TREATING SYMPTOMS; IGNORING THE DISEASE

Posted on June 1, 2017 by thebellyofthebeast

On May 22, 2017, The Wall Street Journal ran an article about the legal profession’s enduring problem: psychological distress. For decades, attorneys have led most occupations in the incidence of serious psychological afflictions — depression, substance abuse, even suicide. Now some law firms are “tackling a taboo,” namely, the mental health problems of their lawyers.

Some observers theorize that a special “lawyer personality” is the culprit. In other words, we have only ourselves to blame, so no one should feel sorry for us. Then again, no one ever feels sorry for lawyers anyway. But attorney psychological distress has become a sufficient problem that, as the Journal reports, some big law firms are now “offering on-site psychologists, training staff to spot problems, and incorporating mental health support alongside other wellness initiatives.”

Stated differently, law firms are following the unfortunate path that has become a dominant approach in the medical profession: treating symptoms rather than the disease. Perhaps that’s because law firm leaders know that curing it would cut into their personal annual incomes.

The Facts

Other workers have serious psychological challenges, too. But attorneys seem to suffer in disproportionately high numbers. The Journal article cites a 2016 study of US lawyers finding that 20.6 percent of those surveyed were heavy drinkers (compared to 15.4 percent for members of the American College of Surgeons). Likewise, 28 percent experienced symptoms of depression (compared with eight percent or less for the general population). According to a 2012 CDC study cited in the Journal, attorneys have the 11th-highest suicide rate.

Now add one more data point. According to an ABA survey in 2007, lawyers in big firms are the least satisfied with their jobs. Anyone familiar with the prevailing big firm environment knows that it has deteriorated dramatically since 1985.

The New World

What has changed? For starters, just getting a job at a big law firm is more difficult. Corporate clients have found cost-effective alternatives to young attorneys billing $300 an hour to review documents. At many firms, demand remains soft.

But the real psychological problems begin after a new associate enters the door. For most of them, promotion to equity partner has become a pipe dream. In 1985, 36 percent of all lawyers in The American Lawyer’s first survey of the nation’s fifty largest firms were equity partners. In 2016, the comparable number was under 22 percent. More than 40 percent of all AmLaw 100 partners are now non-equity partners. The leverage ratio of equity partners to all attorneys has doubled. Stated another way, it’s twice as difficult to become an equity partner today as it was in 1985. That’s what’s been happening at the financial pinnacle of the profession.

The Business Model

There is nothing inevitable about the underlying business model that produces these outcomes. It’s a choice. In 1985, average profits per partner for the Am Law 50 was $300,000 — or about $700,000 in 2017 dollars. Today’s it’s $1.7 million. And the gap within most equity partnerships reflects their eat-what-you-kill culture. Instead of 3-to-1 in 1985, the ratio of highest-to-lowest partner compensation within equity partnerships often exceeds 10-to-1. As the rich have become richer, annual equity partner earnings of many millions of dollars has become commonplace.

At what cost? The future. As law firm leaders rely upon short-term metrics — billings, billable hours, and leverage ratios — they’re pulling up the ladder on the next generation. Too many associates; too few equity slots. Let the contest begin!

But rather than revisit the wisdom of the model, some big firm leaders have made what the Journal characterizes as a daring move: bring in a psychologist. It’s better than nothing, but it’s a far cry from dealing with the core problem that starts with the billable hour, moves through metrics that managers use to maximize short-run partner profits, and ends in predictable psychological distress — even for the so-called winners. The Journal notes that a psychologist at one firm was offering this sad advice to its attorneys: Take a cellphone reprieve by turning off all electronic devices between 2:00 am and 6:00 am.

But even such input from mental health professionals seems anathema to some firm leaders. According to the Journal, Dentons’ chairman Joseph Andrew says that his fear of offering an on-site psychologist was that “competitors will say we have crazy lawyers.”

Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates recently told the New Yorker about her father, an attorney who suffered from depression and committed suicide. “Tragically,” Yates said, “the fear of stigma then associated with depression prevented him from getting the treatment he needed.”

For some firm leaders, “then” is still “now.” And that’s truly crazy.

ASSOCIATE PAY AND PARTNER MALFEASANCE

Posted on July 13, 2016 by thebellyofthebeast

Cravath, Swaine & Moore raised first-year associate salaries from $160,000 to $180,000 — the first increase since January 2007. As most law firms followed suit, some clients pushed back.

“While we respect the firms’ judgment about what best serves their long-term competitive interests,” wrote a big bank’s global general counsel, “we are aware of no market-driven basis for such an increase and do not expect to bear the costs of the firms’ decisions.”

Corporate clients truly worried about the long-run might want to spend less time obsessing over young associates’ starting salaries and more time focusing on the behavior of older attorneys at their outside firms. In the end, clients will bear the costs of short-term thinking that pervades the ranks of big firm leaders. Some already are.

Historical Perspective

Well-paid lawyers never generate sympathy. Nor should they. All attorneys in big firms earn far more than most American workers. But justice in big law firms is a relative concept.

Back in 2007 when associate salaries first “jumped” to $160,000, average profits per equity partner for the Am Law 100 were $1.3 million. After a slight dip to $1.26 million in 2008, average partner profits rose every year thereafter — even during the Great Recession. In 2015, they were $1.6 million — a 27 percent increase from seven years earlier.

In 2007, only 19 firms had average partner profits exceeding $2 million; in 2015 that group had grown to 29. But the average doesn’t convey the real story. Throughout big law, senior partners have concentrated power and wealth at the top. As a result, the internal compensation spread within most equity partnerships has exploded.

Twenty years ago, the highest-paid equity partner earned four or five times more than those at the bottom. Today, some Am Law 200 partners are making more than 20 times their lowest paid fellow equity partners in the same firm.

It Gets Worse

Meanwhile, through the recent prolonged period of stagnant demand for sophisticated legal services, firm leaders fueled the revolution of partners’ rising profits expectations by boosting hourly rates and doubling leverage ratios. That’s another way of saying that they’ve adhered stubbornly to the billable hours model while making it twice as difficult for young attorneys to become equity partners compared to 25 years ago.

The class of victims becomes the entire next generation of attorneys. Short-term financial success is producing costly long-term casualties. But those injuries won’t land on the leaders making today’s decisions. By then, they’ll be long gone.

So What?

Why should clients concern themselves with the culture of the big firms they hire? For one answer, consider two young attorneys.

Associate A joins a big firm that pays well enough to make a dent in six-figure law school loans. But Associate A understands the billable hour regime and the concept of leverage ratios. Associate attrition after five years will exceed 80 percent. Fewer than ten percent of the starting class will survive to become equity partners. Employment at the firm is an arduous, short-term gig. In return for long-hours that overwhelm any effort to achieve a balanced life, Associate A gets decent money but no realistic opportunity for a career at the firm.

Associate B joins one of the few firms that have responded to clients demanding change away from a system that rewards inefficiency. Because billable hours aren’t the lifeblood of partner profits, the firm can afford to promote more associates to equity partner. Associate B joins with a reasonable expectation of a lengthy career at the same firm. Continuity is valued. Senior partners have a stake in mentoring. The prevailing culture encourages clients to develop confidence in younger lawyers. Intergenerational transitions become seamless.

Associate A tolerates the job as a short-term burden from which escape is the goal; Associate B is an enthusiastic participant for the long haul. If you’re a client, who would you want working on your matter?

The Same Old, Same Old

As clients have talked about refusing to pay for first-year associate time on their matters, big firms’ upward profit trends continue. But the real danger for firms and their clients is a big law business model that collapses under its own weight.

As it has for the past eight years, Altman-Weil’s recently released 2016 “Law Firms In Transition” survey confirms again the failure of leadership at the highest levels of the profession. Responses come from almost half of the largest 350 firms in the country. It’s a significant sample size that provides meaningful insight into the combination of incompetence and cognitive dissonance afflicting those at the top of many big firms.

When asked about the willingness of partners within ten years of retirement to “make long-term investments in the firm that will take five years or more to pay off,” fewer than six percent reported their partners’ “high” willingness to make such investments. But at most firms, partners within ten years of retirement are running the place, so the investments aren’t occurring.

Almost 60 percent of firm leaders reported moderate or high concern about their law firms’ “preparedness to deal with retirement and succession of Baby Boomers.” Meanwhile, they resolve to continue pulling up the ladder, observing that “fewer equity partners will be a permanent trend going forward” as “growth in lawyer headcount’ remains a “requirement for their firms’ success.”

Do law firm leaders think they are losing business to non-traditional sources and that the trend will continue? Survey says yes.

Do law firm leaders think clients will continue to demand fundamental change in the delivery of legal services? Survey says yes. (56 percent)

Do law firm leaders think firms “are serious about changing their legal service delivery model to provide greater value to clients (as opposed to simply reducing rates)”? Survey says no. (66 percent)

Do clients think law firms are responding to demands for change? Survey says most emphatically no! (86 percent)

But do law firm leaders have confidence that their firms are “fully prepared to keep pace with the challenges of the new legal marketplace”? Survey says yes! (77 percent)

If cognitive dissonance describes a person who tries to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously, what do you call someone who has three, four or five such irreconcilable notions?

At too many big law firms the answer is managing partner.

THE PERVASIVE AMAZON JUNGLE

Posted on August 19, 2015 by thebellyofthebeast

Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, hates the recent New York Times article about his company. He says it “doesn’t describe the Amazon I know.” Rather, it depicts “a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard.” He doesn’t think any company adopting such an approach could survive, much less thrive. Anyone working in such a company, he continues, “would be crazy to stay” and he counts himself among those likely departures.

The day after the Times’ article appeared, the front page of the paper carried a seemingly unrelated article, “Work Policies May Be Kinder, But Brutal Competition Isn’t.” It’s not about Amazon; it’s about the top ranks of the legal profession and the corporate world. Both are places where the Times’ version of Amazon’s culture is pervasive — and where such institutions survive and thrive.

The articles have two unstated but common themes: the impact of short-termism on working environments, and how a leader’s view of his company’s culture can diverge from the experience of those outside the leadership circle.

Short-termism: “Rank and Yank”

Bezos is hard-driving and demanding. According to the Times, his 1997 letter to shareholders boasted, “You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.”

The Times reports that Amazon weeds out employees on an annual basis: “[T]eam members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year.” Jack Welch pioneered such a “rank and yank” system at General Electric long ago and many companies followed his lead. Likewise, big law firms built associate attrition into their business models.

Theoretically, a “rank and yank” system produces a higher quality workforce. But in recent years, a new generation of business thinkers has challenged that premise. Even GE has abandoned Welch’s brainchild.

As currently applied, the system makes no sense to Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Bob Sutton, who observed, “When you look at the evidence about stack ranking…. The kind of stuff that they were doing [at GE], which was essentially creating a bigger distribution between the haves and the have nots in their workforce, then firing 10% of them, it just amazed me.”

If Amazon uses that system, which focuses on annual short-term evaluations, it’s behind the times, not ahead of the curve.

