Group was making to big firm managers (I’m paraphrasing):

Were law firms providing his magazine with financial information different from what they told their bankers at Citigroup?

In 2006, Press thought not: “The American Lawyer’s report of profits per partner is essentially the same as Citi’s for 47 percent of the firms to which [Citi] has access. For another 22 percent, the difference is 10 percent or less.”

In other words, 69 percent consistency (i.e., within 10 percent) between Am Law and Citi data — and that’s before reconciling their different definitions of equity partner.

On August 22, 2011, the Journal headline read “Law Firms’ Profits Called Inflated” — a supposedly new scandal: “[A]ccording to the person briefed on Citi’s [latest] analysis, in addition to about 22% of the top 50 firms overstating their 2010 profits per partner by more than 20%, an additional 16% inflated their numbers by 10% to 20%. An additional 15% of the firms had profits-per-partner figures that were inflated by 5% to 10%….”

In other words, 62 percent consistency (within 10 percent), again before appropriate reconciliations.

For Citi’s latest sample size of 50, that’s a swing of three law firms.

Of course, no firm should inflate its Am Law PPP, but a few always have. In his 2006 article, Press wondered why. I think it’s because some metrics assume an unsavory life of their own. In that way, Am Law PPP functions similarly to U.S. News law school rankings. Even when the underlying numbers are accurate, relying on the metric to make important decisions can lead to unfortunate behavior.

Pandering to idiotic U.S. News criteria results in dubious practices that discredit the overall result: recruiting previously rejected applicants who went to other schools, but whose LSATs don’t count if they arrive as tuition-paying 2L transfer students; using post-graduation employment rates that don’t distinguish between full- and part-time positions, or jobs requiring a legal degree and those that don’t; awarding first-year scholarships to students with high GPAs and LSATs, only to crush them with mandatory grading curves that impose forfeiture for years two and three.

A similar devotion to misguided metrics dominates many firms. In the 2008 Am Law 100 issue, Press observed: “[P]rofits-per-partner [is] the metric that has turned law firm managers into contortionists…” Maximizing PPP means equity partners squeezing more billables out of everybody, raising rates, and “pulling up the ladder behind them.”

Reliance on misguided metrics isn’t unique to the legal profession. What starts as teaching to a test sometimes culminates in cheating to get higher scores — with middle school instructors at the center of alleged wrongdoing. But catching attorneys in this particular lie is more difficult than finding common erasures for a classroom of standardized test-takers. Like law schools that self-report their information to the ABA (and U.S. News), private law firms submit whatever they want to The American Lawyer. Recipients can’t verify what they get.

However, Citigroup is a lender to law firms and “independently reviews many law firms’ financial performance,” according to the Journal. The WSJ had a story only because Citi entertained an audience of big law chairmen and managing partners with discrepancies between actual law firm profits and what the firms reported for public consumption. I wonder if the bank tried to reconcile its own clients’ apparent discrepancies before highlighting what the WSJ now depicts as a pervasive scandal.

Legal consultant Jerome Kowalski urges firms to stop reporting PPP, as Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP announced it would last year. That’s unlikely, but meanwhile, the real travesty is that the liars go unidentified. Inflating profits for Am Law is a hubristic finger in the eyes of a firm’s client.

Maybe clients have no right to care what their lawyers make, as Adam Smith, Esq. argues in a recent blog post. But the unavoidable fact is that many do. From their perspective, the truth would have been bad enough. A few firms goosing their seven-figure PPP averages even higher make all firms look worse, not better.

IT’S THE MODEL

Posted on August 15, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

[Thanks, readers. My big law novel — The Partnership — has been on the Amazon e-book “Legal Thrillers Best-Seller List” for more than a month. Last weekend, it was #7. Also available for iPad, Nook, and in paperback.]

Returning from vacation means tackling a pile of accumulated newspapers in a single sitting. That sounds like a chore, but it allows the mind to connect news items that otherwise might seem completely unrelated.

Consider these three from the Wall Street Journal on August 1, 2, and 3.

In “With Oracle and Dodgers Waiting, Boies Not Ready to Retire,” the Journal interviewed David Boies — 70-year-old former Cravath partner who started his own firm. He represented Al Gore in the 2000 election fight, plaintiffs challenging California’s law banning gay marriage, the NFL in its litigation with players, and a long string of high-profile litigants. Boies explains why more than half of his firm’s cases have a potential success fee:

“Hourly rate billing is bad for the client and I believe bad for the firm. It sets up a conflict between what’s good for the lawyer and what’s good for the client.”

Enter the client with the will to resist the hourly billing regime. On August 2, the WSJ‘s “Pricing Tactic Spooks Lawyers” describes clients countering high big law fees with on line reverse auctions that pit firms against each other in bidding for business. The result: cost reduction.

But economizing can be dangerous. An article in the next day’s WSJ should make every big firm attorney squirm. “Objection! Lawsuit Slams Temp Lawyers” reports that J-M Manufacturing is suing its former law firm, McDermott, Will & Emery LLP, claiming that the firm didn’t supervise adequately the work of contract attorneys from a third-party vendor. McDermott denies wrongdoing:

“J-M…keeps changing its story. Now [it]…claims that McDermott failed to supervise the contract lawyers that J-M retained….”

According to the article, J-M alleges that it paid McDermott attorneys rates as high as $925 an hour, compared to $61 an hour to the firm supplying the temps. In other words and regardless of who retained them, using contract lawyers helped shave J-M’s outside legal bills.

Here’s the common thread. In the first article, Boies just says what everyone knows: the billable hour regime is a nightmare. The second reflects ongoing client efforts to reduce resulting legal costs. The third identifies a potential peril for law firms that attempt to oblige: a malpractice suit — the ultimate conflict with a client.

