Tag Archives: lateral partner hiring

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.

DANGEROUS ADVICE FOR LAW FIRM LEADERS

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During the past 25 years, law firm management consulting has grown from cottage industry to big business. In a recent Am Law Daily article, “What Critics of Lateral Hiring Get Wrong,” Brad Hildebrandt, one of its pioneers, provides a comforting message to his constituents:

“Large law firms are weathering the storm of the past five years and continue to transform their businesses to operate with efficiency and agility amid a new set of client expectations.”

Hildebrandt v. Altman Weil

Hildebrandt correctly notes that painting all large firms with a single brush is a mistake. But his general description of most firms today is at odds with the results of Altman Weil’s recent survey, “2014: Law Firms in Transition.” The summary of responses from 803 law firm leaders (including 42 percent of the nation’s largest 350 firms) offers these highlights:

— “The Survey shows clear consensus among law firm leaders on the changing nature of the legal market…. [But] law firms are proceeding without an apparent sense of urgency.”

— “Less than half of the law firms surveyed are responding to the pressures of the current market by significantly changing elements of their traditional business model.”

— “Most firms are not making current investments in a future they acknowledge will be different – and different in seemingly predictable ways.”

— “Only 5.3 percent of firms are routinely looking farther than five years out in their planning.”

Altman Weil’s conclusions comport with its October 2013 Chief Legal Officer Survey. When clients rated outside law firms’ seriousness about changing legal service delivery models to provide greater value, the median score was three out of ten — for the fifth straight year.

Hildebrandt v. Georgetown/Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor and Henderson

So what are most big firms doing? Growth through aggressive lateral hiring. Hildebrandt responds to “academics, journalists, former practicing attorneys, and countless legal bloggers” who question that strategy. Count me among them.

Acquiring a well-vetted lateral partner to fill a specific strategic need is wise. But trouble arises when laterals become little more than portable books of business whose principal purpose is to enhance an acquiring firm’s top line revenues.

“Growth for growth’s sake is not a viable strategy in today’s market,” the 2014 Georgetown/Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor Report on the State of the Legal Market observes. Nevertheless, the report notes, most firms are pursuing exactly that approach: “[Growth] masks a bigger problem — the continuing failure of most firms to focus on strategic issues that are more important….”

Professor William Henderson has done extensive empirical work on this subject. “Is Reliance on Lateral Hiring Destabilizing Law Firms?” concludes: “[T]he data is telling us that for most law firms there is no statistically significant relationship between more lateral partner hiring and higher profits.”

Hildebrandt v. Citi/Hildebrandt

Big law partners acknowledge the truth behind Henderson’s data. According to the 2014 Citi/Hildebrandt Client Advisory, only 57 percent of law firm leaders describe their lateral recruits during 2008-2012 as successful, down from 60 percent last year. If those responsible for their firms’ aggressive lateral hiring strategies acknowledge an almost 50 percent failure rate, imagine how much worse the reality must be. Nevertheless, the lateral hiring frenzy continues, often to the detriment of institutional morale and firm culture.

With respect to culture and morale, Hildebrandt rejects the claim that lateral partner hiring crowds out homegrown associate talent. But the 2013 Citi/Hildebrandt Client Advisory suggests that it does: Comparing “the percentages of new equity partners attributable to lateral hires vs. internal promotions in 2007…with percentages in 2011 reveals a marked shift in favor of laterals” — a 21 percent decrease in associate promotions versus a 10 percent increase in lateral partner additions.

Nevertheless, Hildebrandt offers this assessment:

“In the six years prior to the recession, many firms admitted far too many partners—some into equity partnership, many into income partnership. A driving factor in the number of partners in the lateral marketplace is that firms are coming to grips with the mistakes of the past. Lax admissions standards have been a far greater issue than mistakes made on laterals.”

When I read that passage, it seemed familiar. In fact, Chapter 5 of my latest book, The Lawyer Bubble – A Profession in Crisis, opens with this quotation:

“The real problem of the 1980s was the lax admission standards of associates of all firms to partnerships. The way to fix that now is to make it harder to become a partner. The associate track is longer and more difficult.”

Those were Brad Hildebrandt’s words in September 1996. (“The NLJ 250 Annual Survey of the Nation’s Largest Law Firms: A Special Supplement — More Lawyers Than Ever In 250 Largest Firms,” National Law Journal)

“Fool Me Once, Shame On You…”

Evidently, most firms followed Hildebrandt’s advice in the 1990s because the overall leverage ratio in big law firms has doubled since then. His recent suggestion that “lax admission standards” caused firms to make “far too many” equity partners during the six years prior to the Great Recession of 2008-2009 is particularly puzzling. In the May 2008 issue of American Lawyer, Aric Press noted that during the “Law Firm Golden Age” from 2003 to 2007, “Partners reaped the benefits of hard work — and of pulling up the ladder behind them. Stoking these gains has been a dramatic slowdown in the naming of new equity partners.”