Haves and Have Nots

Professor Sutton’s comment about creating a bigger gap between the haves and the have nots describes pervasive law firm trends as well. The trend could also explain why Bezos and the Times may both be correct in their contradictory assessments of Amazon’s culture. That’s because any negative cultural consequences of Bezos’ management style probably don’t seem real to him. Bezos is at the top; the view from below is a lot different.

This phenomenon of dramatically divergent perspectives certainly applies to most big law firms. As firms moved from lock-step to eat-what-you-kill partner compensation systems, the gap between those at the top and everyone else exploded. Often, the result has been a small group — a partnership within the partnership — that actually controls the institution.

Those leaders have figured out an easy way to maximize short-term partner profits for themselves: make the road to equity partner twice as difficult than it was for them. As big firm attorney-partner leverage ratios have doubled since 1985, today’s managers are pulling up the ladder on the next generation. It’s no surprise that those leaders view their firms favorably.

Their associates have a decidedly different impression of the work environment. Regular attrition began as a method of quality control. At many firms, it has morphed into something insidious. Leadership’s prime directive now is preserving partner profits, not securing the long-run health of the institution. Short-term leverage calculations — not the quality of a young attorney’s lawyering — govern the determination of whether there is “room” for potential new entrants.

About the Long-Run

Such short-term thinking weakens the institutions that pursue it. As Professor Sutton observes: “We looked at every peer reviewed study we could find, and in every one when there was a bigger difference between the pay at of the people at the bottom and the top there was worse performance.”

That’s understandable. After all, workers behave according to signals that leadership sends down the food chain. Dissent is not a cherished value. Resulting self-censorship means the king and the members of his court hear only what they want to hear. People inside the organization who want to advance become cheerleaders who suppress bad news. Being a team player is the ultimate compliment and the likeliest path to promotion.

One More Thing

Bezos’ letter to his employees about the Times article encourages anyone who knows of any stories “like those reported…to escalate to HR.” He says that he doesn’t recognize the Amazon in the article and “very much hopes you don’t, either.”

One former employee frames Bezos’ unstated conundrum correctly: “How do you possibly convey to your manager the intolerable nature of your working conditions when your manager is the one telling you, point blank, that the impossible hours are simply what’s expected?”

Note to Jeff B: Escalating to HR won’t eliminate embedded cultural attitudes.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong about all of this. On the same day the Times published its piece on the increasingly harsh law firm business model, the Wall Street Journal ran Harvard Law School Professor Mark J. Roe’s op-ed: “The Imaginary Problem of Corporate Short-Termism.”

It’s all imaginary. That should come as a relief to those working inside law firms and businesses that focus myopically on near-term results without regard to the toll it is taking on the young people who comprise our collective future.

THE ILLUSION OF LEISURE TIME

Posted on April 30, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

Back in January, newspaper headlines reported a dramatic development in investment banking. Bank of America Merrill Lynch and others announced a reprieve from 80-hour workweeks.

According to the New York Times, Goldman Sachs “instructed junior bankers to stay out of the office on Saturdays.” A Goldman task force recommended that analysts be able to take weekends off whenever possible. Likewise, JP Morgan Chase gave its analysts the option of taking one protected weekend — Saturday and Sunday — each month.

“It’s a generational shift,” a former analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch told the Times in January. “Does it really make sense for me to do something I really don’t love and don’t really care about, working 90 hours a week? It really doesn’t make sense. Banks are starting to realize that.”

The Fine Print

There was only one problem with the noble rhetoric that accompanied such trailblazing initiatives: At most of these places, individual employee workloads didn’t change. Recently, one analyst complained to the Times that taking advantage of the new JP Morgan Chase “protected weekend” policy requires an employee to schedule it four weeks in advance.

Likewise, a junior banker at Deutsche Bank commented on the net effect of taking Saturdays off: “If you have 80 hours of work to do in a week, you’re going to have 80 hours of work to do in a week, regardless of whether you’re working Saturdays or not. That work is going to be pushed to Sundays or Friday nights.”

How About Lawyers?

An online comment to the recent Times article observed:

“I work for a major NY law firm. I have worked every day since New Year’s Eve, and billed over 900 hours in 3 months. Setting aside one day a week as ‘sacred’ would be nice, but as these bankers point out, the workload just shifts to other days. The attrition and burnout rate is insane but as long as law school and MBAs cost $100K+, there will be people to fill these roles.”

As the legal profession morphed from a profession to a business, managing partners in many big law firms have become investment banker wannabes. In light of the financial sector’s contribution to the country’s most recent economic collapse, one might reasonably ask why that is still true. The answer is money.

To that end, law firms adopted investment banking-type metrics to maximize partner profits. For example, leverage is the numerical ratio of the firm’s non-owners (consisting of associates, counsel, and income partners) to its owners (equity partners). Goldman Sachs has always had relatively few partners and a stunning leverage ratio.

As most big law firms have played follow-the-investment-banking-leader, overall leverage for the Am Law 50 has doubled since 1985 — from 1.76 to 3.52. In other words, it’s twice as difficult to become an equity partner as it was for those who now run such places. Are their children that much less qualified than they were?

Billables

Likewise, law firms use another business-type metric — billable hours — as a measure of productivity. But billables aren’t an output; they’re an input to achieve client results. Adding time to complete a project without regard to its impact on the outcome is anathema to any consideration of true productivity. A firm’s billable hours might reveal something about utilization, but that’s about it.

Imposing mandatory minimum billables as a prerequisite for an associate’s bonus does accomplishes this feat: Early in his or her career, every young attorney begins to live with the enduring ethical conflict that Scott Turow wrote about seven years ago in “The Billable Hour Must Die.” Specifically, the billable hour fee system pits an attorney’s financial self-interest against the client’s.

The Unmeasured Costs

Using billables as a distorted gauge of productivity also eats away at lawyers’ lives. Economists analyzing the enormous gains in worker productivity since the 1990s cite technology as a key contributor. But they ignore an insidious aspect of that surge: Technology has facilitated a massive conversion of leisure time to working hours — after dinner, after the kids are in bed, weekends, and while on what some people still call a vacation, but isn’t.

Here’s one way to test that hypothesis: The next time you’re away from the office, see how long you can go without checking your smartphone. Now imagine a time when that technological marvel didn’t exist. Welcome to 1998.

When you return to 2014, read messages, and return missed calls, be sure to bill the time.

THE NEWEST BIG LAW PARTNERS SPEAK

Posted on November 13, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

A recent survey of associates who became partners in their Am Law 200 firms between 2010 and 2013 produced some startling results. The headline in The American Lawyer proclaims that new partners “feel well-prepped and well-paid.” But other conclusions are troubling.

More than half (59 percent) of the 469 attorneys responding to the survey were non-equity partners. That’s significant because for them the real hurdle has yet to come. Most won’t advance to equity partnership in their firms. But even the combined results paint an unattractive portrait of the prevailing big law firm business model.

Lateral progress

It should surprise no one that institutional loyalty continues to suffer as the leveraged big law pyramid continues to depend on staggering associate attrition rates. According to the survey, almost half of new partners said that “making partner is nearly impossible.”

It’s toughest for home grown talent. Forty-seven percent of new partners switched firms before their promotions, most within the previous four years. An earlier survey of 50 Am Law 200 firms made the point even more dramatically: 59 percent of those who made partner in 2013 began their careers elsewhere. Long ago, a lot of older partners became wise to this gambit. They learned to hoard opportunities and preserve client silos as the way to move up and/or acquire tickets into the lucrative lateral partner market.

Somewhat paradoxically in light of their lateral paths into the partnership, 90 percent of new partners thought that commitment to their firms was of great or some importance as a factor in their promotion to partner. Yet almost 60 percent said that, since making partner, their commitment to the firm had decreased or only stayed the same.

Why don’t they feel like winners?

More than 80 percent of respondents thought that the “ability to develop and cultivate new clients” was “of great or some importance” in their promotion to partner. Yet more than half of new partners said that they received no formal training in business development.

Other results also suggest that a big law partnership has become an increasingly mixed bag. Almost eight out of ten said their business development efforts had increased since making partner. How did they make room for those activities in their already full workdays as “on-track-for-partner associates”? Eighty-three percent reported that time with their family “had decreased or stayed the same.” More than half said that control of their schedules had decreased or stayed the same. Making partner doesn’t seem to help attorneys achieve the kind of autonomy that contributes to career satisfaction and overall happiness.

The meaning of it all

More than 60 percent of new partners were satisfied or very satisfied with their compensation. Maybe money alone will continue to draw the best law graduates into big firms. A more important question is whether they will stay.

Most partners running today’s big firms assume that every associate has the same ambition that they had: to become an equity partner. Meanwhile, they’ve been pulling up the ladder on the next generation. Leverage ratios in big firms have doubled since 1985; making equity partner is now twice as difficult as it was then. Does anyone really believe that the current generation of young attorneys contains only half the talent of its predecessors?

The law is a service business. People are its only stock in trade. For today’s leaders who fail to retain and nurture young lawyers, the future of their institutions will become grim indeed. As that unfortunate story unfolds, they will have only themselves to blame. Then again, if these aging senior partners’ temporal scopes extend only to the day they retire, perhaps they don’t care.

UGLINESS INSIDE THE AM LAW 100 — PART I

Posted on May 1, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Every spring, the eyes of big firm attorneys everywhere turn to the American Lawyer rankings — the Am Law 100 — and the contest surrounding its key metric: average profits per equity partner (PPP). But if the goal is to obtain meaningful insight into a firm’s culture, financial strength or profitability for most of its partners, those focusing on PPP are looking at the wrong ball.

Start with the basics

For years, firms have been increasing their PPP by reducing the number of equity partners. American Lawyer reports that cutbacks in equity partners, when done correctly, are “a solid management technique, not financial chicanery.” But as firms are now executing the strategy, it looks more like throwing furniture into the fireplace to keep the equity house warm.

Since 1985, the average leverage ratio (of all attorneys to equity partners) for the Am Law 50 has doubled from 1.76 to more than 3.5. It’s now twice as difficult to become an equity partner as it was when today’s senior partners entered that club. Between 1999 and 2009, the ranks of Am Law 100 non-equity partners grew threefold; the number of equity partners increased by less than one-third.

Arithmetic did the rest: average partner profits for the Am Law 50 soared from $300,000 in 1985 ($650,000 in today’s dollars) to more than $1.7 million in 2012.

The beat goes on

Perhaps it’s not financial chicanery, but many firms admit that they’re still turning the screws on equity partner head count as a way to increase PPP. According to the American Lawyer’s most recent Law Firm Leaders’ Survey, 45 percent of respondent firms de-equitized partners in 2012 and 46 percent planned to do so in 2013.

But even when year-to-year equity headcount remains flat, as it did this year, that nominal result masks a destabilizing trend: the growing concentration of income and power at the top. In fact, it is undermining the very validity of the PPP metric itself.

An unpublished metric more important than PPP

The internal top-to-bottom spread within the equity ranks of most firms doesn’t appear in the Am Law survey or anywhere else, but it should, along with the distribution of partners at various data points. As meaningful metrics, they’re far more important than PPP.