I don’t know if McDermott did anything wrong, but clients should realize that putting the squeeze on outside lawyers is tricky. For example, cutting fees is one thing; expecting large firm equity partners to do the obvious — reduce their own stunning income levels to help the cause — is something else, and it isn’t happening.

Amid corporate belt-tightening that targeted outside legal costs, average equity partner profits for the Am Law 100 actually rose during the last two years. They’re now back to pre-Great Recession levels of $1.4 million a year and it’s a safe bet that next year’s profits will be even higher. If I were a client, I’d ask, “How did that happen?”

“It’s the successful model at work,” most firm leaders would say without reflection or hesitation. “Growing equity partner earnings are essential to retain and attract top talent. Firms have become more efficient, so it’s a win-win for clients and partners.”

Clients should consider the untoward implications of austerity measures that don’t dent equity partners’ pocketbooks. Increased efficiency? Operating with fewer secretaries and putting locks on supply room cabinets don’t account for the extraordinary profits wave that big law continues to ride.

Here’s another explanation. The prevailing model requires increases in billable hours — big law’s distorted definition of productivity — to offset fee reductions that clients demand. Concerned about attorney fatigue that compromises morale and work product? Too bad; the model ignores it.

Clients can and should seek lower big law fees, but they should be careful what they wish for, scrutinize what they get, and wonder why equity partners’ eye-popping profits keep growing along the way. The prevailing model rewards big law equity partners handsomely, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s working for their clients or anyone else.

AGING GRACEFULLY — OR NOT

Posted on June 5, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

A recent NY Times article revealed the baby boomer’s dilemma: await marginalization or hog opportunities. It has profound implications for big law attorneys of all ages.

“[I]n my experience, it is much harder for older partners to maintain their position if their billable hours decline,” an employment lawyer told the Times.

So a law firm consultant suggested this strategy: “Very few people are so skilled that they can’t be replaced by a younger, more current practitioner. You’ve got to be so connected to important clients that the firm is going to fear your departure.”

That’s unfortunate advice, but not surprising. Most elders don’t mentor talented proteges to assume increasing responsibilities, persuade clients that others can do equally first-rate work, or institutionalize relationships so that the firm weathers senior partner departures and prospers over the long run. Instead, they create silos — self-contained practice groups of clients and attorneys who will give them leverage in the internal battles to retain money, power, and status. (See, e.g., The Partnership) Rather than waste time gaining fellow partners’ respect, the prevailing big law model prefers fear — or, more precisely, fear of a senior partner’s lost billings.

Over time, intergenerational antagonisms result. Older partners become blockage because the leveraged pyramid that pervades big law requires adherence to short-term metrics. Artificial constraints block the promotion of well-qualified candidates who’ve given years of personal sacrifice. If there’s not economic room at equity partner decision time, their efforts will have been for naught; they’re left behind.

Meanwhile, young attorneys learn by example. “Firm” clients cease to exist; they’re absorbed into jealously guarded fiefdoms that become transportable business units. Traditional partnership principles of mutual respect and support yield to unrestrained self-interest.

Eventually, everyone loses. Young attorneys resent elders; wealthy equity partners erect futile defenses against their own inevitable decline to an unhappy place; firms lose the stability that comes with loyal clients.

For some aging big law partners, greed never retires. But for many others, hanging on isn’t about the money. As mortality rears its head, their real quest is for continuing relevance — the belief that they still have something to offer and are making a difference.

Another Times article suggested a possible way out of big law’s conundrum: encouraging partners to redirect their skills. The New York Legal Aid Society program, Second Acts, taps into the growing army of retired lawyers:

“The point is not to have distinct phases of working life and after-working life, but to meld the two by having pro bono work be part of a lawyer’s career. Therefore, when lawyers retire, they can somewhat seamlessly slip into meaningful volunteer work, said Miriam Buhl, pro bono counsel at…Weil, Gotshal & Manges.”

The article described 68-year-old Steven B. Rosenfield, a former Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison partner who traded his commercial securities practice for work in juvenile rights.

Behavior follows embedded economic structures and the incentives they create. In big law, the myopic emphasis on a handful of short-term profit-maximizing metics — billings, billable hours, and leverage ratios — has produced blinding wealth for a few. But sometimes those metrics become less satisfying as organizing principles of life.

Firm demands have left all lawyers with little time to reflect on what their lives after big law might be. Someday, most successful big law partners will pay the price and need help finding a path that reshapes self-identity while preserving dignity. The challenge is to permit disengagement with honor.

Firms could do a great service — and improve their own long-term stability in the process — if they relieved the stigma of economic decline in ways that encouraged aging colleagues to do the right thing. But it requires thinking beyond today’s metrics that determine a partner’s current year compensation. It requires valuing what can’t be easily measured and embedding it in a firm’s culture so that reaching retirement age isn’t a shock, it’s a blessing. It requires empathy, compassion, and — most of all — leadership.

In short, it requires things that are, tragically, in very short supply throughout big law.

A NEW LAW SCHOOL MISSION

Posted on May 15, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

What ails the profession and is there a cure?

If you haven’t already seen it, you might want to take a look at Part I of my article, “Great Expectations Meet Painful Realities,” in the Spring 2011 issue of Circuit Rider. My latest contribution to the debate on the profession’s growing crisis begins on page 24 of the Seventh Circuit Bar Association’s semi-annual publication.

Part II begins at page 26 of the December 2011 issue.

IMPROVING PROSPECTS — BUT FOR WHOM?

Posted on May 10, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

Life is just a matter of perspective. For example, here’s some apparently good news:

— The legal sector added 1,500 jobs in April.

