Tag Archives: MBA mentality

ABOUT THOSE BIGLAW ASSOCIATE SATISFACTION SURVEYS….

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The 2010 American Lawyer survey reports the lowest overall level of associate satisfaction since 2004.

The firms faring poorly will take comfort in standard disclaimers: response rates are low and negatively biased; survey questions are flawed; the poll captures attitudes from a generation of young attorneys who feel entitled. We all know the list. Lawyers specialize in explaining away bad facts and sometimes the critique is valid.

But before lower-ranked firms throw these results into a sea of self-serving rationalizations, they should consider the criteria by which others did quite well: relations with partners and other associates, interest in and satisfaction level of the work, training and guidance, policy on billable hours, management openness about firm strategies and partnership chances, the firm’s attitude toward pro bono work, compensation and benefits, and the respondents’ inclination to stay at their firms for at least two more years.

Now correlate each factor to the metrics that dominate today’s Biglaw business models — billings, billable hours, and associate/partner leverage ratios, all of which produce equity partner profits. For too many, the relationship is inverse. The absence of a metric by which firms hold partners accountable for associate satisfaction means that it gets ignored.

What’s the solution? Pay them more money? They won’t object, but according to a recent survey published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, additional income beyond $75,000 a year doesn’t increase happiness. (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/27/1011492107.full.pdf+html?sid=61f259ad-92a2-470f-b218-23537d8e2972)

How about just telling them to suck it up and push through to a better day? Doesn’t time cure all ills? Another NAS study suggests that our sense of global well-being is U-shaped. We start at a high point around age 18, move down until 50, and take a major upward turn until 85. (http://www.pnas.org/content/107/22/9985.abstract?sid=61f259ad-92a2-470f-b218-23537d8e2972) This comes from a 2008 telephone survey asking 340,000 people how they felt on the day the researchers called them. No attempt was made to control for health, employment, marital status, or anything else. It’s just a cross-sectional slice of the population at a moment in time. In short, draw conclusions at your peril.

Still, it’s interesting to compare these results with recent evidence about the happiness life-cycle of many Biglaw attorneys.

There no need for melodrama or hyperbole. Many lawyers of all ages have fulfilling careers and lead satisfying lives. Generalizations are always treacherous. Within and among firms, there are always exceptions to whatever is typical or predominant.

But the big picture can be informative. In the ABA’s 2007 survey of the profession, about 60% of attorneys in practice fewer than 5 years said they would recommend a legal career to a young person. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement; however, it’s better than more senior attorneys’ views. For those practicing more than 10 years, it dropped to 40%.

Of course, “more than 10 years” covers lawyers from 35 to 90. So it’s difficult to know if the data support a U-shaped theory. They lend some credence to the notion that there’s a steep slide for people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. But is there an uptick when attorneys hit the mid-century mark? That’s not clear — and it seems like a long wait.

It’s not all bad news. In the ABA survey, 84% found the practice of law to be intellectually stimulating. When I’ve invited lawyers of different ages and stages of their careers to make guest appearances in my undergraduate course on the profession, Biglaw attorneys spoke enthusiastically about tackling cutting-edge legal problems. Then they heard this question:

“What has been your happiest time as a lawyer?”

Here are some answers:

A 20-something senior associate: “Certainly not now. My life is not my own. I’m billing long hours in the hope of becoming a partner. Then I’ll gain more autonomy and control.”

A 30-something non-equity partner: “Life was easier when I was an associate. But I work hard now because I think things will get better if I make equity partner. Of course, that’s a big ‘if”.”

A 40-something equity partner: “I never realized how good I had it as an associate. Now I feel pressure to bring in clients so I can justify my equity compensation; that process never ends. You think that becoming an equity partner means you’ve crossed some finish line, but that’s when the race really begins.”

A 50-something equity partner: “I don’t know what I’ll do when I’m not a partner in my firm anymore. I haven’t had time to think about what’s next for me. Now, when I consider that prospect, the future becomes a source of anxiety.”

I don’t know to what extent these attorneys’ comments represent their respective demographic groups in Biglaw or elsewhere. But it’s no surprise to me that surveys consistently find practicing lawyers to be among the least satisfied workers and that attorneys in large firms today have the most difficulty finding the upward leg of the U-shaped happiness curve, assuming it’s out there.

The Biglaw business model has provided some of its attorneys with a lot more money than their predecessors. Career satisfaction that contributes to overall happiness?

That’s more complicated.

BIGLAW AND THE BLACK SWAN

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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?

ALONG CAME LAW FIRM MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS

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In the final analysis, Biglaw leaders have only themselves to blame, but they didn’t stumble into the world of misguided metrics on their own. They paid outside experts to guide the way — and they’re still doing it.