Even as overall leverage ratios have increased dramatically, the internal gap within equity partnerships has skyrocketed. A few firms adhere to lock-step equity partner compensation within a narrow overall range (3-to-1 or 4-to-1). But most have adopted higher spreads. In its 2012 financial statement, K&L Gates disclosed an 8-to-1 gap — up from 6-to-1 in 2011. Dewey & LeBoeuf’s range exceeded 20-to-1.

This growing internal gap undermines the informational value of PPP. In any statistical analysis, an average is meaningful if the underlying sample is distributed normally (i.e., along a bell-shaped curve where the average is the peak). But the distribution of incomes within most big firm equity partnerships bears no resemblance to such a curve.

Cultural consequences

Rules governing statistical validity have real world implications. Growing internal income spreads render even nominally stable equity partner head counts misleading. Lower minimum profit participation levels make room for more equity partner bodies, but what results over time is Dewey & LeBoeuf’s “barbell” system. A handful of rainmakers dominates one side of the barbell; many more so-called service partners populate the other — and they rarely advance very far.

As Edwin B. Reeser and Patrick J. McKenna wrote last year, in Am Law 200 firms, “Typically, two-thirds of the equity partners earn less, and some perhaps only half, of the average PPP.” Statisticians know that for such a skewed distribution, the arithmetic average conveys little that is useful about the underlying population from which it is drawn.

Why it matters

For firms that don’t have lock-step partner compensation, the PPP metric doesn’t reveal very much. For example, consider a firm with two partners and an 8-to-1 equity partner spread. If Partner A earns $4 million and Partner B earns $500,000, average PPP is $2.25 million — a number that doesn’t describe either partner’s situation or the stability of the firm itself. But the underlying details say quite a bit about the culture of that partnership.

Firms with the courage to do so would follow the lead of K&L Gates and disclose what that firm calls its “compression ratio” and then take it a step farther: reveal their internal income distributions as well. But such revelations might lead to uncomfortable conversations about why, especially during the last decade, managing partners have engineered explosive increases in internal equity partner income gaps.

A future post will consider that topic. It’s not pretty.

FROM CRAVATH TO CHASE TO CADWALADER

Posted on February 27, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

James Woolery is on the move again. We’ve never met, but I’m beginning to feel as if I know the guy.

Woolery first appeared in my June 3, 2010 post about a policy change at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. The Wall Street Journal featured the then-41-year-old Cravath partner in an article about the firm’s plan to allow lawyers in their 30s and 40s to “make a name for themselves” by taking the lead on client deals. Historically, the WSJ reported, Cravath had reserved that role for partners in their 50s.

Six months later, I wrote about Woolery’s departure from Cravath to become co-head of JP Morgan Chase’s North American mergers and acquisitions group. He told the New York Times that he’d developed a business development focus and the Chase opportunity allowed him to build on those skills. So much for practicing law.

Now, two years after joining Chase, Woolery has become the first firmwide deputy chair of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft — a new position apparently created specially for its prominent lateral hire. The Wall Street Journal suggested that the move “is a big personal bet for Mr. Woolery. He is jumping back to the legal industry when it is still struggling with a shortage of work, and he is leaving J.P.Morgan just as mergers are showing new signs of life.”

Regardless of the particular reasons for Woolery’s various moves, the contrast between where he started (Cravath) and where he has now ended (Cadwalader) is remarkable.

Cravath

Whatever else people may think of Cravath, it has an unrivaled reputation for attracting first-rate attorneys. It is also a partnership in the truest sense of that concept: A single tier with a lock-step compensation system that resists an undue emphasis on short-term thinking. The Cravath model promotes longer run values, such as institutional stability.

For example, a lateral hiring frenzy pervades big law, but it’s a relatively rare event at Cravath. The firm focuses on developing talent internally. Its attorneys work hard, run a challenging gauntlet to equity partnership, and reap rich rewards for success.

In May 2007, an American Lawyer interviewer asked Cravath’s then-presiding partner Evan R. Chesler whether partners would stick around if the firm made less money. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “I think there is more glue than just money.”

Cadwalader

Cravath’s ethos wouldn’t appeal to attorneys drawn to Cadwalader’s culture. In the mid-1990s, Cadwalader began moving aggressively toward what its new chairman Robert O. Link Jr. called a meritocracy. Others call it “eat-what-you-kill.”

In a February 2007 interview with the American Lawyer, Link expressed an attitude about firm culture that differed dramatically from Chesler’s. “Everyone should wake up in the morning and feel a little vulnerable,” he said.

Link meant it. In 1995, the 268-lawyer Cadwalader firm’s two-tier partnership had 76 equity partners, giving it a leverage ratio of three-and-a-half. By 2005, the firm had nearly doubled in size, but it had only 75 equity partners. Its leverage ratio of seven far exceeded that of all other Am Law 100 firms.

Cadwalader’s asset-backed structured finance practice fueled much of its growth. By 2007, it had 645 lawyers and a stunning leverage ratio of eight-and-a-half. But when the residential housing market cratered and took asset-back structured finance legal work with it, the firm’s fortunes slid badly.

By the end of 2012, Cadwalader had 435 lawyers — down more than 200 from five years earlier. Only 55 of them were equity partners — down 20 from 2007. The good news for the survivors was that by 2012, average equity partner profits had recovered almost completely to their 2007 all-time high of $2.7 million.

Differences that transcend metrics

As Cadwalader became smaller, Cravath maintained average partner profits ranging from $2.5 to $3.2 million, a leverage ratio of approximately four, and moderate growth from 412 to 476 attorneys. Even more to the point, it’s hard to imagine any circumstance short of dissolution that would cause Cravath to shed almost a third of its equity partners, as Cadwalader did from 2007 to 2012.

Back in May 2010, Woolery told the Wall Street Journal, “This is not your grandfather’s Cravath.” It’s not clear what that characterization of his former firm means or if it is correct, but offspring sometimes underestimate the value of a grandfather’s gifts. And offspring sometimes grow up to be grandparents themselves.

BIG LAW FIRM MANAGEMENT PUZZLES

Posted on November 7, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Last month, ALM Legal Intelligence released “Thinking Like Your Client: Strategic Planning In Law Firms,” a curiously titled survey of Am Law 200 law firm leaders. The title is curious because the results demonstrate that most law firm managing partners are neither thinking like clients nor planning strategically for their firms’ futures.

Lateral self-delusion

The appendix of actual law firm responses from 79 out of all Am Law 200 partners is more interesting than the narrative explanations in the report. For example, one question asked them to identify their firms’ top three priorities. In order, the most frequent answers were:

Growing the firm’s revenues — 66 percent

Talent acquisition and retention — 59 percent

Improving firm profitability — 54 percent

Eighty percent said they had a strategic plan in place to address firm priorities. But other responses suggest that the plans are pretty simple: hire more lateral partners.

When asked how, as part of their strategic plans, firms were pursuing growth in the next two years, 96 percent said “acquiring laterals.” Seventy-six percent of the 75 respondents who listed this strategy said they would pursue laterals “aggressively.” More than 70 percent of respondents expect that, as a staffing category, lateral partner hires will increase over the next five years.

Yet they also acknowledge that laterals have been a mixed bag. Only 28 percent of managing partners said that their lateral strategies over the past five years have been “very effective — most laterals have been retained and contributed to business growth.” And those are just the dollar impacts. Ignored are the cultural consequences for a firm whose growth strategy depends on endless acquisition of outside talent. Nevertheless, most big firm leaders are doubling down on a dubious approach.

Is it really about the clients?

As for other half of the report’s title — “thinking like your client” — fewer than a third of respondents included “client performance management and client satisfaction measurement” as one of their top three priorities. Responses to other questions echoed that attitude. Forty-one percent admitted that they had no plan in place to build, track and measure client loyalty and satisfaction. When asked what aspect of their client relationships they would most like to change, only 21 percent said higher service levels — far behind the desire to take work from other firms and improve profitability.

When asked to identify the top three metrics they regarded as most important in managing firm performance, leaders listed a familiar trinity: firm revenue, firm profit, and profit per partner. Client retention metrics got a whopping 4 percent response, tied at the bottom of the list with “other.”

Only 18 percent use “client retention metrics” to reward partners, but more than 70 percent identified collections, firm profit, billings and client business development as the key criteria. (Apparently dollars from new clients are worth more than dollars from old ones.)

Look out for what’s next

How well is all of this working? Better for some than for others, and that will continue. When asked whether non-partner to partner leverage ratios had left their firms properly resourced to provide exceptional client service while also growing the firm business, 70 percent of law firm managers said they needed to make adjustments.

We all know which way those “adjustments” will go: in the direction of fewer equity partners. With respect to staffing categories that managing partners expect to experience the biggest decrease over the next five years, the largest plurality chose equity partners. Additionally, more than 90 percent of law firm managers said they had “unprofitable partners.” Seventy percent said that such subpar performers were at risk for de-equitization or removal.

Finally, if you’re wondering about the hourly rate regime and whether law firms can deal with any other system, consider this: When asked to compare alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) to hourly rate matters, 12 percent of firm leaders said AFAs were more profitable, 23 percent said they were less profitable, and 65 percent had no clue. How’s that for a leadership confidence builder?

Perhaps some of these managing partners have a subconscious awareness of their shortcomings. When asked to list the top three areas where their firms have a competitive advantage, only 14 percent chose “strong firm leadership.” Unfortunately, it seems clear that even that dismal number is too high.

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.

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.

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 NON-EQUITY PARTNER BUBBLE

Posted on February 22, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

In May 2009, The American Lawyer reported that Am Law 100 firms had increased the number of non-equity partners threefold since 1999, but the number of equity partners grew by less than one-third. As big law leaders continue to pull up the ladder, what will come from the growing cadre of partners-in-name-only? Other than some short-term money for equity partners, nothing good.

Historically, most two-tier firms employed a simple strategy for non-equity partners: up-or-out. Within a reasonable period of time (for no benign reason, it’s gotten longer), non-equity partners either proved themselves worthy of elevation or moved on. Limited exceptions included specialized niche players who could stay indefinitely.

An article in the February 2012 issue of The American Lawyer, “Crazy Like a Fox,” suggests another option: permanent non-equity partners.

The Economic Case

Authors Edwin B. Reeser and Patrick J. McKenna offer financial justifications for the strategy. First, they say, clients unwilling to pay high hourly rates for first- and second-year associates have an easier time swallowing non-equity partner rates, even though they are much greater.

Sometimes, maybe. But clients are now scrutinizing the match between attorneys and their tasks. Using an unnecessarily expensive non-equity partner to perform associate work is dangerous.

Second, they argue, associate recruitment and training are expensive, with each new associate costing $250,000 to $300,000. As a class, Reeser and McKenna assert, “associates do not make money for the firm until sometime in the end of the third or even the fourth year.”

Maybe. But at current hourly rates and required minimum billables, the payback is probably sooner. (Do the math using an average profit margin of forty percent, which is conservative.) But their larger point is correct: non-equity partners are a source of leverage that for the Am Law 50 has doubled since 1985 — from an average of 1.75 to 3.54.

The Problems

Whatever the debatable short-term economic gain, the long-run cost of expanding the non-equity ranks and making them permanent is far greater.