— Ashby Jones at the Wall Street Journal Law Blog cited a recent article in The Guardian for the proposition that the U.K. might actually have a shortage of lawyers next year. Could the U.S. be far behind?

— NALP’s Executive Director James Leipold noted that, along with an overall attorney employment rate of 88.3% for the class of 2009, “the most recent recruitment cycle showed signs of a small bounce in the recruiting activity of law firms, a sign that better economic times likely lie ahead.”

Now consider each headline a bit differently:

— “Legal sector” isn’t limited to attorneys; more than 44,000 new law school graduates hit the market every year.

— The Guardian article relies solely on a report from the College of Law that has an interest in encouraging applications to its program for prospective solicitors. More than one comment to the initial report expressed angry skepticism about the College’s short-term motives. Where have I heard that before?

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that, for the entire ten-year period from 2008 to 2018, net U.S. attorney employment will increase by only 100,000. Even if all aging attorneys retired as they turned 65, there aren’t enough of them to make room for all the newbies. In 1970, for example, law schools awarded only about one-third of the number of JDs conferred in 2010.

— To his credit, NALP’s Leipold went behind the 88% employment rate for the class of 2009. The resulting caveats are significant.

First, the percentage employed are graduates “for whom employment status was known.” Who’s excluded? Who knows?

Second, nearly 25 percent of all reported jobs were temporary; more than 10 percent were part-time.

Third, only 70 percent “held jobs for which a J.D. was required.” Unfortunately, law schools don’t offer tuition refunds (or relief from student loans) for education that was unnecessary for their graduates’ actual employment opportunities. That doesn’t surprise me. (See “Law School Deception.”)

Finally, more than 20 percent of employed graduates from the class of 2009 “were still looking for work.” Beneath the veneer of superficially good news — having a job — career dissatisfaction continues to eat away at too many of the profession’s best and brightest in yet another generation.

That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t go to law school. It means that they should think carefully about it first, starting with this question: why do I want to be a lawyer and will the reality of the job match my expectations?

Turning the employment subject toward big law leads to one more lesson on perspective.

A day after the Ashby Jones and James Leipold articles, the WSJ‘s Nathan Koppel summarized big law’s continuing job-shedding: the NLJ 250 lost another 3,000 in 2010, bringing their total decrease since 2008 to 9,500. They may be hiring some new associates, but they’re getting rid of many more.

NALP expects to release its 2010 employment data in May. But every big law leader knows that May’s true importance lies in a much more significant event: annual publication of the Am Law 100. For some partners, pre-release anxiety is palpable, if not paralyzing.

This year, average equity partner profits for the Am Law 100 went up by over 8% — to almost $1.4 million. For context, that surpasses 2007, which was the peak of an uninterrupted five-year PPP run-up. Pretty stunning for an economy that remains difficult for so many. Gross revenues increased as overall headcount dropped by almost 3%. More revenues from fewer attorneys meant more billables — mislabeled as higher “productivity” in big law terms — for the chosen. (See “The Misery Index.”) As jobs remained scarce and associate hours climbed, equity partner earnings continued their ascent.

How much is enough? For some people, the answer will always be more; short-term metrics that maximize current PPP guide their way. Life is easy when deceptively objective numbers make solutions simple, reflection unnecessary, and the long-term someone else’s problem. It’s just a matter of perspective.

BIG LAW INCIVILITY

Posted on April 14, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

Attorney incivility is nothing new. Noting that the problem dated to the nineteenth century, Chief Justice Warren Burger addressed it in 1971 remarks to the American Law Institute. He criticized the lawyer who equated zealous advocacy with “how loud he can shout or how close he can come to insulting all those he encounters.” (“The Necessity for Civility,” 52 FRD 211, 213 (1971))

Here’s a more recent example from a deposition, cited in Judge Marvin E. Aspen’s oft-quoted 1998 article on the erosion of civility:

Mr. V: Please don’t throw it at me.

Mr. A: Take it.

Mr. V: Don’t throw it at me.

Mr. A: Don’t be a child, [Mr. V]. You look like a slob the way you’re dressed, but you don’t have to act like a slob….

Mr. V: Stop yelling at me. Let’s get on with it.

Mr. A: You deny I have given you a copy of every document?

Mr. V: You just refused to give it to me.

Mr. A: Do you deny it?

Mr. V: Eventually you threw it at me.

Mr. A: Oh, [Mr. V], you’re about as childish as you can get. You look like a slob, you act like a slob.

Mr. V: Keep it up.

Mr. A: Your mind belongs in the gutter.

Evidence of incivility among adversaries is largely anecdotal; the best examples don’t lend themselves to statistical analysis. A recent Above the Law post led me to ponder this question: does the prevailing big law business model contribute to incivility?

Mark Herrmann, a former big law partner, writes “Inside Straight” from his relatively new vantage point as in-house counsel. “How to Be a Crappy Partner” isn’t about civility, but some of his readers’ comments led me to this observation: when lawyers inside a law firm treat each other poorly, no one should expect their behavior to improve for outside opponents.

Unpleasant personalities are everywhere. Big firm lawyers as a group may be no worse than those in other practice settings; jerks exist across the spectrum. Likewise, drawing conclusions from any potpourri of Above the Law comments is dangerous. Even so, the most coherent “Crappy Partner” reactions fall into the following categories, each of which has a counterpart in external incivility:

— Disrespect for People’s Time

“Give me 10 minutes as an associate in a world without Blackberrys–please.” Other examples: delaying assignments until they conflict with an associate’s long-planned (and widely known) vacation; imposing tight deadlines only to let the completed work sit undisturbed on the assigning partner’s desk for two weeks; Friday night forwarding of a client’s earlier request for answers by the following Monday with a message revealing that the partner sat on the client’s request for five days.