Thirty years ago, few undergraduates went to law school because they thought that a legal career would make them rich. For example, most students at Harvard with that ambition were on the other side of the Charles getting MBAs; the river formed a kind of natural barrier. The law was something special — a noble profession — or so most of us believed.

Particularly in large firms, nobility has yielded to business school-type metrics that focus on short-term profits-per-partner. The resulting impact on the internal fabric of such firms is depicted in my legal thriller, The Partnership (http://www.amazon.com/Partnership-Novel-Steven-J-Harper/dp/0984369104/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273000077&sr=1-1) But other collateral damage includes the decline of mentoring that produced great lawyers in my baby boomer generation. (See my article, “Where Have All The Mentors Gone?” – http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/07/harpermentors.html).

Among the reactions to my mentoring observations was this:

“I am particularly intrigued by your reference to the role modern legal consulting firms have played in the demise of law as a profession. This is worthy of a blog post in and of itself and I look forward to it.”

I discussed this subject in an earlier post, but it’s worth another look.

Hildebrandt Baker Robbins is the successor to Hildebrandt, Inc., one of the early pioneers in what became a cottage industry: law firm management consulting. The company’s 2010 Client Advisory includes this line:

“In our view, one of the serious misuses of metrics in the past few years has been the overreliance on profits per equity partner as the defining index of a firm’s value and quality.”  (http://www.hildebrandt.com/2010ClientAdvisory)

Really? Who encouraged the use of this ubiquitous metric on which Hildebrandt has now soured? As Dana Carvey’s church lady character might say, “Could it be….Hildebrandt?”

Of course, it wasn’t alone. When The American Lawyer published its first ranking of the Am Law 50  (now  grown to 100) in 1985, what was once off limits in polite company — how much money a person made — became an open and notorious measuring stick of law firm performance: average profits per partner. Greed became respectable as inherently competitive firm leaders began teaching to the Am Law test so they could gain or retain position in its annual listing.

When the 1990-1991 recession rattled a much smaller version of what is now called biglaw, the National Law Journal’s annual survey of the largest 250 firms in 1991 quoted Bradford Hildebrandt, who 16 years earlier had founded the company bearing his name:

“In most firms, current management has never operated within a recession and didn’t know how to deal with it…” (“The NLJ 250: Annual Survey of the Nation’s Largest Law Firms — Overview — The Boom Abates,” The National Law Journal, September 30, 1991 (Vol. 14, No. 4))

So who could save us from ourselves? As they watched profits slide, worried law firm leaders turned to Hildebrandt and other experts who could assist in bringing business school principles and MBA-type metrics to their big firms. By 1996, Mr. Hildebrandt himself had diagnosed the situation and offered his remedy in that year’s NLJ 250 issue:

“The real problem of the 1980s was the lax admissions standards of associates of all firms to partnership. The way to fix that now is to make it harder to become a partner. The associate track is longer and more difficult, and you have a very big movement to two-tiered structured partnership.” (“The NLJ 250 Annual Survey of the Nation’s Largest Law Firms: A Special Supplement — More Lawyers Than Ever In 250 Largest Firms,” The National Law Journal, September 30, 1996 (Vol. 19, No. 5))

With such cheerleaders at their sides, senior partners focused on the three legs supporting the PEP (profits per equity partner) stool: billings, billable hours, and associate/partner leverage ratios.

Hourly rates marched skyward — even during recessions — increasing an average of 6% to 8% annually from 1998 to 2007. Billable hours targets likewise rose. Yet talented attorneys who would have advanced to equity partner a decade earlier received their walking papers as firms increased leverage ratios, which doubled between 1985 and 2010 for the Am Law 50. (http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/05/classof1985.html) With a few sharp turns of the costs screw, the game was won.

The results were mixed. For equity partners in the Am Law 100, average profits soared to more than $1 million annually — and rose during the Great Recession. Yet today, attorneys in big firms have become the law’s most dissatisfied workers — even though lawyers as a group were already leading most occupations in that unpleasant race.

The law firm as collection of men and women bound together in common pursuit of a noble profession yielded to an MBA mentality that relied on business school metrics to produce more dollars — the new measure of individual status and firm success. Valued partners who wouldn’t have considered leaving in earlier times began to follow the money — eroding concepts of loyalty and shared mission that created a firm’s identity over generations.

Oh, what a mistake, Hildebrandt now urges — not unlike Harvard’s new business school dean who looks hopefully (but in vain) to the law as an alternative model that might restore integrity to that world. (See my earlier article, “The MBA Mentality Rethnks Itself?” — http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/05/harper1.html)

What does Hildebrandt now propose to replace profits per equity partner as the key measure of overall firm performance? Profits per employee. But it simultaneously suggests that client satisfaction ratings should replace billable hours while employee satisfaction ratings supplant leverage.

