Tag Archives: lateral hiring in big law

THE REAL STORY OF THE NEW YORK PRIMARY

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It was a “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment.

Shortly after the polls closed on primary election night in New York, CNN made a bold prediction. Its exit polling showed Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders locked in a tight Democratic primary race. Clinton’s win would be close, Wolf Blitzer said: 52 percent to 48 percent.

Less than an hour later, that prediction was as laughable as the famous November 3, 1948 Chicago Tribune headline announcing that voters had elected Thomas E. Dewey President of the United States.

Statistically, the CNN call was far worse. In the end, Truman beat Dewey 49 to 45 percent. Clinton won New York — 58 to 42 percent.

When the News is News

One interesting aspect of the CNN mistake is how quickly it disappeared from public sight. That’s because all major media outlets use exit polling to predict results as soon as they can. First-predictors are the first to attract viewers. There’s no incentive for any of them to throw mud on a process that they all use as a marketing gimmick.

Another aspect is the paucity of discussion over what went wrong at CNN. I don’t know the answer, but this article isn’t about that. It’s about the real lesson of the episode: The use of statistics can be a perilous exercise.

Law Schools

Data are important. It’s certainly wise to look at past results in weighing future decisions. But it’s also important to cut through the noise — and separate valid data from hype.

For example, if less than one-third of a particular law school’s recent graduates are finding full-time long-term jobs requiring a JD, prospective students are wise to consider carefully whether to attend that school. But it becomes more difficult when some law professor argues that the average value of a legal degree over the lifetime of all graduates is, say, a million dollars.

It’s even more challenging when law deans and professors repeat the trope as if it were sacrosanct with a universal application every new JD degree-holder from every school. And it sure doesn’t help when schools with dismal full-time long-term JD employment outcomes tout, “Now is the Time to Fulfill Your Dream of Becoming a Lawyer.”

Law Firms

Likewise, based on their unaudited assessments, leaders of big law firms confess that only about half of their lateral hires over the past five years have been breakeven at best. And that not-so-successful rate has been declining.

Law firms are prudent to consider carefully that data before pursuing aggressive lateral hiring as a growth strategy. But it becomes more difficult when managing partners seek to preside over expanding empires. And it doesn’t help when law firm management consultants keep overselling the strategy as the only means of survival.

Data should drive decisions. But the CNN misfire is a cautionary tale about the limits of statistical analysis. Sometimes numbers don’t tell the whole story. Sometimes they point people in the wrong direction. And sometimes they’re just plain wrong.

THE LATEST BIG LAW FIRM STRATEGY: PERFECTING ERROR

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NOTE: Amazon is running a promotion. The KINDLE version of my novel, The Partnership, is available as a free download from March 30 through April 3, 2016.

Two months ago in “Big Law Leaders Perpetuating Mistakes,” I outlined evidence of failure that most big law firm leaders ignore. Back in December 2011, I’d covered the topic in “Fed to Death” The recently released trade paperback version of my latest book, The Lawyer Bubble – A Profession in Crisis, includes an extensive new afterword that begins, “The more things change…”

The failure is a ubiquitous strategy: aggressive inorganic growth. In response to facts and data, big law firm leaders aren’t stepping back to take a long, hard look at the wisdom of the approach. Instead, they’re tinkering at the margins in the desperate attempt to turn a loser into a winner. To help them, outside consultants — perennial enablers of big law firms’ worst impulses — have developed reassuring and superficially appealing metrics. For anyone who forgot, numbers are the answer to everything.

Broken Promises

One measure of failure is empirical. Financially, many lateral partners aren’t delivering on their promises to bring big client billings with them. Even self-reporting managing partners admit that only about half of their lateral hires are above breakeven (however they measure it), and the percentage has been dropping steadily. In “How to Hire a Home-Run Lateral? Look at Their Stats,” MP McQueen of The American Lawyer writes that the “fix” is underway: more than 20 percent of Am Law 200 firms are now using techniques made famous by the book and movie “Moneyball.”

“Using performance-oriented data, firms try to create profiles of the types of lawyers they need to hire to help boost profits, then search for candidates who fit the profile,” McQueen reports. “They may also use the tools to estimate whether a certain candidate would help the firm’s bottom line.”

There’s an old computer programmer’s maxim: “Garbage in, garbage out.”

Useless Data

Unlike baseball’s immutable data about hits, runs, strikeouts, walks, and errors, assessing attorney talent is far more complicated and far less objective. Ask a prospective lateral partner about his or her billings. Those expecting an honest answer deserve what they get. Ask the partner whether billings actually reflect clients and work that will make the move to a new firm. Even the partner doesn’t know the answer to that one.