For starters, such lawyers become second class citizens. They know it. Everyone in the firm knows it. They may be decent, hard-working people. But once they receive the scarlet letter of permanent non-equity status, their morale plummets.

It’s understandable. After all, throughout their lives they succeeded at everything they tried — outstanding college record, good grades at a top law school. They’re intelligent and ambitious, otherwise firms wouldn’t have hired them in the first place. But then, after years of hard work they learn that they won’t reach the next level and never will. Only magical thinking can wish away the demoralizing impact of that message.

Any firm creating a permanent subclass of such attorneys takes an individual problem and makes it an institutional one. For example, if permanent non-equity partners do meaningful and fulfilling work, they’ll deprive younger attorneys of those increasingly scarce opportunities. That expands the morale problem into the senior associate ranks where career satisfaction languishes at historic lows.

Conversely, if the permanent non-equity partners are performing tasks that other attorneys avoid, that creates other difficulties. Reeser and McKenna note that such practitioners sometimes “take on non-billable leadership positions…involving pro bono, diversity, recruiting, training, and professional development.” Unfortunately, there’s no better way to send a message of management’s indifference to such pursuits than by putting the B-team in charge.

Finally, the authors suggest that a non-equity track enables firms to “retain some whiz-bang lawyers who have young children they want to spend more time with or who just want to get off the equity partner treadmill.” Remarkably, no one seems willing to rethink the wisdom of a system that produces that unhappy treadmill in the first place.

The presence of more non-equity partners in big law might simply be a residue of the enormous associate classes hired in earlier years. But for firms using them to create a permanent subclass generating short-term dollars, the strategy makes no long-term sense. Because there’s no metric to capture the downside, big law leaders will ignore it.

But if the trend continues, the non-equity partner bubble will grow and the prevailing big law model will develop another enduring chink in its increasingly fragile armor.

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.

A MODERN TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS

Posted on November 21, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

The American Lawyer‘s November cover story tells the sad tale of Jonathan Bristol. His client, Ken Starr, was a high-profile financial adviser to celebrities. (Starr is no relation to his namesake, the former Whitewater special prosecutor and current president of Baylor University.) In 2009, one of Starr’s clients, Uma Thurman, began asking tough questions for which he had no answers. Last year, he pleaded guilty to investment adviser fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.

Starr’s scheme doesn’t interest me; his lawyer does. Bristol’s saga reflects the 30-year evolution of an attorney and his profession. Indeed, because many of Bristol’s experiences look so familiar, some lawyers will find his story unsettling. At least, they should.

ACT ONE

His path into the law was typical — Amherst College (magna cum laude), followed by the University of Virginia Law School. Undergraduates throughout the country still identify with ambitions that Bristol probably held when he was their age — do well at a top college; get into a first-rate law school; enjoy a rewarding career. What could go wrong?

ACT TWO

After graduating in 1981, he went to a boutique Manhattan firm, Dreyer & Traub, where he practiced real estate finance law. Many would say that, today, such a job looks even more appealing as a big law alternative than it was then: smaller, more collegial, better sense of community.

ALM reporter Ross Todd writes, “as a junior partner in Dreyer & Traub’s waning days, Bristol needed to find clients and bill hours.” That was true in the mid-1990s and it’s worse today. Most big firm senior partners say they want aggressive attorney-entrepreneurs, but they ignore the perilous downside. Bristol found clients all right, but eventually he, they, and his firm became defendants themselves. I don’t know why Dreyer & Traub collapsed, but along with a lot of other small firms, it’s gone. So are some bigger ones.

ACT THREE

After leaving Dreyer & Taub in the spring of 1995, Bristol went through a succession of firms before landing at Brown, Raysman, Millstein, Felder & Steiner. In December 2006, Brown Raysman joined Thelen, Reid & Priest in the largest merger of that year. Some blame that transaction for Thelen’s dissolution less than two years later. Since then, lots of mergers have failed; more will follow.

ACT FOUR

In November 2008, Winston & Strawn picked up Bristol and 18 other former Thelen lawyers. Although his annual compensation for 2009 and 2010 was set at $1.35 million, in mid-2009 he agreed to reduce his guaranteed amount to $500,000. His metrics — billables, billable hours, and leverage ratio — must have been in deep trouble. That’s how most big firms measure value.

Bristol’s world continued to collapse as his biggest client, Starr, got behind on his legal bills. The amount — $750,000 — may not seem large for a firm with gross revenues of more than $700 million in 2010. But for a partner already wilting under the heat of the short-term metrics spotlight, it provided tippping-point pressure. Bristol allowed Starr to transfer stolen funds through his personal attorney escrow accounts.

ACT FIVE

In a request to delay sentencing, Bristol’s lawyer wrote that his client’s childhood left considerable emotional scarring: “For much of his adult life, Mr. Bristol has been in therapy to treat depression and anxiety.” If he suffered from those afflictions in college, he couldn’t have chosen a less suitable career.

From all of this, endless lessons emerge: know yourself; know your partners; scrutinize lateral hires; don’t assume anything about an attorney just because he or she comes from a great school or well-respected firm; being entrepreneurial is a two-edged sword; think beyond short-term metrics; character counts; and so forth.

But maybe the most important message is a universal one that few will heed. Perhaps inadvertently, one of Bristol’s former partners at Dreyer & Traub, Edward Harris, Jr., summarized it in The American Lawyer article:

“If you’ve got your eyes on the prize, sometimes you might ignore caution signs or something along the way.”

While enjoying the holiday season with family and friends, consider this addendum: Think about whether the prize you eye is the right one.

THE ARROGANCE OF OVERCONFIDENCE

Posted on November 8, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

Most of us hate admitting our mistakes, especially errors in judgment. Lawyers make lots of judgments, which is why they should pay special attention to two recent and seemingly unrelated NY Times articles.

In the October 23 NYT Magazine, psychologist and economics Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman describes an early encounter with his own character flaw that led him to research its universality. Assigned to observe a team-buidling exercise, he was so sure of his predictions about the participants’ future prospects that he disregarded incontrovertible data proving him wrong — again, and again, and again.

In subsequent experiments, he discovered that he wasn’t alone. A similar arrogance of overconfidence explains why, for example, individual investors insist on picking their own stocks year after year, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence that their portfolios are worse for it.

In the same Sunday edition of the Times, philosopher Robert P. Crease discusses the two different measurement systems. One relates to traditional notions: how much something weighs or how far a person runs. Representatives from 55 nations met recently to finalize state-of-the-art definitions for basic units of such measurements — the meter, the second, the kilogram, and so forth.

The second system is less susceptible to quantification. Crease notes: “Aristotle…called the truly moral person a ‘measure,’ because our encounters with such a person show us our shortcomings.” Ignoring this second type in favor of numerical assessments gets us into trouble, individually and as a society. Examples include equating intelligence to a single number, such as I.Q. or brain size, or evaluating students (and their teachers) solely by reference to standardized test scores.

Lessons for lawyers — and everyone else

Now consider the intersection of these two phenomena — the arrogance of overconfidence and the reliance on numbers alone to measure value. For example, in recent years, a single metric — partner profits — has come to dominate every internal law firm conversation about attorney worth. Billings, billable hours, and leverage ratios have become the criteria by which most big law leaders judge themselves, fellow partners, their associates, and competitors. They teach to the same test — the one that produces annual Am Law rankings.

The arrogance of overconfidence exacerbates these tendencies. It’s one thing to press onward, as Kahneman concludes most of us do, in the face data proving that we’re moving in the wrong direction. Imagine how bad things can get when a measurement technique appears to validate what are really errors.

I’m not an anarchist. (I offer my advanced degree in economics as modest support.) But the relatively recent notion that there is only one set of law firm measures for defining success — revenues, short-term profits, leverage — has become a plague on our profession. Of course, we’re not alone. According to the Times, during the academic year 2005-2006, one-quarter of the advanced degrees awarded in the United States were MBAs. Business school-type metrics are ubiquitous and, regrettably, often viewed as outcome determinative.

But lawyers know better than to get lost in them, or once upon a time they did. The metrics that most big firm leaders now worship were irrelevant to them as students two or three decades ago. Like today’s undergraduates, they were pursuing a noble calling. Few went to law school seeking a job where their principal missions would be maximizing client billings and this year’s partner profits.

Will the profession’s leaders in the next generation make room for the other kind of measure — the one Aristotle had in mind — that informs the quality of a person’s life, not merely it’s quantitative output? Might they consider the possibility that focusing on short-term metrics imposes long-run costs that aren’t easily measured numerically but are far more profound?

Reviewing the damage that their predecessors’ failures in that regard have inflicted — as measured imprecisely by unsettling levels of career dissatisfaction, substance abuse, depression, and worse — should motivate them to try.

Meanwhile, they’ll have to contend with wealthy senior partners telling them to keep their hours up — a directive that those partners themselves never heard. Good luck to all of us.

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.

GREED ATOP THE PYRAMIDS

Posted on February 2, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

Three recent reports are more interesting when read together: the National Law Journal‘s annual headcount survey at the largest 250 law firms, the Citi Law Firm Group’s third quarter report on law firm performance, and the Association of Corporate Counsel/The American Lawyer (ACC/TAL) Alternative Billing 2010 Survey.

The headline from the NLJ 250 item: a 1,400 drop in 2010 total attorney headcount. This qualified as a welcome improvement over the far deeper plunge in 2009. Associates took the biggest hit, accounting for about 1,000 of the eliminated positions.

That doesn’t sound too bad, until you realize that it’s a net reduction number. As 5,000 new law school graduates got large firm jobs, many more — over 6,000 — lost (or left) theirs. This simple arithmetic suggests an unsettling reality: The relatively few who land big law jobs may discover that keeping them is an even more daunting challenge.

In some respects, that’s nothing new. Long before the Great Recession began, attrition was a central feature of most large firm business models. In 2007, lucrative starting positions were plentiful, but big law’s five-year associate attrition rate was 80%. Some of it was voluntary; some involuntary. The survival rate for those continuing the journey to equity partner was exceedingly small.

That takes us to the Citi report. The only really good news now goes to top equity partners: For them, big law’s short-term profit-maximizing model remains alive and well. The formula remains simple: Firms are imposing increasingly strict limits on equity partnership entry and, according to Citi, charging clients higher hourly rates overall as some partners remain busy with tasks that less costly billers performed previously. (Equity partners have to keep their hours up, too.) Amid the bloodshed elsewhere, average equity partner profits for the Am Law 100 actually rose slightly in 2009 — to $1.26 million. Not bad for the first full year of the worst economic downturn in a century.

But even that remarkable average masks growing wealth gaps within equity partnerships. One law firm management consultant observed, “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.” That is stunning.

While maintaining leverage and increasing hourly rates, the third leg of the profits stool likewise remains intact: billable hours. As business picks up, firms are hiring fewer associates than in earlier recovery periods. Under the guise of transparency, some newbies are hearing that they have to meet monthly billable hours targets in addition to the annual requirements reported to NALP.

The ACC/TAL survey reveals why: Earlier rhetoric surrounding the new world of alternative fees was largely empty. Hourly billing remains king of the fee-generating hill. As another Am Law survey confirmed, simple discounts from regular hourly rates accounted for 80% of so-called alternative fee arrangements last year.