Incivility counterpart: Fighting over inconsequential scheduling matters; taking actions, such as so-called emergency motions, solely to disrupt opponents’ personal lives.

— Flagrant Misbehavior

“Believe it or not, I’m on your side.” Examples: partners who yell, scream, and act in ways that most parents wouldn’t tolerate from a two-year-old; verbal abuse; sexist comments; narcissism.

Incivility counterpart: Ad hominem attacks.

— Lack of Candor About the Big Law Model

“I’m smart; that’s why you hired me. I can do the math.” Examples: pretending that associates don’t notice as fewer than ten percent of earlier new hires advance to equity partner after years of 2,000+ billables; bragging about the firm’s tenth year of increasing partner profits while laying off associates and staff; giving lip-service to mentoring and professional development when short-term profits drive decisions based on metrics that exclude such considerations.

Incivility counterpart: Lawyers believing their own press releases–and acting the role.

Send the purveyors (and victims) of such hubris into the world and what do you expect? More than most occupations, lawyers learn from role models and mentors. The culture that undermines morale at many large firms isn’t self-limiting. The prevailing business model often rewards “crappy partner” behavior and rarely penalizes it. External incivility is one byproduct of that internal ethos.

Large firms aren’t solely to blame for incivility; far from it. But for good and ill, they exert vastly disproportionate influence over the profession. Among other failings, the prevailing big law business model isn’t helping the cause of civility. Tellingly, here’s one commenter’s sad advice on how to avoid becoming a crappy partner:

“Please say please and thank you.”

I wonder what their mothers would say.

A NEW METRIC: THE MISERY INDEX

Posted on April 6, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

Let’s call it what it is.

Large law firms and their management consultants have redefined a word — productivity — to contradict its true meaning. Recent reports from Hildebrandt and Citi measure it as everyone does: average billable hours per attorney.

No one questions this perversion because the prevailing business model’s primary goal is maximizing partner profits. Billables times hourly rates produce gross revenues. More is better and the misnomer — productivity — persists.

The Business Dictionary defines productivity as the “relative measure of the efficiency of a person [or] system…in converting inputs into useful outputs.” But the relevant output for an attorney shouldn’t be total hours spent on tasks; it’s useful work product that meets client needs. Total elapsed time without regard to the quality of the result reveals nothing about a worker’s value. More hours often mean the opposite of true productivity.

Common sense says that effort on the fourteenth hour of a day can’t be as valuable as that exerted during hour six. Fatigue compromises effectiveness. That’s why the Department of Transportation imposes rest periods after interstate truckers’ prolonged stints behind the wheel. Logically, absurdly high billables should result in compensation penalties, but prevailing big law economics dictate otherwise.

Here’s a partial cure. Rather than mislabel attorney billables as measures of productivity, an index should permit excessive hours to convey their true meaning: attorney misery. The Misery Index would be a natural corollary to NALP’s survey of minimum billable hour requirements. Attorneys now accept as given the 2,000 hour threshold that most firms maintain, even though current big law leaders faced no mandatory minimum levels when they were associates. As Yale Law School describes in a useful memo, 2,000 is a lot. But even if the 2,000-hour bell can’t be unrung, the Misery Index could reveal a firm’s culture.

To construct this metric for a given firm, start with attorneys billing fewer than 2,000 hours annually (including pro bono and genuine firm-related activities such as recruiting, training, mentoring, client development, and management); those lawyers wouldn’t count toward their firm’s Misery Index. However, at each 100-hour increment above 2,000, the percentage of attorneys reaching each higher numerical category would be added. To reflect the increasing lifestyle costs of marginal billables, attorneys with the most hours would count at every 100-hour interval preceding their own. Separate indices should exist for associates (AMI) and partners (PMI).

The Misery Index would reveal distinctions that firmwide averages blur. For example, Firm A has an Associate Misery Index of 125, calculated as follows:

50% of associates bill fewer than 2,000 hours = 0 AMI points

50% > 2,000 = 50 AMI points

40% > 2,100 = 40

25% > 2,200 = 25

10% > 2,300 = 10

None > 2,400

AMI: 125

Firm B’s AMI of 315 describes a much different place:

10% of associates bill fewer than 2,000 hours = 0 AMI points

90% > 2,000 = 90 points

75% > 2,100 = 75

60% > 2,200 = 60

45% > 2,300 = 45

30% > 2,400 = 30

15% > 2,500 = 15

None > 2,600

AMI: 315

A Misery Index would aid decision-making, especially for new graduates. Some would prefer firms with a high one; most wouldn’t. A Misery Index above 300 might prompt questions about the physical health of a firm’s attorneys; a Misery Index of zero — no one working more than 2,000 hours — might prompt questions about the health of the firm itself. Big disparities between partners (PMI) and associates (AMI) would be revealing, too.

Data collection is problematic. NALP won’t ask for the information and most firms won’t supply it — unless clients demand it. (In an earlier article, I explained why they should.) Alternatively, individual attorneys could provide the information anonymously, similar to The American Lawyer’s annual mid-level associate surveys.

Complementing the Misery Index would be firm-specific Attrition Rates by class year from starting associate to first year equity partner. NALP’s last report — before the 2008 financial crisis — showed big law’s five-year associate attrition rates skyrocketing to more than eighty percent, but significant differences existed among firms.

The Misery Index and Attrition Rates would be interesting additions to Am Law‘s “A-List” criteria that many big firms heed. Imagine an equity partner meeting that included this agenda item: “Reducing Our Misery Index and Attrition Rates.” It would certainly be a departure from scenes and themes in my best-selling legal thriller, The Partnership.

Big law is filled with free market disciples who urge better information as a panacea, as well as metrics to communicate it. Here’s their chance.