Group Dewey Consulting’s Eric Dewey, who is appropriately skeptical about using prescriptive analytics in this process, notes, “An attorney needs to bring roughly 70 percent of their book of business with them within 12 months just to break even.” He also observes that more than one-third bring with them less than 50 percent.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with assessing the likely value that a strategically targeted lateral hire might bring to the firm. And there’s nothing wrong with using data to inform decisions. But that’s different from using flawed numerical results to justify growth for the sake of growth.

Becoming What You Eat

Beyond the numbers is an even more important reality. Partners who might contribute to a firm’s short-term bottom line may have a more important long-term cultural impact. It might even be devastating.

Dewey & LeBoeuf — no relation to Group Dewey Consulting — learned that lesson the hard way. During the years prior to its collapse, the firm hired dozens of lateral rainmakers. But as the firm was coming apart in early 2012, chairman Steven H. Davis was wasting his breath when he told fellow partners there wasn’t enough cash to pay all of them everything they thought they deserved: “I have the sense that we have lost our focus on our culture and what it means to be a Dewey & LeBoeuf partner.”

Half of the partners he was addressing had been lateral hires over the previous five years. Most of them had joined the firm because it promised them more money. They hadn’t lost their focus on culture. They had redefined it.

BIG LAW LEADERS PERPETUATING MISTAKES

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In January 2014, the annual Georgetown/Peer Monitor “Report on the State of the Legal Market” urged law firm leaders to shun a “growth for growth’s sake” strategy. The year 2013 had been a record-setter in law firm mergers; lateral partner acquisitions were the centerpiece of what many big law firm leaders passed off as a “strategic plan.”

The Report offered this damning observation:

“In our view, much of the growth that has characterized the legal market in recent years… masks a bigger problem — the continuing failure of most firms to focus on strategic issues that are more important for their long-term success than the number of lawyers or offices they may have.”

Since then, the situation has deteriorated.

The Destabilizing Lateral Hiring Frenzy Continues

In 2015, there were more lateral moves in big law firms than at any time since 2009. Morgan, Lewis & Bockius’s mass hiring of 300 former Bingham Mccutcheon partners contributed significantly to the total, but the continuing lateral frenzy is evident. Was the 2014 Georgetown/Peer Monitor wrong? Has aggressive inorganic growth become a winning strategy?

The answers are No and No.

Those answers are not news, but a recent ALM Legal Intelligence analysis suggests that they still are correct. As MP McQueen reports in the February issue of The American Lawyer, “[The] study of 50 National Law Journal 350 firms conducted with Group Dewey Consulting of Davis, California, and released in November found that 30 percent of lateral partner hires delivered less than half their promised book of business after a complete year.”

The co-author of the report notes that lateral hiring is “the top growth strategy for many firms today but there is an incredible lack of empirical evidence as to whether laterals are achieving their promise.”

It’s actually worse than that. The evidence suggests that most lateral hires are disappointments to the firms that acquire them.

Cognitive Dissonance

The survey reported that 96 percent of respondents said that “hiring lateral lawyers with a client following” was “very important” or “moderately important” to their revenue growth strategy. In other words, virtually all firms continue to defy the Georgetown/Peer Monitor Report’s 2014 admonition.

But the survey respondents also said that only 49 percent of lateral hires delivered at least 75 percent of expected client billings. The other 50 percent did worse. Almost one-third of laterals delivered less than half of what they’d promised. And remember, those are anonymous, unaudited responses from the leaders who brought those laterals into the firm. The reality is far worse than they admit.

Likewise, as I’ve written previously, managing partners responding to the Hildebrandt/Citi 2015 Client Advisory’s confidential survey admitted that only about half of their lateral partners were break-even at best. As the Client Advisory reported:

“For all the popularity of growth through laterals, the success rate of a firm’s lateral strategy can be quite low. For the past few years, we have asked leaders of large firms to quantify the rate of success of the laterals they hired over the past five years. Each year, the proportion of laterals who they would describe as being above ‘break even’, by their own definition, has fallen. In 2014, the number was just 54 percent of laterals who had joined their firms during 2009-2013.” (Emphasis supplied)

That’s down from two years ago when managing partners self-reported to Citi/Hildebrandt a self-defined break-even or better rate of 60 percent.  At alarming speed, most big law leaders are running their firms backwards.

Costly Mistakes

The cultural impact of aggressive inorganic growth is not susceptible to measurement, so it gets ignored in the prevailing law-firm-as-a-business model. But there are plenty of recent examples of the potentially catastrophic costs. Just look at Howrey, Dewey, and Bingham McCutchen — three recent collapses on the heels of stunning lateral growth spurts.