The pressure to bill hours is increasing. Unfortunately, it remains an important, albeit misnamed, productivity metric. Indeed, rewarding time alone is the antithesis of measuring true productivity, which should focus on the efficiency of completing tasks — not the total number of hours used to get them done.

As one law firm management consultant told the NLJ, “We’re finally seeing the bottom of the legal recession…There’s been a reset. There are fewer lawyers producing more work and more revenue.”

When the Am Law 100 profit results come out in May, Citi’s prediction will come true: As the economy continues to sputter and young law school graduates worry about their prospects, overall average profits per equity partner will follow their steady upward trajectory.

Law firm management consultants might say all of this results from increased productivity that the “reset” of big law has produced. That’s one way to put it. But the the growing spread between highest and lowest within equity partnerships — coupled with the plight of everyone else — may reveal something more sinister: The worst economic downturn of modern times has provided protective cover to greed atop the pyramids.

LAW SCHOOL DECEPTION

Posted on January 12, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

Last Sunday, the NY Times asked: Are law schools deceiving prospective students into incurring huge debt for degrees that aren’t worth it?

Of course they are. The U.S. News is an aider and abettor. As the market for new lawyers shrinks, a key statistic in compiling the publication’s infamous rankings is “graduates known to be employed nine months after graduation.” Any job qualifies — from joining Cravath to waiting tables. According to the Times, the most recent average for all law schools is 93%. If gaming the system to produce that number doesn’t cause students to ignore the U.S. News’ rankings altogether, nothing will.

My friend, Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law Professor Bill Henderson, told the Times that looking at law schools’ self-reported employment numbers made him feel “dirty.” I assume he’s concerned that prospective students rely on that data in deciding whether and where to attend law school. I agree with him.

But an equally telling kick in the head is buried in the lengthy Times article: Most graduates who achieve their initial objectives — starting positions in big firms paying $160,000 salaries — quickly lose the feeling that they’re winners. Certainly, they must be better off than the individuals chronicled in the article. What could be worse than student debt equal to a home mortgage, albeit without the home?

Try a legal job with grueling hours, boring work, and little prospect of a long-term career. Times reporter David Segal summarized the cliche’: “Law school is a pie-eating contest where first prize is more pie.”

These distressing outcomes for students and associates aren’t inevitable. In fact, they’re relatively new phenomena with a common denominator: Business school-type metrics that make short-term pursuit of the bottom line sterile, objective, and laudable. Numbers prove who’s best and they don’t lie.

Law school administrators manipulate employment data because they have ceded their reasoned judgment to mindless ranking criteria. (“[M]illions of dollars [are] riding on students’ decisions about where to go to law school, and that creates real institutional pressures,” says one dean who believes that pandering to U.S. News rankings isn’t gaming the system; it’s making a school better.)

Likewise, today’s dominant large firm culture results from forces that produced the surge in average equity partner income for the Am Law 50 — from $300,000 in 1985 to $1.5 million in 2009. Leveraged pyramids might work for a few at the top; for everyone else — not so much.

The glut of law school applicants, as well as graduates seeking big firm jobs to repay their loans, leaves law school administrators and firm managers with no economic incentive to change their ways. The profession needs visionaries who are willing to resist perpetuating the world in which debt-laden graduates are becoming the 21st century equivalent of indentured servants.

Henderson calls for law school transparency in the form of quality employment statistics. I endorse his request and offer a parallel suggestion: Through their universities’ undergraduate prelaw programs, law schools should warn prospective students about the path ahead before their legal journeys begin.

Some students enter law school expecting to become Atticus Finch or the lead attorneys on Law & Order. Others pursue large firm equity partnerships as a way to riches. Few realize that career dissatisfaction plagues most of the so-called winners who land what they once thought were the big firm jobs of their dreams.

A legal degree can lead to many different careers. The urgency of loan repayment schedules creates a practical reality that pushes most students in big law’s direction. If past is prologue, the vast majority of them will not be happy there. They should know the truth — the whole truth — before they make their first law school tuition payments. Minimizing unwelcome surprises will create a more satisfied profession.

Meanwhile, can we all agree to ignore U.S. News rankings and rely on our own judgments instead of its stupid criteria? Likewise, can big law managers move away from their myopic focus on the current year’s equity partner profits as a definitive culture-determining metric? I didn’t think so.

MEASURING VALUES

Posted on January 3, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

In a recent NY Times column, David Brooks wrote about the future of our nation, but one observation applies to big law:

“In a world of relative equals, the U.S. will have to learn to define itself not by its rank, but by its values. It will be important to have the right story to tell, the right purpose and the right aura. It will be more important to know who you are.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/opinion/14brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion)

Large law firms, too, have become a world of relative equals. That has been an unintended consequence of the transformation from a profession to a business. In pursuit of rank, too many managers rely on B-school-type metrics — billings, billable hours, leverage ratios — as definitive measures of worth. They use them as substitutes for independent judgments based on values that are less easily quantified.

Behavior follows incentives. Partners jockey for internal position and managers focus myopically on short-term profits. They believe that favorable Am Law rankings will distinguish them but, Brooks argues, similar thinking would be a mistake for our country over the long-run.

It’s equally true for big firms. High-paying clients assume that only the best and brightest lawyers will work on their matters. But to attract and retain those attorneys, even the self-described top firms will have to offer more than money. In that contest, values will separate the biggest winners from everyone else.

Of course, in the very short-term, top graduates respond to the urgency of school loan repayment schedules. But as the novelty of a steady paycheck fades, the superstars will yearn for something else. They’ll understand that a firm’s “make more money” mantra limits its vision. For most, it fails to offer long-term career satisfaction. Indeed, the prevailing model doesn’t even contemplate long-term careers for the vast majority of new hires.

The most ambitious and talented new graduates are already beginning to understand the game. As greater knowledge of what lies ahead empowers students to make better decisions, firms viewing their own missions merely as maximizing this year’s equity partner profits will lose the values contest for the next generation’s talent. It won’t happen this year or next, but it will happen.

What are the winning values? Here are some suggestions:

Resisting the deceptive simplicity of short-term metrics. Embracing efforts to shed light on a troubled business model. Requiring decency in all human interactions. Punishing bullies. Providing young lawyers with mentors, training, and opportunities because even the best internal programs are no substitutes for the real thing. (Pro bono programs can help as they advance other important values.) Creating a reality that matches more closely students’ prelaw expectations of what being a lawyer would mean.

Offering realistic prospects for long-term careers. Without tolerating mediocre performers, implementing decision-making processes that minimize the impacts of internal politics and clashing personalities in determining the fate of human beings. Providing meaningful and candid reviews while also jettisoning arbitrary barriers that the leveraged pyramid model imposes on equity partnership entry. Advancing all who deserve promotion.

Conquering the billable hour and its death-grip on associate compensation. Finding a way to measure attorney productivity that rewards those who complete a task efficiently — and penalizes those whose long hours produce big client billings based on diminishing (or negative) returns.

To secure their firms’ futures, thoughtful partners will accept modest reductions from the staggering personal incomes that they’ve enjoyed in recent years. Those willing to make the investment will reap great dividends. Large firms depend uniquely on the wisdom, judgment, and intelligence of their attorneys. The best new graduates will flock to firms cherishing values consistent with a satisfying career, even if it means less money (although in the long-run, it probably won’t).

As for the rest? Much of big law will continue pursuing the highest short-term dollar — wherever it is and whatever its cost to others, their institutions, or the profession. Such is the power of greed. But those who measure everything they value risk creating an unpleasant world in which they value only what they measure.

BONUS TIME!

Posted on December 14, 2010 by thebellyofthebeast

Firms that abandoned lock-step in favor of merit-based compensation a year ago are now reversing course. Why?

The prevailing theory is backlash. Associate dissatisfaction pervades big law; some saw “competency models” as thinly disguised efforts to reduce associate wages. (http://www.lawjobs.com/newsandviews/LawArticle.jsp?id=1202443769098&rss=newswire&slreturn=1&hbxlogin=1) Restoring lock-step, the argument goes, should enhance morale.

But when firm leaders really care about morale, they’ll ask associates to evaluate partners on mentoring, training, and overall humanity — and, at least to some extent, partner compensation will reflect the results. Instead of looking into those unpleasant mirrors, managers are likely to form a new committee investigating the “associate problem,” as if it were a mystery.

One way to improve morale would be to tell associates the truth earlier. But quality merit review is tough work. Performing it properly is not in most large firms’ short-term economic interests. For starters, they can’t bill the time to clients.

When I chaired my firm’s associate review committee in the 1990s, the process focused on a single goal: Identifying the best among a distinguished group. That meant evaluating specific skills, developmental needs, and future prospects. To squeeze out personality conflicts and internal politics, partners from outside their assigned associates’ practice areas gathered performance information. Then the committee actually deliberated for an entire day.

In an era when lateral partner movement among firms was rare, promotion decisions were akin to choosing a new family member. Admittedly, subjective judgments produced the distinctions, but partners generally played fair with the next generations. The integrity of the process produced widespread respect for outcomes.

In those days, compensation didn’t turn on billable hours. High outliers (those billing over 2,400) were singled out for counseling that doesn’t happen anymore: “If you burn out, you’re no good to us or anyone else.” Low outliers (below 1,600) attracted a different concern: “Partners aren’t giving that person work. Why? Is there a performance problem?” Between those extremes, hours had little impact on reviews or compensation. As incredible as that now sounds, it was true throughout big law. Just ask the senior partner who is pressing you to “get your hours up.”

Transparency worked. Knowing relative position allowed associates to handicap prospects while they were most marketable. Performance ratings translated into monetary distinctions that spoke for themselves. Anyone displeased with the message could explore other options.

New York firms pioneered lock-step. Exploding client demand caused many more to follow. Uniform compensation to a class allowed partners to postpone the day of reckoning for those with limited futures. Unpleasant news went undelivered.

Some partners rationalized the failure to provide more candid feedback: “We need the bodies to run our business. We’re paying them decent money. So they’re doing ok.”

The first two points were true: A myopic MBA-mentality emerged and departing associates often found that their new positions paid substantially less than they had been making. But doing ok? Some lost their jobs, their lifestyle, and chunks of their self-image in a single belated conversation.

Lock-step was also supposed to improve morale by reducing internal competition. But as compensation packages ballooned, associate satisfaction plummeted and voluntary attrition skyrocketed. Bonuses tied to hours but unrelated to quality erode meritocracies and morale — as does boring work that doesn’t enhance attorney skills.

Modern mega-firms now face the toughest task. To perform truly merit-based reviews, they must develop meaningful individual assessments for legions of associates — sometimes hundreds in a single office. Without proof that the exercise contributes to the bottom line, what incentivizes firms to devote the non-billable time required to perform reviews diligently? Management’s concern for the future, you say? At most big firms, that means projecting next year’s equity partner profits. They’re counting on laterals to fill quality gaps.

Associates should be skeptical about how firms now promising merit review will deliver quality feedback. But lock-step that camouflages meaningful information is no panacea. Student loan repayment demands notwithstanding, sooner is better than later when it comes to acquiring the knowledge that frames life’s most important decisions.