THE GOLDMAN MODEL FOR BIG LAW?

Posted on March 31, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

Goldman Sachs has been in the news a lot lately. Taken together, several articles suggest parallels to big law. Anyone wondering where many large law firm leaders want to take their institutions — and how they might get there — should look closely at Goldman. As law firms have embraced metrics that maximize short-term partner profits, they’ve moved steadily in Goldman’s direction. If America follows Australia and the UK in permitting non-attorneys to invest in law firms, a tipping point could arrive.

Others ponder this possibility. Professor Mitt Regan, Co-Director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, has been thinking, writing, and speaking thoughtfully about non-lawyer investment in law firms for a long time. Understandably, most academic observers focus on the outside — how smaller firms’ access to capital could affect competition, the interaction with attorneys’ ethical obligations, and the like.

Those are important issues, but I’m more interested on the inside. Presumably, the process would involve current equity partners selling ownership interests to investors. Many of those in big law who already take a short-term economic view of their institutions would leap at the opportunity for a one-time payday that discounted future cash flows to today’s dollar. In fact, a big lump sum will tempt every equity partner who worries about next year’s annual review.

Then what? Perhaps Goldman has devised an adaptable mechanism. When it went public in 1999, Goldman Sachs retained a partnership system within a larger corporate structure. As the Times notes, “Goldman’s partners are its highest paid executives and it biggest stars….”

Consider the similarities to big law:

— Management

Traders displaced traditional investment bankers and chairman Lloyd Blankfein surrounded himself with “like-minded executives — ‘Lloyd loyalists,'” according to the Times. Transactional attorneys have similarly risen to lead many big law firms; dissent is not always a cherished value.

— Resulting culture changes

Seeking to represent all sides of a deal, Goldman became adept at managing conflicts rather than avoiding them, a former insider told the Times. Large law firms have developed standard retention letters that maximize their representational flexibility to take on more lucrative matters that might arise.

— Metrics

Goldman’s leverage ratio is stunning: 475 partners out of more than 35,000 employees. As a group, large firms have pulled up ladders, widened the top-to-bottom range within equity partnerships, and doubled attorney-to-equity partner leverage ratios between 1985 and 2010.

— Partner Wealth

Goldman’s partners are famously rich. Many big firm equity partners now enjoy seven-figure incomes previously reserved for media celebrities, professional athletes, and investment bankers.

All of this raises an important question: How well is the model working — and for whom? Maintaining the stability of such a regime presents challenges. Goldman partners maximize their continuing influence as minority shareholders by acting in unison on shareholder votes. But the cast of characters constantly changes. According to the Times, “Every two years, roughly 70 executives leave the club, by choice or because they are no longer pulling their weight. The average tenure is about seven years…Within five years of the IPO, almost 60 percent of the original partners were gone…”

In the end, the environment is problematic for many, as one former Goldman partner told the Times:

“It’s a very Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest firm.”

It could also be big law’s future. Then again, some firms may already be there.

Here’s a concluding thought: perhaps Goldman Sachs will become a big law outside investor that buys its way into the legal profession. That shouldn’t bother anyone. After all, Lloyd Blankfein graduated from Harvard Law School.

HOWREY’S LESSONS: A NATIONAL CONVERSATION

Posted on March 21, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

My latest “Commendable Comments” award goes to a non-lawyer, the Washington Post’s Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Steven Pearlstein.

Since I started my blog a year ago, two of my most popular articles have been “Howrey’s Lessons” and “Howrey’s Lessons — Part II.” Versions recently ran on Am Law Daily, where they also attracted widespread attention.

I don’t know if Pearlstein was among the thousands who saw my analysis of Howrey’s end and its relationship to ubiquitous big law trends, but his March 20 column reinforces my themes. If I hadn’t been attending the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville to discuss The Partnership, I might have missed it. I’m glad I didn’t.

Both of my Howrey articles focused on a central point: What matters most are not the things that make the once venerable institution different from other large firms. Rather, the true significance of its death lies in what makes the firm similar to many, many others. Intelligent lawyers who specialize in distinguishing adverse precedent prefer to think otherwise; they do so at their peril.

Noting as I had that, as recently as 2008, the DC-oriented Legal Times hailed Howrey’s final chairman, Robert Ruyak, as one of 30 “visionaries,” Pearlstein describes how quickly the world turned. In the end, I found Ruyak’s litany of claimed contributors to the firm’s demise — clients demanding contingency fee arrangements; conflict problems that made European growth problematic; and the rise of competitive electronic discovery vendors — unpersuasive; I explained why in “Howrey’s Lessons — Part II.” Pearlstein is more charitable in accepting such excuses at face value. That’s understandable because he’s never worked in a large firm.

But on the big picture, his assessment echoes my earlier observations:

1. Howrey’s global expansion through lateral hiring created a firm of free agents who lacked the deep loyalties that once characterized the firm. That phenomenon wasn’t unique to Howrey.

2. Pearlstein notes that profits per partner has become “not only the key determinant of how much partners take home, but it is the metric by which the very competitive and ambitious people in the legal business keep score.” My regular readers know that the business school mentality of misguided metrics — billings, billable hours, and leverage ratios aimed at increasing partners’ short-term profits — has transformed a once noble profession in unfortunate ways.

3. Pearlstein observes that when Howrey’s average partner profits took a downward turn, the partnership — which wasn’t really a partnership in the way most people understand that concept — found that its “bonds of loyalty [were] not strong enough to hold Howrey together.” In “Howrey’s Lessons,” I put it this way: “[W]hen cash becomes king, partnership bonds remain only as tight as the glue that next year’s predicted equity partner profits provide….”