“Nonsense,” big law leaders are telling themselves. “We’re not like those failed firms. They had unique problems. We’re special.” Sure you are. Things look great until it becomes apparent only too late that current partner profits are the only glue holding partners together. If money lured laterals into your firm, someone else’s more reliable money can lure them away.

But even in the not-so-long run, top-line growth through misguided lateral hiring produces bottom-line shrinkage. Laterals are expensive on the front end. On the back end, it can take years for the failure of financial expectations to become apparent. The ALI study estimates that lateral hiring misfires can reduce law firm profit margins by as much as 3 percent and profits per equity partner by 6 percent.

Why?

If lateral hiring is bad, why are so many firms committed to it as a growth strategy. One answer is that it’s not always bad. Some of my best friends are laterals. Their moves benefitted them and their new firms. In every one of those cases, culture was at least as important as money to the partners’ decisions to relocate and their new firms’ desire to recruit them.

But that doesn’t account for firms that continue to pursue aggressive inorganic growth as an unrestrained strategic policy. When the odds of success are no greater than the flip of a coin, confirmation bias displaces judgment that should be a key attribute of true leadership.

That leads to another explanation for the continuing lateral hiring frenzy: The opposite of leadership. Most managing partners relish the creation of ever-expanding empires over which they can preside. Having made more than enough money to feed their families for generations, now they’re feeding their egos.

Unfortunately, those appetites can be insatiable.

ANOTHER COLOSSAL LATERAL MISTAKE

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Lateral hires are risky. Even managing partners responding to the Hildebrandt/Citi 2015 Client Advisory’s confidential survey admitted that only about half of their lateral partners are break-even at best — and the respondents had unrestrained discretion to decide what qualified as “break-even.” As Ed Newberry, co-global managing partner of Squire Patton Boggs told Forbes, “[L]ateral acquisitions, which many firms are aggressively pursuing now … is a very dangerous strategy because laterals are extremely expensive and have a very low success rate….”

Beyond the financial perils, wise firm leaders understand that some lateral partners can have an even greater destructive impact on a firm’s culture. In late 2014, former American Lawyer editor-in-chief Aric Press interviewed Latham’s outgoing chairman Bob Dell, who was retiring after a remarkably successful 20-year run at the top of his firm. Dell explained that he walked away from prospective lateral partners who were not a good cultural fit because they stumbled over Latham’s way of doing things.

Press wrote: “Culture, in Dell’s view, is not a code word for soft or emotional skills. ‘We think we have a high-performance culture,’ he says. ‘We work at that. That’s not soft.'”

Under the Radar and Under the Rug

Most lateral hiring mistakes attract little public attention. Firm leaders have no reason to highlight their errors in judgment. Fellow partners are reluctant to tell their emperors any unpleasant truth. If, as the adage goes, doctors bury their mistakes and lawyers settle theirs, then managing partners pretend that their mistakes never happened and then challenge anyone to prove them wrong. The resulting silence within most partnerships is deafening.

Every once in a while, a lateral hire becomes such a spectacular failure that even the press takes note. When that happens, the leaders of the affected law firm have nowhere to hide. Which takes us to James Woolery, about whom I first wrote five years ago.

Without mentioning Woolery specifically, I discussed a May 28, 2010 Wall Street Journal article naming him was one of several Cravath, Swaine & Moore partners in their late-30s and early-40s taking “a more pro-active approach, building new relationships and handling much of the work that historically would have been taken on by partners in their 50s.”

“We’re more aggressive than we used to be,” 41-year-old Cravath partner James Woolery told the Journal. “This is not your grandfather’s Cravath.”

A Serial Lateral

Six months later, it wasn’t Woolery’s Cravath, either. He’d already left to co-head J.P. Morgan Chase’s North American mergers and acquisitions group.

In 2013, only two years after accepting the Chase job, Woolery moved again. With much fanfare, he negotiated a three-year deal guaranteeing him at least eight million dollars annually to join Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. How was the cultural fit? The firm’s chairman, Chris White, described him as “the epitome of the Cadwalader lawyer” who deserved the lucrative pay package that made him the firm’s highest paid partner. A new title created especially for Woolery — deputy chairman — also made clear that he was White’s heir apparent.

To no one’s surprise, in 2014 Cadwalader announced that Woolery would take over as chairman in early 2015. As he prepared to assume the reins of leadership, the firm took a dramatic slide. The current issue of The American Lawyer reports that Cadwalader posted the worst 2014 financial results of any New York firm. Woolery’s guarantee deal looked pretty good as his firm’s average partner profits dropped by more than 15 percent. The firm’s profit margin — 26 percent — placed it 87th among Am Law 100 firms.