“LIES, DAMN LIES, AND STATISTICS”

Posted on November 16, 2010 by thebellyofthebeast

ALM editor-in-chief Aric Press penned a provocative article about Indiana Law Professor Bill Henderson’s for-profit venture on recruiting, retention, and promotion. (http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/11/pressconventionalwisdom.html) The WSJ law blog and ABA Journal covered it, too. (http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/11/15/on-law-firms-and-hiring-is-a-new-paradigm-on-the-way/) Henderson is analyzing why some attorneys succeed in Biglaw and others don’t.

Does anyone else find his project vaguely unsettling?

At first, I thought of the venerable computer programming maxim, “garbage in, garbage out.” That’s because he’s asking Am Law 200 partners to identify values and traits they want in their lawyers — and he’s assuming they’ll tell him the truth. But will they admit to seeking bright, ambitious associates wearing blinders in pursuit of elusive equity partnerships typically awarded to fewer than 10% of large firm entering classes? Or that such low “success” rates inhere in the predominant Biglaw business model that requires attrition and limits equity entrants to preserve staggering profits?

Then I considered Mark Twain’s reflections on the three kinds of falsehoods: “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” It came to mind because Henderson’s researchers “pour over the resumes and evaluations of associates and partners trying to identify characteristics shared by those who have become ‘franchise players’ and those who haven’t.” Here’s what those resumes and evaluations won’t reveal: the internal politics driving decisions.

Most Biglaw equity partners are talented, but equally deserving candidates fail to advance for reasons unrelated to their abilities. Rather, as the business model incentivizes senior partners to hoard billings that justify personal economic positions, those at the top wield power that makes or breaks young careers — and everybody knows it. Doing a superior job is important, but working for the “right” people is outcome determinative. Merit sometimes loses out to idiosyncrasy that is impervious to Henderson’s data collection methods.

But perhaps the biggest problem with Henderson’s plan is it’s goal: identifying factors correlating with individual success. Does the magic formula include “a few years in the military, a few years in the job force, or a few years as a law review editor?”

If managers warm to Henderson’s conclusions (after paying his company to develop them), they’ll leap from correlation to causation, develop checklists of supposed characteristics common to superstars like themselves, and hire accordingly. Law schools pandering to the Biglaw sliver of the profession (it’s less than 15% of all attorneys) could take such criteria even more seriously. Before long, prospective students will incorporate the acquisition of “success” credentials into their life plans.

The difficulty is that today’s Biglaw partners already favor like-minded proteges. That inhibits diversity as typically measured — gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and the like — along with equally important diversity of views and a willingness to entertain them. Even today, concerned insiders are reluctant to voice dissent from Biglaw’s prevailing raison d’etre — maximizing short-term profits at the expense competing professional values and longer-term institutional vitality. Won’t meaningful diversity — of backgrounds, life experiences, and resulting attitudes about professional mission — suffer as groupthink makes firms even more insular? Meanwhile, trying to improve overall “success” rates is a futile goal; they won’t budge until the leveraged pyramid disappears.

I don’t fault Henderson, who bypassed Biglaw practice for academia after his 2001 graduation. But Press’s warning is important: “To some extent, it doesn’t matter what Henderson and Co. discover. What matters is that the inquiries have begun…If we’ve learned anything from the last decade, it’s that we can’t predict the consequences of new information beyond acknowledging its power to disrupt.”

Consider two unfortunate examples. The flawed methodology behind U.S. News’ law school rankings hasn’t deterred most students from blindly choosing the highest-rated one that accepts them. (Exorbitant tuition and limited job prospects may be changing that.) Likewise, Biglaw’s transformation from a collegial profession to a short-term bottom-line business accelerated after publication of average partner profits at the nation’s largest firms (then the Am Law 50), beginning in 1985; I just published a legal thriller describing that phenomenon. (http://www.amazon.com/Partnership-Novel-Steven-J-Harper/dp/0984369104)

The most important things that happened to me — in Biglaw and in life — were fortuitous. No statistical model could have predicted them. Still, I hope Henderson’s study answers an important question: Would his likely-to-succeed factors have led any firm to hire me?

THE END OF LEVERAGE? JUST KIDDING.

Posted on November 11, 2010 by thebellyofthebeast

Since the beginning of the Great Recession, some observers have predicted the demise of the Biglaw leverage model. (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202428174244) Are they correct? After all, recent associate classes are dramatically smaller than in prior years. Unless equity partner ranks shrink proportionately, the argument goes, something has to give and that something will be the very business model itself. The days of using four or more associates to sustain a single equity partner must be numbered, right?

In fact, the model endures, but with structural innovations. What has been transient leverage — continuous non-equity attorney attrition coupled with annual replenishment from law schools — is giving way to something more permanent and, perhaps, more sinister for the future of the profession. Law firm management consultant Jerome Kowalski recently called it the “Associate Caste System.” (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202472939044&PostRecession_Law_Firms_A_New_Caste_System_Emerges)

New hires earning $160,000 a year are the “showcase pieces,” but they are a much smaller group than they once were. Below them at the same firms is a vast underbelly of lawyers. Some are full-time but have taken themselves off partner tracks and make less than their nominal classmates. At the bottom are contract attorneys whose jobs won’t last beyond their current projects. They work per diem with no benefits. Kowalski describes them as comparable to “those guys who hang around in front of a Home Depot waiting for some contractor to show up with a truck.”

The rise of legal outsourcing could add yet another attorney subclass contributor to Biglaw profits, provided firms can persuade clients to accept fees greater than what the people doing the outsourced work earn. That’s nothing new. For a long time, clients have regarded overpriced associates as a necessary cost incurred to retain a big-name attorney.

Does this add up to the demise of the lucrative leverage model that has kept average equity partner profits for the Am Law 100 well above $1 million annually for many years?

For all practical purposes, it means the opposite. Although big firms are hiring 30 or 35 new associates rather than the 100 or more of a few years ago, most of them will still be unpleasantly surprised when they don’t capture the equity partner brass ring after pursuing it for a decade or more. That component of the model remains intact. Meanwhile, the rest of the leverage action has moved to the growing ranks of underbelly people. For as long as they get paid less than their billing rates, they contribute to equity partner wealth.

In fact, many Biglaw managers prefer this new system. They save on recruiting (say, 35 instead of 150 new associates each year), summer programs, associate training, and other expenses associated with talent development. Meanwhile, the underclass of attorneys who know their places will resign themselves to their limited prospects: a source of permanent leverage.

This continues an ugly trend: Many big firms have been candidly closing long-term career windows for their youngest lawyers. For example, Morgan Lewis already had a non-partner track for those who opted onto it. But when the firm recently announced a return to lock-step associate compensation, it included this kicker: another permanent non-partner track for young lawyers who pursue partnership but don’t make it. (http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/11/morganlewispay.html)

Rather than up-or-out, it’s becoming stick around and make the equity partners some money. In earlier times, wise firm leaders either promoted such individuals to well-deserved equity partnerships or terminated them as counterproductive blockage that undermined morale and deprived more promising younger lawyers of developmental opportunities. Either way, positioning the next generation to inherit clients served long-term institutional interests. But that’s less important when equity partners jealously guard their clients to preserve personal economic positions and “long-term” doesn’t extend beyond current profits or the coming year’s equity partner compensation decisions.

Here’s my question: How will any aspect of this new world promote the profession’s unique and defining values or improve Biglaw’s dismal career satisfaction rates? Here’s an even better one: Does anyone care?

WORK-LIFE BALANCE MONTH

Posted on November 1, 2010 by thebellyofthebeast

Pity the United Kingdom, which I just visited. It has only “Work-Life Balance Week” — the last seven days of September. How many Americans realize that October was our “Work-Life Balance Month“? Such commemorations suggest an obvious question: What should we celebrate the rest of the year? Work-Life Imbalance?

The concept of work-life balance is laudable, even if the phrase itself can be somewhat off target. For those who are chronically unhappy with their jobs, “balancing” unpleasant “work” with the rest of “life” is at best palliative, not curative. Dissatisfaction with a career usually infects everything else. Notwithstanding daunting economic realities, a better long-term plan for such sufferers is to find another way to make a living.

On the other hand, my friend, Northwestern Professor Steven Lubet, correctly notes that no job is perfect: “That’s why they call it work.” But attorneys who generally enjoy their tasks still benefit from time spent on people and things other than clients and their problems. Enjoying life outside the office makes most of us better in every way and improves worker productivity. Unfortunately, that’s an increasingly tough sell in most of the Biglaw world where the MBA-mentality of misguided metrics — billable hours, billings, and short-term equity partner profits — force all oars in the water to row in the same myopic direction.

Being a lawyer has always been demanding, but when even satisfied attorneys feel pressure to work unreasonably long hours, bad things happen to them, their families, clients, firms, and the profession. Slackers can take no comfort in my views. An honest 2,000 billed hours — the annual minimum that most big firms report to NALP — requires 10-hour days and occasional weekends. (http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/CDO_Public/cdo-billable_hour.pdf) That’s more than firms required 25 years ago, but it’s still not unreasonable.

Unfortunately, too many large firms made the 2,000 minimum culturally irrelevant long ago. No debt-ridden associate concerned about keeping a job wants to bring up the rear of a year-end billable hours list. Nor does the pressure end with advancement. Equity partners must continually justify their economic existences — year-after-year.

During my 30 years at a large firm, my billed hours usually ranged from 2,000 to 2,200 yearly. Once or twice, they reached 2,500 and every incremental hour above 2,200 took a increasingly severe toll. Beyond losing any semblance of a personal life, how well does anyone function during the 14th hour of a workday compared to hour 8? A fatigued mind is fuzzy, irrational, less efficient, and prone to error. Most clients paying for an attorney’s 3,000th billed hour in a year are getting very little for their money. Yet some lawyers do that year after year — and some clients encourage such behavior.

The Department of Transportation reviewed scientific studies on the effects of exhaustion on the human mind and body before limiting over-the-road truckers to 70 hours in an 8-day period, after which they must rest for 34 consecutive hours. (http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/rules-regulations/topics/hos/) Ask any Biglaw lawyer the last time he or she worked at that clip (or worse) and then went 34 straight hours without looking at a BlackBerry or talking with clients and colleagues on a cellphone.

Who presents the greater societal danger — a tired, overworked driver exceeding the 8-day maximum of 70 hours, or an attorney maintaining a more strenuous pace? Big-hours legal billers might argue that trucker fatigue is different. When a sleep deprived driver causes a catastrophe, innocent bystanders are at risk. If lawyer exhaustion produces suboptimal or even negative results, the client (or the attorney’s malpractice carrier) pays the price; usually it’s financial. That’s reassuring.

No one wants an attorney who has nothing to do. Likewise, every good lawyer sometimes confronts genuine emergencies that require burning the midnight oil. But a firm’s perennial billable hours winners present potential problems that, for some reason, don’t concern most clients. I’ve never understood why.

KEEP FEEDING PROFITS THE BEAST. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

Posted on October 7, 2010 by thebellyofthebeast

Most Biglaw equity partners are weathering the persistent economic storm quite well. But who’s paying the price?