Likewise, Pearlstein’s overall conclusion is identical to mine: The most troubling aspect of Howrey’s death is that “the industry seems to have learned nothing from such episodes.” He closes with an acknowledgement of the widespread problem of partner and associate dissatisfaction that the prevailing big law culture has exacerbated.

On only one point would I offer this limited qualification to Pearlstein’s survey of the legal blogosphere concerning Howrey. He suggests that the media (press and blogs) offer “the same uncritical acceptance of…a world in which firms are held together by nothing more than a collective determination to increase profit per partner.” Respectfully, I offer my ongoing commentary over the past year as a consistent voice in challenging the prevailing big law model.

When an intelligent, sophisticated observer such as Steven Pearlstein takes a seemingly isolated issue involving lawyers — that is, Howrey’s disintegration — and uses his national platform to shine a welcome light on a deeper professional problem, it becomes that much more difficult for big law leaders to ignore. They’ll continue to turn a blind eye to the incubating crisis, but perhaps they’ll rest just a little bit less easily in doing so.

Pearlstein’s prize is a copy of The Partnership, which I will send him this week. I’m confident that, as an interested outsider, he’ll find it fascinating.

HOWREY’S LESSONS — PART II

Posted on March 13, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

I wasn’t going to write another article about Howrey. But then I read chairman Robert Ruyak’s explanations for his firm’s collapse, together with columnist Peggy Noonan’s review of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s new book. The two men have more in common than the first two letters of their last names. Both are at the center of dramatically unfortunate episodes that occurred on their respective watches. Both look for villains and miss the bigger picture.

Former Reagan speechwriter and conservative columnist Noonan opens her review with this: “I found myself flinging his book against the wall in hopes I would break its stupid little spine…You’d expect [Rumsfeld] to be reflective, to be self-questioning, and questioning of others, and to grapple with the ruin…He heard all the conversations. He was in on the decisions. You’d expect him to explain the overall, overarching strategic thinking that guided them. Since those decisions are in the process of turning out badly,…you’d expect him to critique and correct certain mindsets so that [others] will learn.” He doesn’t.

Those words also describe Ruyak’s unsatisfying explanations for Howrey’s failure:

1. European offices:

“The real problem we ran into in Europe was conflicts of interest…It’s a different analysis in Europe. But we had to apply the U.S. standards across Europe. That made it difficult to grow because we had to forgo a lot of cases…”

Analysis of potential conflicts issues should have anchored any business plan that began with London (2001) and continued with high-powered lateral acquisitions in Brussels (2002), Amsterdam (2003), Paris (2005), Munich (2007), and Madrid (2008). By July 2008, Howrey was Managing Intellectual Property‘s “Top U.S. Firm in Europe” with more than 100 lawyers there and plans for more.

More importantly, firms survive conflicts-related departures. But here, 26 European lawyers (12 partners, 14 associates) in October 2010 supposedly set off a chain reaction that crushed an otherwise healthy, 550-attorney firm that, only a decade earlier, had no European presence.

2. Document discovery vendors.

“We created a whole portion of the firm to handle [document discovery] efficiently – using staff attorneys and sometimes temporary people, computer systems and facilities.” Along came some companies that were “offering to do this work less expensively at a lower price.”

But in May 2009, Ruyak had attributed part of Howrey’s Am Law 100-leading revenue surge to avoiding “areas that suffered significant downturns,” singling out for praise the firm’s five-year-old document review and electronic discovery center that added $47 million to the top line. So successful was the Falls Church operation that he was considering a second one on the West Coast. (The American Lawyer, May 2009, p.118)

Yet somehow, 75 staff attorneys and 100 temps accounting for 8% of Howrey’s $570 million gross in 2008 became a key contributor to the firm’s demise two years later.

3. Contingent and alternative fees

“Unlike corporations that operate on an accrual basis, it’s hard to adjust from a cash base on your business to an accrual base where you are deferring significant amounts of revenue into future time periods. Once you make that adjustment, I think it works. But the adjustment period is difficult.”

In other words, partners couldn’t tolerate the deferred gratification associated with contingency fee matters. But they loved the upside. In 2008, Howrey’s average partner profits jumped almost 30% — to $1.3 million. When PPP dropped to $850,000 in 2009, Ruyak said 2008 had been an aberration resulting from $35 million in contingency receipts. (The American Lawyer, May 2010, p. 101)

Perhaps inadvertently, he revealed the real culprit: a revolution of rising expectations among the already rich. Ruyak put it this way: “Partners at major law firms have very little tolerance for change.”

If he’s referring to firms that have lost cohesion and a shared purpose beyond a myopic focus on current profits exceeding the last year’s, he’s right. But that culture exists for a reason. Aggressive lateral growth produces partners who don’t know each other. Firm allegiances become tenuous; the institutions themselves become fragile.

Ruyak’s self-serving explanations avoid accepting personal responsibility, but that’s not their greatest fault. The bigger problem is that other law firm leaders will find false comfort in his litany; it encourages the view that Howrey’s challenges were unique. As I said before, they weren’t.

HOWREY’S LESSONS

Posted on February 18, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

If Howrey LLP disappears, most big law leaders will make distinctions; they’ll focus on how their organizations are different from Howrey’s. More interesting are the similarities, especially the universal forces that might render others vulnerable to the highly respected firm’s current plight.

First is the speed with events can overtake seemingly secure institutions — and I’m not referring to the fall of Mubarak in Egypt. On May 19, 2008, the Legal Times hailed Howrey LLP’s chairman Robert Ruyak as one of the profession’s “Visionaries.” He deserved it. During the prior 30 years, his distinguished career enhanced Howrey’s reputation and the business of law in DC. But on February 1, 2011, he and Winston & Strawn’s managing partner Thomas Fitzgerald together urged Howrey partners to act quickly on Winston’s offers to hire about three-quarters of them. The big law world can rapidly take a dramatic and unexpected turn.