On January 19, 2015, the firm’s managing partner, Patrick Quinn, convened a conference call with all Cadwalader partners to convey a stunning one-two punch: Woolery would not become chairman, and he was leaving the firm to start a hedge fund. Woolery was not on the call to explain himself.

Unpleasant Press

No law firm wants this kind of attention. No client wants its outside firm to project uncertainty and instability at the top. No one inside the firm wants to hear about someone who has now been “thrust into the role of designated chairman of the firm,” as The American Lawyer described Patrick Quinn.

Woolery is gone, and so is Chris White, the former Cadwalader chairman who sold fellow partners on Woolery and his stunning guaranteed compensation package. White, age 63, left the firm in November to become co-CEO of Phoenix House, the nation’s largest non-profit addiction rehabilitation center.

Meanwhile, newly designated Cadwalader chairman Quinn says that the firm has no plans to change its strategy, including its reliance on lateral partner hiring. Maybe Chris White can use his new job to help Quinn and other managing partners shake their addiction to laterals. Apparently, first-hand experience with failure isn’t enough.

UNFORTUNATE (AND IRONIC) COMMENT AWARD

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If Dewey & LeBeouf has so-called friends like its former partner John Altorelli…well, you know the rest.

Altorelli’s recent comments to Am Law Daily include so many candidates for my Unfortunate Comment Award that it’s difficult to choose just one. So let’s go with the most ironic. In discussing whether Dewey could have done a better job managing information — presumably referring to publicity about attorney layoffs, partner departures and financial results — Altorelli said:

“In most law firms, I think, as good as the lawyers are at advising clients, they’re not as good at taking their own advice. They are surprisingly obtuse when it comes to their own situation.”

He then proceeded to reveal himself as someone surprisingly obtuse about his own situation. Before listing those inadvertent revelations, consider how Altorelli himself embodies the lateral partner hiring phenomenon that has overtaken much of big law as a dominant business strategy.

The revolving lateral door

After  graduating from Cornell Law School in 1993, Altorelli made his way through four law firms in only fourteen years — LeBeouf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, Paul Hastings, Reed Smith, and Dewey Ballantine (shortly after the collapse of Dewey’s merger talks with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and a few months before its October 2007 merger with his original firm, LeBeouf Lamb). Such a journey is not likely to produce deep institutional loyalties anywhere.

He’s not unique. For example, as I composed this post The Wall Street Journal reported that Brette Simon had left Jones Day to join Bryan Cave. Since graduating in 1994, she’s also worked at O’Melveney & Myers, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton.

Still, Altorelli’s book of business apparently qualified him for a place on Dewey & LeBeouf’s executive committee. He says former chairman Steven H. Davis will “take the axe” for whatever is going wrong now, but surely the firm’s executive committee wasn’t a collection of potted plants. It seems improbable that Davis alone could have forged and executed Dewey initiatives that issued bonds and used guaranteed multi-year compensation contracts to lure prominent lateral partners.

But now Altorelli says: “The only people who need contracts are those who are not so secure. I feel bad that firms have to go that way, in competition for laterals and the like.”

Not my fault

Then again, Altorelli also suggests that management hasn’t contributed to Dewey’s current problems. Rather, it was just “bad timing” of a long recession that didn’t allow the firm to burn off expenses associated with the Dewey-LeBeouf merger: “We kept thinking it’ll get better tomorrow, then it doesn’t get better. The next thing you know it’s been four years.”

Magical thinking rarely results in a winning strategic plan. Curiously, Altorelli also notes that during that same period while he was at the firm, he and Dewey prospered: “I had five of the best years of my career.”

As he headed for his fifth big firm in nineteen years, Altorelli offered several additional insights that qualify for stand alone Unfortunate Comment Awards, especially coming from one of the firm’s recent executive committee members who professes continuing hope for Dewey’s future:

— “I’m not sure how they can weather the departures.”

— “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to say, I don’t know how many more they can suffer.”

— “[There] could be a survival path for a smaller Dewey. I don’t know how that would work. They seem to have a strategy. Or the firm will be busted up into a bunch of little pieces and survive in the hearts and souls of a lot of good people.”

Yet perhaps the unkindest cut of all came in contrasting his professional life at Dewey with things that will be better at DLA Piper, where he will serve on its executive committee:

“Altorelli says he was drawn to his new firm by the chance to help change the way he practices law. Altorelli…says the firm is experimenting with ways to ‘try to get back to more of an intellectual pursuit, rather than just grinding out the paper.'”

If Altorelli’s interview had appeared five days earlier, I would have looked for this concluding line: “April Fool!”

Just delete “April.”

DEWEY’S DILEMMA

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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.

FED TO DEATH

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

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

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