As the economy cratered in 2009, average equity partner profits for the Am Law 100 actually edged up slightly — to $1.26 million. As the summer of 2010 ended, law firm management consultant Hildebrandt Baker Robbins reported that profits remained healthy in a stagnant market. (http://www.hbrconsulting.com/PMIQ2-2010) (Its Peer Monitor Economic Index (PMI) purports to capture the “drivers of law firm profitability, including rates, demand, productivity and expenses.” How’s that for a nifty, all-inclusive metric?)

Recently, Citi released six-month data for 2010 showing increases in average equity partner profits compared to 2009, notwithstanding flat revenue and reduced demand. (http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/09/citimidyear.html)

How are the equity partners doing it? Look at the PMI components: revenue, expenses, and productivity.

1. During the first half of 2010, billing rates trended up by 4%. According to Citi, that increase could reflect senior partners with higher billing rates doing work that younger lawyers once performed. Such hoarding is the way some partners respond to lean economic times. No one escapes the pressure to maintain hours.

2. Reduced expenses is a nice way of saying that attorneys and staff lost their jobs. Black Thursday in mid-February 2009 was bad enough; Biglaw laid off thousands of associates that week. But Hildebrandt noted that headcount reductions actually peaked months later — in the fourth quarter of 2009. This “relentless focus on cost cutting has managed to sustain profitability.”

The chairman of Citi’s Law Firm Group added, “Given these results, we see the first six months of 2010 as lackluster from a volume perspective but made palatable due to belt-tightening.” Whose belts?

3. Increased productivity is MBA-speak for squeezing more billable hours from attorneys. Hildebrandt expressed concern that the quarter’s 1.7% productivity increase marked a slowdown compared to the 2.3% gains of the two prior quarters. The prime directive remains: Get those hours up.

Now what?

Hilbedrandt’s report: “We may be reaching an inflection point where major fundamental changes in legal service delivery are needed to prosper in the years ahead. New approaches to firm structures, client management, pricing strategies and talent development need to be closely examined. The challenge to firms will be in their willingness to innovate, experiment and change longstanding firm traditions in order to find new avenues of growth and profitability.”

What does that mean? Last week, Hildebrandt’s Lisa Smith offered a five-year scenario in which increased efficiency, outsourcing, and use of staff attorneys could combine to reduce the number of current non-partner attorneys in the Am Law 200 from 65,000 to 47,500 — a 27% drop. (http://www.hbrconsulting.com/blog/archive/2010/09/23/chipping-away-at-the-traditional-model.aspx ) It’s unclear if her assumed efficiency gains included expected law firm consolidations, but mergers of any businesses usually eliminate jobs.

Meanwhile, non-economic metrics — the ones that the predominant Biglaw business model ignores — add another dimension. Associate satisfaction continues to plummet. If someone asked, many partners would express discontent as well. Particularly unhappy would be those feeling vulnerable to the metrics that make decisions automatic in too many big firms: billings, billable hours, and leverage ratios.

Think equity partners are safe? Think again. As Citi’s Law Firm Group chairman noted, “Most firms reduced equity partner headcount in the first half of 2010, so it’s clear that this is a focal point. We believe it will continue to be a priority throughout 2010.”

All of this brings to mind Martin Niemoller’s famous remark about Nazi Germany during the 1930s: “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist…” His litany continued through trade unionists and Jews before concluding,

“When they came for me, no one was left to speak for me.”

Here’s where the analogy fails: More than 85% of attorneys practice outside Biglaw. That’s a lot of survivors.

SOLVING THE BIGLAW MYSTERY OF GROWING CAREER DISSATISFACTION

Posted on September 30, 2010 by thebellyofthebeast

Clues that explain the growing ranks of dissatisfied Biglaw attorneys are everywhere — even on C-Span. I’d intended to watch the recently televised replay of a judicial conference panel discussion for a few minutes, but the ongoing train wreck captivated this onlooker for an hour. I wonder if I can get CLE credit?

Participants included a Biglaw managing partner, the general counsel of Fortune 100 company, and a professor at a top law school. The absence of a law firm management consultant was surprising; they’re ubiquitous.

There’s no reason to name the Biglaw partner or his firm because his views are mainstream — and reveal why attorney career dissatisfaction continues to increase more rapidly in large firms than elsewhere. Here’s a synopsis of his comments:

1. Law schools should turn out project managers. That’s what he and his clients really need because front line opportunities — such as trials for litigators — are disappearing.

2. In their first days at his firm, new associates learn about its finances: “They realize that our 35% profit margins are fragile. They understand the importance of billing their time. They know more about the firm’s finances than I did as a first-year partner.” He didn’t mention Am Law‘s most recent report that his firm’s average equity partner profits exceeded $1 million. Everyone avoided that elephant in the room.

3. When asked whether associates today felt greater work-related pressures, he was adamant: “No. People today are nostalgic for a time that never existed. As an associate, I worked hundreds of hours a week reviewing documents. Today’s associates don’t work any harder, just differently. They leave the office, have dinner with their families, help put the kids to bed, and then work from their home computers. So they actually have it better than I did.”

The client representative on the panel followed with a line that generated the day’s biggest laugh: “I’m wondering how you billed hundreds of hours a week when there are only 168 hours in a week. But then I realized that you were talking about the bill you sent the client!”

No one asked the Biglaw partner an obvious and unsettling question: His firm’s NALP directory reports an associate minimum requirement of 2,000 billable hours yearly. What was the requirement in the early 1970s, when he was an associate? (Answer: There wasn’t one. There also weren’t cellphones or BlackBerrys that tether today’s attorneys to their jobs — 24/7.)

The law professor responded that law schools can’t train project managers because they’re not business schools. Besides, the law requires something different from such vocational-type training. He could have added that fewer that 15% of all attorneys comprise the NLJ 250, thereby prompting the obvious follow-up: Why should law schools tailor curriculum to satisfy such a small segment of the profession anyway?

“With highly paid starting positions in big firms disappearing,” he concluded, “what am I supposed to tell incoming students they’ll be getting for the $150,000 required to obtain a law degree?” No one suggested the truth, however he saw it.

The general counsel disagreed with the Biglaw partner on a key point: “I don’t hire lawyers to be project managers. I want their best judgments and special skills.” The Biglaw partner replied that perhaps the GC didn’t really know what he wanted or needed.

The audience submitted written questions; the best came from a judge: “I didn’t go to law school to become rich. Why is everything so focused on the money? Is professionalism gone and, if so, how do we recover it?”

When such panels include attorneys willing to speak truth to power, we’ll hear honest answers to those inquiries. But who wants that?

ARE THE U.S. NEWS RANKINGS BIGLAW’S BLACK SWAN?

Posted on September 17, 2010 by thebellyofthebeast

An earlier post considered Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s bestseller, The Black Swan. (https://thebellyofthebeast.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/biglaw-and-the-black-swan/ ). Taleb describes the folly of relying on supposedly proven models of the past to anticipate the smooth continuation of existing trends. Such myopic thinking ignores the wholly unexpected Black Swans that actually shape history. The essence of the Black Swan is its serendipity, coupled with its power. It can be good or bad, but it’s always transformative. September 11 was a Black Swan, as were Microsoft and Facebook.

If you accept Taleb’s theory, I think Am Law introduced Biglaw to a Black Swan in 1985 with its profits per equity partner rankings. They encouraged internal behavior that, over time, dramatically changed most large firms’ cultures. Today, accepting conventional wisdom means following managers (few of whom are leaders — a crucial distinction for Taleb) who focus on supposedly proven metrics: billings, billable hours, and associate/partner leverage ratios. Free markets dictate decisions; important things that don’t impact the current year’s bottom-line drop out of key calculations; equity partner profits trees grow to the sky.

But wait! The U.S. News evaluations seem to ignore this crucial Am Law metric. They utilize client and attorney surveys assessing lawyer quality, not firms’ bottom-line profits. In seeking to attain or retain the highest available practice group rating (Tier 1), will firms teach to this new test that the criteria appear to use?

Not so fast. Even as U.S. News released the rankings, big firms began setting the goalposts for the new competition. Because U.S. News departed from its typical numerical approach in favor of tiers for practice groups, Sidley Austin and K&L Gates each claimed the overall #1 position based on their total Tier 1 rankings.

If I’m right, the new rankings will simply accelerate an embedded trend toward lateral recruiting at the highest levels. (http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/09/lateral-uptick.html) Big firms will compete even more ferociously for top partners to fill particular U.S. News practice group holes — and they’ll jettison incumbents to make room. How will high-powered partners decide where to plant themselves? They’ll take their books of business and follow the money. The definitive Am Law metric — average equity partner profits — will remain inviolate. Too many Biglaw partnerships will continue their devolution into collections of attorneys whose principal bond is financial.

So there’s no Black Swan here — just another log on the bonfire that is already consuming much of the profession.

But these developments favor the emergence of a Black Swan that I identified in my earlier post. Australia now has publicly traded law firms. Attorneys in Great Britain have begun preparing to follow that lead when the Legal Services Act becomes effective next year. (http://www.law.com/jsp/law/international/LawArticleIntl.jsp?id=1202463691626)

Biglaw’s ongoing transformation to a species of Big Business could culminate in non-lawyer shareholders and boards. What will stop them? Equity partners who have been hired to buttress a firm’s claim to Tier 1 status in the U.S. News rankings? As relative newcomers, their allegiance to their new firms will be more tenuous. The idea of preserving whatever remains of a unique professional culture will seem antiquated, particularly with the big bucks for their shares of an initial public offering (IPO) dangling before them.

It sure looks to me like the same country that introduced the first black swan to the New World is now exporting something far more ominous for the legal profession.

BIGLAW AND THE BLACK SWAN

Posted on September 6, 2010 by thebellyofthebeast

After reading my novel, The Partnership, an insightful observer wrote that its themes “sound like a biglaw version of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Drawing out the comparisons between your book and Taleb could fill many blog posts.”

This is the first.

Taleb’s title derives from the discovery of what everyone knew didn’t exist. In the Old World, universally reported human experience pointed unambiguously to a single conclusion: All swans were white. Then came the discovery of Australia and its black swans.

The lesson: Widely accepted truths often turn out to be false. Relying on models of the past to anticipate the future can be a fool’s errand, especially if it ignores the wholly unexpected Black Swans that actually shape history. Who imagined that Bill Gates’ boyhood fascination with computers would lead to Microsoft, or that Mark Zuckerberg’s college dorm room at Harvard would be the birthplace of a revolutionary social networking phenomenon?

Black Swans can be good or bad — but they are always transformative. Most of us fail to consider them because we tend to theorize about the future in specific and limited ways from prior experience. For example, Taleb notes, the French built the Maginot Line to defend against German attack following the Great War, only to watch Hitler zip around it during a greater one, World War II.

“What did people learn from the 9/11 episode?” he continues. “Did they learn that some events, owing to their dynamics, stand largely outside the realm of the predictable? No. Did they learn the built-in defect of conventional wisdom? No. What did they figure out? They learned precise rules for avoiding proislamic terrorists and tall buildings.”