Is your head spinning over the interplay among these complicated and confusing new metrics? Hildebrandt has the answer:

“As always, we stand ready to assist our clients in negotiating through these new and uncertain waters.”

How comforting.

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

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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?

ON THE BEACH

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While I’m away next week, perhaps you’ll reconsider one of my earlier posts, “VACATION? WHAT’S THAT?”  (https://thebellyofthebeast.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/vacation-whats-that/))

Or, you could read my new legal thriller, The Partnership. It’s enjoying brisk sales and receiving strong reviews from lawyers and lay readers alike. (http://www.amazon.com/Partnership-Novel-Steven-J-Harper/dp/0984369104/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273000077&sr=1-1 )

A new post will appear during the week of August 16.

MIRED IN METRICS? HAVE SOME MORE!

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Once a bad situation spins out of control, is there any way to corral it? When all else fails, try making things worse.

The ABA recently released its report detailing just a few of the ways that U.S. News law school rankings have been counterproductive for prospective lawyers and the profession — from driving up the costs of legal education to driving down the importance of diversity.  (http://www.abanet.org/legaled/nosearch/Council2010/OpenSession2010/F.USNewsFinal%20Report.pdf)

As U.S.News now develops law firm rankings, the report concludes with an ominous warning:

“Once a single rankings system comes to dominate a particular field, it is very difficuly to displace, difficult to change and dangerous to underestimate the importance of its methodology to any school or firm that operates in the field. This, we believe, is the most important lesson from the law school experience for those law firms who may be ranked by U.S. News in the future.”

In other words, rankings sometimes function as any so-called definitive metric: They displace reasoned judgment. Independent thought becomes unnecessary because the methodology behind the metric dictates decision-makers’ actions.

Since 1985, many big firms have become living examples of the phenomenon. That year, The American Lawyer published its first-ever Am Law 50 list of the nation’s largest firms. Most firm leaders now teach to the Am Law test, annually seeking to maximize revenues and average profits per equity partner. The resulting culture of billings, billable hours, and associate/partner leverage ratios begins to explain why surveys report that large firm lawyers lead the profession in career dissatisfaction.(http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/pulse_of_the_legal_profession/print/) Without a metric for it, attorney well-being — and the factors contributing to it — drop out of the equation.

Courtesy of U.S. News, large firms now stand on the threshhold of more metrics. Will they make working environments of firms that have succcumbed to the profits-per-partner criterion worse?

It depends, but more of yet another bad thing — rankings — could produce something good — forcing individuals to sift through contradictory data, think for themselves, and make a real decision. But that can happen only if U.S. News produces a list of “best law firms” that bears little resemblance to the rank ordering of the Am Law 100 in average equity partner profits. Such contradictory data would confuse newly minted attorneys and force them to develop their own criteria for decision.

The American Lawyer itself provides a useful example of the possibilities. Eight years ago, it began publishing the Am Law “A-List,” which has gained limited traction as a moderating influence on the Am Law average profits-per-equity-partner metric that otherwise dominates decision-making at most big firms. The A-List’s additional considerations bear on the quality of a young lawyer’s life — associate satisfaction, diversity, and pro bono activities. The myopic focus on short-term dollars still dominates decisions in most big firms, but the A-List has joined the conversation.

What methodology will U.S. News employ in evaluating law firms? If it follows the approach of its law school ranking counterparts, many firms will game the system, just as some law schools have. (See my earlier article, “THE U.S. NEWS RANKINGS ARE OUT!” (https://thebellyofthebeast.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/the-us-news-rankings-are-out/)) But misguided and manipulatable metrics aren’t inevitable.

Talent is essential for any successful firm, large or small. Other qualities — collegiality, mentoring, community, high morale accompanying a shared sense of professional purpose — make a workplace special. Can the U.S. News find ways to measure those qualities?

That’s the challenge. But I fear that students won’t bother focusing on the U.S. News methodology or its flaws. More likely, whatever rankings emerge from the process will provide — as they have for so many deliberating the choice of a law school — an easy final answer.

Ceding such control over life’s direction to others is rarely a good idea. There is no substitute for personal  involvement in deciding the things that matter most. That means asking recruiters tough questions, scrutinizing the lives of a firm’s senior associates and partners, and finding role models who are living a life that a new attorney envisions for her- or himself.

In the end, the current large firm business model and its self-imposed associate/partner leverage ratios will continue to render success — defined as promotion to equity partnership — an elusive dream for most who seek it. For those who become dissatisfied with their jobs, time passes slowly. So everyone joining a big firm — even a person intending to remain only for the years required to repay student loans — has ample incentive to get that first big decision after law school correct.