Meanwhile, the swelling ranks of income partners reflect a different strategy: using the non-equity partner tier as a profit center. The strategy is misguided, but pursuing it has been intentional, not a “mistake.” (Take a look at the American Lawyer article, “Crazy Like a Fox,” by Edwin Reeser and Patrick McKenna.)

Even so, Hildebrandt’s words reassure firms that are recruiting laterals for all the wrong reasons and/or tightening the equity partner admission screws. Tough love might better serve the profession.

A STORIED LATERAL HIRE

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“Are Laterals Killing Your Firm?” is the provocative title of The American Lawyer‘s February issue. The centerpiece is a thoughtful article, “Of Partners and Peacocks,” by Bill Henderson, professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and Director of the Center on the Global Legal Profession, and Christopher Zorn, professor of political science, sociology, crime, law, and justice at Penn State University.

Henderson and Zorn conclude that “for most law firms there is no statistically significant relationship between more lateral partner hiring and higher profits.” As I observed in last week’s post, most big law managing partners have conceded as much in anonymous surveys. Even so, the drumbeat of lateral hiring to achieve top line revenue growth persists, even in the face of dubious bottom line results.

A timely topic

One lateral hire outcome became particularly fascinating this week. On the way out of the top spot at DLA Piper is global co-chair Tony Angel. You might remember him from one of my earlier articles, “The Ultimate Lateral Hire.”

The American Lawyer 2012 Lateral Report identified Angel as one of the top lateral hires of the year — “a typically bold and iconoclastic play by DLA. For a firm to bring in a former managing partner from another firm is rare,” Am Law Daily reporter Chris Johnson wrote in March 2012. According to the article, the 59-year-old Angel was to receive $3 million a year for a three-year term.

With great fanfare, DLA touted its coup. “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,” boasted then co-chair Frank Burch.

At the time, DLA’s press release was equally effusive: “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.”

Predictably, law firm management consultants also praised the move:  “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,” said Peter Zeughauser. Legal headhunter Jack Zaremski called it a “brave move” that “might very well pay off.”

On second thought…

The current publicity surrounding Angel’s transition is decidedly more subdued. According to a recent Am Law article, Angel and his fellow outgoing global co-chair, Lee Miller, “will remain with the firm in a senior advisory capacity, the details of which will be worked out later this year.”

Two years, plus another 10 months as a lame duck, is a remarkably short period to occupy the top spot of any big firm. Only those who work at DLA Piper can say whether Angel’s brief reign was a success (and why it’s over so soon). Not all of them are likely to provide the same answer.

Separating winners from losers

In 2008, more than three years before Angel’s arrival, the firm’s non-equity partners found themselves on the receiving end of requests for capital contributions. According to Legal Week, “275 partners contributed up to $150,000 each to join the equity.” The move was “intended to motivate partners by granting them a direct share of the firm’s profits, as well as an equal vote in the firm’s decisions.” But it also helped “DLA reduce its bank debt.”

That equitization trend continued during Angel’s tenure. In 2012, the firm’s non-U.S. business reportedly added capital totaling 30 million pounds Sterling “as a result of the move to an all-equity partnership structure.” Again according to Legal Week, the firm’s non-equity partners in the UK, Europe, and Asia Pacific paid on average 61,000 pounds Sterling each to join the equity.”

Perhaps most new equity partners discovered that their mandatory bets became winners. After all, gross profits and average profits for the DLA Piper verein went up in 2012. Then again, averages don’t mean much when the distribution is skewed. According to a Wall Street Journal article three years ago, the internal top-to-bottom spread within DLA Piper was already nine-to-one.

Anyone looking beyond short-term dollars and willing to consider things that matter in the long run could consult associate satisfaction rankings for cultural clues. In the 2013 Am Law Survey of Midlevel Associate Satisfaction, DLA Piper dropped from #53 to #77 (out of 134 firms). That’s still above the firm’s #99 ranking in 2011.

The more things change

Management changes are always about the future. It’s not clear how, if at all, incoming co-chair Roger Meltzer’s vision for DLA Piper diverges from Angel’s. Age differences certainly don’t explain the transition; both men are around 60. Likewise, both have business orientations. Meltzer practices corporate and securities law; Angel joined DLA Piper after serving as executive managing director of Standard & Poor’s in London.

Maybe it’s irrelevant, but Meltzer and Angel also have this in common: Both are high-powered lateral hires. Angel parachuted in from Standard & Poor’s in 2011; Meltzer left Cahill, Gordon & Reindel to join DLA Piper in 2007. It makes you wonder where these guys and DLA Piper will be a few years from now.

SPINNING DEWEY’S HEROES

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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.