Second is the way unprecedented demand for big law services combined with the prevailing business model to create enormous financial paydays that became even larger as firms grew. When Ruyak became chairman in January 2000, Howrey ranked near the middle of the Am Law 100 in average profits per equity partner (PEP — $575,000). It had 325 attorneys (89 equity partners).

Ruyak’s strategy targeted growth in three core practice areas: antitrust, IP, and litigation. As the Legal Times observed, “To achieve that vision, Ruyak knew that the firm had to be bigger, so Howrey went on a merger spree.” It added Houston-based patent firm Arnold, White & Durkee, acquired the antitrust practice of Collier, Shannon, Rill & Scott, and established European offices in London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Munich, and Madrid.

By 2006, Howrey had 555 attorneys; its 127 equity partners averaged $1.2 million each. After profits dropped in 2007, they soared by almost 30% in 2008 — the biggest percentage revenue-per-lawyer gain in the Am Law 100. Howrey’s 2008 profits were $1.3 million per equity partner — an all-time high.

Third is the fragility that such financial prosperity created for the fabric of many law firm partnerships. When profits plunged 35% in 2009, Ruyak’s partial explanation was that 2008 had been aberrational. Large contingency receipts accounted for much of that year’s non-recurring spike. The firm was still “figuring out how to do [alternative fee arrangements] well.” (The American Lawyer, May 2010, p. 101)

Unfortunately, the revolution of rising expectations was underway; the short-term bottom-line mentality is an impatient and unforgiving two-edged sword. In 2000, Howrey had a clear identity and average equity partner profits of almost $600,000 — seemingly sufficient to keep partners satisfied and any firm stable. Certainly, that amount far exceeded any current big law equity partner’s wildest financial dreams when entering the profession. A decade later, disappointing projections that the firm might reach only 80-90% of its $940,000 PEP target (or $750,000 to $850,000) fed rumors and a perilous media downdraft.

Heller Ehrman proved that lateral hiring and law firm mergers risk sacrificing firm culture in ways that inflict unexpected damage. I don’t know if that has happened at Howrey, but when cash becomes king, partnership bonds remain only as tight as the glue that next year’s predicted equity partner profits provide, assuming those predictions are believed.

That leads to a final lesson: leadership requires credibility. Only two weeks before the remarkable joint message from Ruyak and Fitzgerald, Howrey spokespersons insisted that all was well: “The amount of costs taken out of the firm at all levels — which includes leases, partners, associates, and the like leaving the firm — have made the firm much more efficient,” vice-chairman Sean Boland said. “It’s done wonders for our cost structure, such that we’re going to see some major advantages in 2011. We’re very encouraged by the cost cutting that we’ve done.”

Likewise, one of its outside consultants said that the firm was “getting back to its strengths… What’s happening at Howrey is largely by design.” Maybe so. But from this distance, the parade of top partner departures and Ruyak’s involvement in Winston’s outstanding offers make the design appear curious, indeed.

In May 2008, the Legal Times, concluded with a senior partner’s observation that Howrey had become “a very exciting place to work.” I suspect that’s still true. As with most things legal, the definition is everything.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION?

Posted on February 14, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

In “Greed Atop the Pyramids,” I observed that the internal spread between the top and the bottom within large firm equity partnerships has grown dramatically in recent years. No one feels sorry for those at the low end, but the compensation for many top partners has reached staggering heights. My title suggested an explanation.

K&L Gates Chairman Peter Kalis — whom I’ve never met — has offered another reason: It’s not greed; it’s geography. His photograph appeared with The Wall Street Journal article on Jamie Wareham, “The $5 Million Dollar Man.” According to the Journal, at K&L Gates “top partners earn up to nine times as much as other partners. Pay spreads widen as firms become more geographically diverse, operating in cities with varying costs of living, said Peter Kalis, chairman of K&L Gates. The firm’s pay spread rose from about 5-to-1 to as much as 9-to-1 in the past decade as it expanded. ‘Houses cost less in Pittsburgh than they do in London,’ Mr. Kalis said.”

Let’s consider that proposition. It’s certainly true that London is more expensive than New York, and New York is more expensive than Pittsburgh. It’s also true that some firms consider cost-of-living differences when setting compensation; some apply formulaic across-the-board geographical adjustments. But the issue involves the top of a widening range, not the relative cost of comparable talent across offices.

Here’s how to test the hypothesis that geography accounts for this relatively new phenomenon: Are all of a firm’s top equity partners located in the city of the firm’s most expensive office? I doubt it. Or try it from the other side: Are any of the biggest paydays going to partners working in less expensive cities? Almost certainly.

I don’t know how much Kalis makes, but he might even be a useful example. His K&L Gates website biography page shows a commendable involvement in a number of Pittsburgh-area civic organizations. In addition to his Pittsburgh office, the page also lists a New York phone number, but his only bar admission is Pennsylvania. He’s certainly not headquartered in the most expensive cities where K&L Gates has offices — Tokyo, Moscow, Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, London, or Paris. My hunch is that, as Chairman and Global Managing Partner, he’s not at the low end of his firm’s equity partner compensation range, either. So why the superficially appealing but ultimately unpersuasive “houses are cheaper in Pittsburgh” line to explain away a pervasive big law trend?

Perhaps it’s because reality is sometimes harsh and unflattering. Citing a former pay consultant for law firms, the Journal article noted, “A majority of big law firms have begun reducing the compensation level of 10% to 30% of their partners each year, partly to free up more money to award top producers.”