The Black Swan came out in 2007 and was a best-seller before the Great Recession — an event that others began calling a Black Swan, although Taleb said it didn’t qualify. Rather, that downturn replays previous Black Swan events — including the 1982 bank failures, 1987 market crash, and 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management — from which intelligent people persistently failed to learn. So-called financial experts with MBAs had lost fortunes betting that such Black Swans were so improbable that they could be ignored. According to Taleb, these empty suits persevered and suckered others into accepting their discredited models, only to have them fail yet again.

So how could this relate to Biglaw? After all, it has enjoyed a 30-year run as straightforward metrics — billings, billable hours, and associate/partner leverage ratios — enabled large firms to produce staggering wealth for their owners. Even as many positions disappeared and revenues remained flat or declined at some firms, average equity partner profits for the Am Law 100 continued to rise.

The dominant Biglaw model is working, right?

Only until a Black Swan appears. It would be presumptuous to predict its form or timing. Indeed, the Black Swan’s essence is its serendipity, coupled with its power. It strikes when overconfidence creates complacency and vigilance takes a vacation.

So for Biglaw, accepting conventional wisdom means following managers (few of whom are leaders — a crucial distinction) who focus on supposedly proven metrics that have made them rich. They let free markets dictate decisions; they ignore things that don’t impact this year’s bottom-line; they watch their equity partner profits trees grow to the sky.

Where in all of this might Biglaw’s Black Swans lurk?

The candidates are too numerous for thoughtful consideration in a single article. Some examples: increasing attorney dissatisfaction at all levels; client resistance to hourly billing regimes; the displacement of a professional ethos with business-school metrics aimed at short-term profit-maximization; prospective lawyers’ growing awareness of Biglaw’s darker side.

But many of us already know about these difficulties, which makes them less likely Black Swan candidates. Then again, the Black Swan need not come as a surprise to everyone. For too long, most Biglaw managers have been oblivious to the profession’s growing challenges; too many behave as if they still are. As Taleb notes, a well-fed turkey that becomes fatter as Thanksgiving approaches is amazed to encounter the ultimate Black Swan event — its slaughter. But the butcher always knew what was coming.

I’ll add one more to the list:

Australia has pioneered a new regulatory regime that allows outsiders — non-lawyers — to invest in private law firms. Some are now publicly traded. http://www.abanet.org/legaled/committees/Standards%20Review%20documents/AnthonyDavis.pdf

Lawyers in Great Britain have begun preparing to follow that lead when the Legal Services Act becomes effective next year. http://www.law.com/jsp/law/international/LawArticleIntl.jsp?id=1202463691626

Could Biglaw’s ongoing transformation to a species of Big Business culminate in non-lawyer shareholders and boards? It’s a frightening prospect — but not so scary that equity partners are likely to forego the enormous short-term windfalls they’d reap from initial public offerings (IPOs) of their firms’ stock. Most view themselves as disproportionately responsible for their own success and will be content to let the next generations fend for themselves in a bleak professional landscape.

Could the same country that introduced the first black swan to the world be exporting something far more momentous?

OUTSOURCING: THE BEGINNING OF A NEW AND IMPROVED BIGLAW BUSINESS MODEL?

Posted on August 16, 2010 by thebellyofthebeast

If you’re a new law school graduate looking for work, or an equity partner seeking to profit this year (and maybe next) from the leverage that high-priced associates add to your firm’s bottom line, outsourcing sounds like a bad idea. But for those concerned about the long-run psychological well-being of the profession, the implications are more ambiguous.

It’s not novel. Throughout corporate America, outsourcing has been an important profit-maximizing technique for a long time. Lawyers have made a lot of money assisting clients in the development and implementation of such strategies. The resulting loss of American jobs has been sold as a necessary price paid to remain competitive in the world economy.

Such cost-minimization makes sense where protocols can assure a quality finished product. But when lead turns up in the paint on children’s toys from China, well….

Now, as the NY Times recently reported, outsourcing has pushed its nose into the biglaw tent. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/business/global/05legal.html) If the trend continues, what is the fate of the dominant large law firm business model that relies on associate/partner leverage as the source of equity partner wealth? (See my earlier article, “Send The Elevator Back Down” at http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/07/harper3071410.html)

Its days may be numbered but, then again, its days may be numbered with or without outsourcing.

As the Times article notes, outsourcing is particularly advantageous for mundane legal tasks — due diligence on corporate deals and document review for major litigation matters. What client can resist paying “one-third to one-tenth” of a big firm’s hourly rates for such work?

The challenge will be to find the limits and assure quality output. Due diligence seems unimportant until a major potential liability gets overlooked. Document review is dull, but large lawsuits have turned on an internal memo buried in a gigantic collection; a discerning eye made all the difference.

Still, it seems likely that clients will gravitate toward firms that can offer lower rates for outsourced attorneys performing necessary but non-critical work. It is equally clear that clients will continue to “pay a lot of money” to lawyers with special experience and expertise — “world-class thought leaders and the best litigators and regulatory lawyers around the world,” as one corporate leader put it in the Times.

With these trends, new law school graduates will face shrinking labor markets, especially at entry level positions in big firms. But for the fortunate few who get jobs, their work could get better as outsourced labor performs some of the menial tasks that now account for most young associates’ billable hours.

Meanwhile, senior attorneys will have new incentives to mentor proteges so they become their firms’ next generation of “world-class thought leaders.” (See my earlier article, “Where Have All The Mentors Gone?” at http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/07/harpermentors.html)

What will all of this mean for equity partner profits? The big firm leaders who do the right things — strict quality control of outsourced work coupled with a serious investment in the development of inside talent — will thirve as their firms deleverage. Unfortunately, others intent on maximizing short-term dollars by prolonging the lives of their leveraged business enterprises will do okay, too — at least for a while. But such a myopic focus runs enormous long-term risks for the affected institutions.

And here’s a wild card: Small and mid-sized firms with talented senior attorneys may find that these new pools of outsourced talent enable them to compete with the mega firms. Size may no longer be everything. In fact, it may not be anything at all.

If I’m correct, the resulting transformation will slow biglaw’s growth rate and, perhaps, shrink that segment of the profession. But instead of the mind-numbing tasks that are the bane of any young attorney’s biglaw existence, associates will find themselves doing work that more closely resembles what they thought being a lawyer meant when they first decided to attend law school. If that happened — and reality began to resemble expectations — lawyers as a group could become more satisfied with their jobs. The unthinkable might even happen: a slow reversal in the tide of recent surveys that consistently rank attorneys near the bottom of all occupations in career fulfillment.

Such a scenario would be an ironic turn of events. The extraordinary wealth that clients now confer on those running today’s highly leveraged big firms could be providing the impetus to upend the profession and force the emergence of a new business model in which leverage no longer mattered.

Of course, everything could careen wildly in a different direction –toward further corporatization of law firms as non-attorneys provide private investment capital, become shareholders, and complete the MBA takeover of the profession. That movement is clearly afoot in Great Britain. (See http://www.abanet.org/legaled/committees/Standards%20Review%20documents/AnthonyDavis.pdf) Once senior partners become accountable to non-attorney boards of directors, the individual autonomy that once defined being a lawyer will have disappeared.

But it doesn’t cost any more to be optimistic, does it?

WHERE HAVE ALL THE MENTORS GONE?

Posted on July 19, 2010 by thebellyofthebeast

Many biglaw leaders should take heed.

In last weekend’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, columnist Peggy Noonan lamented the loss of what she called “adult supervision.” (http://www.peggynoonan.com/article.php?article=531)

Commemorating the 50th annivesary of To Kill A Mockingbird, she recalls the “wise and grounded Atticus Finch, who understands the world and pursues justice anyway, and who can be relied upon.”

She then rattles off a list of world leaders whom she regards as young — President Obama is 48; British Prime Minister Cameron is 43; Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (no relation) is 51. Noonan says they could benefit from the presence of wise advisers like the venerable Finch.

Of course, there’s an obvious problem with her analysis: Finch himself was about the age of the “young men” she now finds in need of wise older counsel. So she misses an essential point: Wisdom is neither the exclusive province of the old nor the assured destination of advancing age.

But Noonan states an important truth when she views the modern world and observes that “there’s kind of an emerging mentoring gap going on in America right now.” She sees it in “a generalized absence of the wise old politician/lawyer/leader/editor who helps the young along, who teaches them the ropes and ways and traditions of a craft.”

That is undoubtedly true for much of biglaw. Why?

There are exceptions within and among firms, but this development flows directly from the MBA-mentality that now dominates most large law firms. It forces leaders and everyone else to focus on short-term metrics — individual billings, billable hours, associate-partner leverage ratios.

The resulting behavior is predictable. Each individual’s drive to attain and preserve position in accordance with such metrics leaves little room (or time) for the personalized mentoring that turns good young lawyers into better older ones. There’s no metric for measuring the future contribution that mentoring makes to the current year’s average profits-per-equity-partner.

For firms adhering to the pervasive biglaw model, the absence of a mentoring metric makes all the difference. In Hildebrandt Baker Robbins’s 2010 Client Advisory to the legal profession, one of the pioneering consultants responsible for the proliferation of biglaw’s misguided metrics aimed at short-term profit-maximizing concludes, “There is a management adage that ‘what gets measured gets done.'” (http://www.hildebrandt.com/2010ClientAdvisory)

I would add this corollary: Throughout biglaw in particular and the world generally, that which lacks a metric gets ignored.

Unfortunately, some of those things are important.

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The Belly of the Beast

Steven J. Harper, Esq.

Tag Archives: leverage ratio

TREATING SYMPTOMS; IGNORING THE DISEASE

ASSOCIATE PAY AND PARTNER MALFEASANCE

THE PERVASIVE AMAZON JUNGLE

THE ILLUSION OF LEISURE TIME

THE NEWEST BIG LAW PARTNERS SPEAK

UGLINESS INSIDE THE AM LAW 100 — PART I

FROM CRAVATH TO CHASE TO CADWALADER

BIG LAW FIRM MANAGEMENT PUZZLES

IS IT REALLY MORE COMPLEX THAN GREED?

THE GOLDMAN CULTURE

THE BIG LAW PARTNER LOTTERY

THE NON-EQUITY PARTNER BUBBLE

FED TO DEATH

OCCUPY BIG LAW

A MODERN TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS

THE ARROGANCE OF OVERCONFIDENCE

THE GOLDMAN MODEL FOR BIG LAW?

GREED ATOP THE PYRAMIDS

LAW SCHOOL DECEPTION

MEASURING VALUES

BONUS TIME!

“LIES, DAMN LIES, AND STATISTICS”

THE END OF LEVERAGE? JUST KIDDING.

WORK-LIFE BALANCE MONTH

KEEP FEEDING PROFITS THE BEAST. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

SOLVING THE BIGLAW MYSTERY OF GROWING CAREER DISSATISFACTION

ARE THE U.S. NEWS RANKINGS BIGLAW’S BLACK SWAN?

BIGLAW AND THE BLACK SWAN

OUTSOURCING: THE BEGINNING OF A NEW AND IMPROVED BIGLAW BUSINESS MODEL?

WHERE HAVE ALL THE MENTORS GONE?

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