I don’t know if that has happened at K&L Gates, but other law firm management consultants have suggested that the need to attract and retain rainmakers in a volatile market has widened the top-to-bottom equity partner range in many firms:

“Before the recession, [the top-to-bottom equity partner compensation ratio] was typically five-to-one in many firms. Very often today, we’re seeing that spread at 10-to-1, even 12-to-1.”

Finally, the Journal article itself provides additional evidence that something other than geography is at work: “A small number of elite firms, such as Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP and Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, still hew to narrower compensation bands, ranging from 3-to-1 to 4-to-1, typically paying the most to those with the longest service….”

Cravath has a London office. Simpson Thacher has offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Palo Alto, Sao Paolo, Tokyo, and Washington, DC. Yet they have avoided the surging top-to-bottom equity partnership pay gaps that Kalis attributes to geography.

To understand what has really happened recently inside big firms — and why — read The Partnership.

There is, indeed, greed atop the pyramids — even in Pittsburgh.

Are You Worth $5 Million?

Posted on February 10, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

The Wall Street Journal’s front page reported that litigator Jamie Wareham “will make about $5 million a year, a significant raise from his pay at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP, where he has been one of the highest paid partners.”

This phenomenon – superstar lateral hiring – is nothing new, but in recent years it has become more common. For those who remember the 1980s, it’s vaguely reminiscent of the period when ill-fated Finley Kumble turned that strategy into a losing business model.

Of course, Finley failed for many reasons that may distinguish it from current trends. Still, those running that firm into extinction as they signed up marquee players who couldn’t carry their own economic weight probably wished they’d asked this question:

How can you determine whether a lawyer is worth $5 million?

Reserved for another day are the broader implications, including the challenges that significant lateral desertions and insertions at the top present to the very concept of firm partnership. This article focuses solely on underlying financial considerations associated with the superstar lateral hire.

Presumably, bringing in a big-name player makes economic sense for a firm operating under the prevailing business model, which means that at least one of the following conditions are met:

First, the proposed lateral has an independent book of business suitable for delivery to the new firm. That would be simple, but for the clients themselves. Even if they hired and regularly use a particular partner, they probably also like his or her package of assembled talent. Consequently, the lateral must bring along a team of capable junior lawyers. Alternatively, the new firm may have excess attorney inventory that it can deploy, but that requires the lateral to persuade clients to use new lawyers who can quickly and efficiently climb their learning curves.

Second, even absent a short-term economic justification, a firm could rationally conclude that anticipated events make the talent investment worthwhile for its future strategic positioning. Recent examples include firms that loaded up on bankruptcy attorneys when the economy was still strong. The crash of 2008 made them look like geniuses. More speculative are the “if you hire them, clients will come” bets that managers sometimes make. Former government employees, along with high-profile attorneys who lack a portable client following but are on everyone’s short-list of best lawyers, fall into this category.

For the first category, short-term value is simple arithmetic. According to the latest Am Law 100 report, Wareham’s old firm, Paul Hastings, had a 41% profit margin in 2009. If the “substantially less” than $5 million he’ll make at DLA Piper was — say, $4 million – he would have needed revenues of $10 million to earn his keep there, assuming no other equity partners claimed any part of that gross. At a total blended attorney rate for all attorneys on his client matters of $500/hour, that translates into 20,000 billable hours.

But at DLA Piper and its reportedly lower profit margin (26%), Wareham will have to produce almost $20 million to support a $5 million share of firm profits. At a blended hourly rate of $500, that means more than 40,000 hours. (If he is selling clients on a move with him on the promise of lower hourly rates, the billables requirement at DLA Piper would become even higher.)

If one of the 20 or so attorneys on Wareham’s team is another equity partner earning, say, $1 million, then the minimum break-even billables bogey moves proportionately higher. (Assuming a 26% profit ratio, it takes about $4 million gross — 8,000 hours at a blended rate of $500/hour — to net $1 million.)

Insofar as the lateral acquisition’s value relates to the second category – future payoff — big name players get a grace period. But at some point, the economic imperatives of the first category will surface. When that happens, they’ll feel the revenue and related billable hours heat even more than everyone else — except, of course, the attorneys working for them.

Such is the economically successful lateral hire outcome. Failure on a sufficiently large scale produces Finley Kumble.

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The Belly of the Beast

Steven J. Harper, Esq.

Tag Archives: equity partner profits

BAD NUMBERS REVEALING WORSE TRENDS

IS IT REALLY MORE COMPLEX THAN GREED?

DEWEY’S L. CHARLES LANDGRAF: THE PLIGHT OF THE LOYAL COMPANY MAN

DEWEY’S RICHARD SHUTRAN — RUNNING THE NUMBERS

DEWEY’S JEFFREY KESSLER: STARS IN THEIR EYES

SPINNING DEWEY’S HEROES

THE GOLDMAN CULTURE

DEWEY’S DILEMMA

THE BIG LAW PARTNER LOTTERY

THE LATERAL BUBBLE

THE ULTIMATE LATERAL HIRE

FED TO DEATH

OCCUPY BIG LAW

BONUS TIME — AND ANOTHER UNFORTUNATE COMMENT AWARD

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER LAW FIRM MERGER

THE COST OF DISSATISFACTION

COMMENDABLE COMMENT AWARD

INFLATED PPP?

IT’S THE MODEL

AGING GRACEFULLY — OR NOT

A NEW LAW SCHOOL MISSION

IMPROVING PROSPECTS — BUT FOR WHOM?

BIG LAW INCIVILITY

A NEW METRIC: THE MISERY INDEX

THE GOLDMAN MODEL FOR BIG LAW?

HOWREY’S LESSONS: A NATIONAL CONVERSATION

HOWREY’S LESSONS — PART II

HOWREY’S LESSONS

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION?

Are You Worth $5 Million?

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