So why would intelligent young attorneys let U.S. News’ self-proclaimed experts make it with something as silly as a ranking? Probably for the same reasons that they relied on U.S. News to make their law school decisions for them three years earlier.

Someday, maybe there will be a U.S. News formula for choosing a spouse. Then won’t life be simple?

DEADLY SERIOUS

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For some reader out there, this may be the most important article I’ve written — and there’s no room for levity. Yet another biglaw attorney ended his own life.

On July 15, a Chicago subway train struck and killed a Reed Smith partner. Late last week, the Cook County medical examiner confirmed that the 57-year-old father of two intentionally placed himself in harm’s way. (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202463774221&rss=newswire)

It’s difficult to determine what leads anyone to take such an irrevocable step. The lines that tether each of us to this earth are thin and fragile. But the relative frequency with which lawyers in large firms have become the subject of such recent reports is disconcerting.

In April 2009, a 59-year-old Yale Law School graduate who headed Kilpatrick Stockton’s Supreme Court and appellate advocacy group took his own life. http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/a_death_in_the_office/

A month later, two more attorney suicides made the news — an associate and a partner in two different large firms. http://abajournal.com/news/disappointments_preceded_suicides_by_lawyers_at_three_major_law_firms In

January 2010, a 45-year-old partner in Baker & Hostetler’s Houston office apparently shot himself on a Galveston beach. http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/01/tragedy.html

Are these events more frequent? Or just more frequently reported? I fear it’s the former.

We’ve all encountered unhappy attorneys, but during my first 25 years in a big firm, I’d never heard of a lawyer anywhere who’d taken his or her own life. When I attended such a funeral for a young partner in 2005, eulogies confirmed that he’d battled internal demons since childhood.

That insight offered comfort. Survivors can move forward more easily when viewing themselves as dramatically different from the deceased. It requires a skill that lawyers hone: distinguishing otherwise relevant precedent.

Then came the unavoidable wave that began in early 2009.

Only those closest to the victim can even begin to describe the special circumstances surrounding his or her plight. The causes of such fatalities are as unique as the individuals involved. The choice to continue living becomes a frighteningly close call for some. Severe depression, other mental illness, and unrelenting physical pain can wreak incomprehensible havoc. None makes suicide a correct decision for the afflicted — just understandable. But if any such factors contributed to the recent spate of biglaw victims, the public reports didn’t disclose them.

Maybe government lawyers, attorneys in small- or mid-size firms, or those in other positions are committing suicide, too, but receiving less media attention. For example, when a 64-year-old Connecticut solo real estate practitioner hanged himself in November 2009, press coverage was minimal. (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202435932676) But  such an argument loses its appeal when you consider that attorneys in the 250 largest firms comprise fewer than 15% of those practicing.

Does the interaction between the dominant large firm business model and the economic downturn provide a partial explanation? After all, most of the recently reported attorney suicides involved accomplished biglaw partners in their 40s and 50s.

No single set of shoulders bears the blame, and only the respective firms know whether or to what extent their actions might have contributed specifically to these final acts. I make no accusations in that regard.

But as a general matter, firms adhering religiously to an MBA-mentality of misguided metrics — billings, billable hours, and associate-partner leverage — as fundamental criteria for lawyer evaluation have become less collegial and more unforgiving. Even in good times, justifying your own economic existence anew during every review cycle can be unsettling or worse. For some, the feared loss of income or status can be powerfully unpleasant.

Assuming that they might have contributed even minimally to these tragedies, the pressures of the dominant biglaw model aren’t disappearing any time soon. So what’s my point? Simply this: The regime doesn’t have to victimize the most vulnerable.

Everyone — especially lawyers — should periodically assess whether the fit of a chosen job is right. Even if it’s not, the work may still be an acceptable way to make a living. No job is perfect; that’s why they call it work. But for some, the psychological toll can mount in dangerous ways. In such cases, only individual action can arrest a downward slide.

That might mean counseling, viewing your employment differently, finding a new legal job, or leaving the profession altogether. One thing is certain: For the chronically distressed, inaction can become a lethal decision.

In my Convocation Address to the Northwestern University Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences graduating class of 2010 last month, the line that interrupted my remarks with the longest and loudest applause from the 10,000 students and parents in attendance was also the most important:

“Seeking help when you need it is never a sign of weakness; it’s proof of strength.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP3Uhiol6Vs)

I promise a lighter article next time.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE MENTORS GONE?

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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.

BABY BOOMERS STRIKE AGAIN

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Getting old is tough. But not nearly as tough as being young these days.

Recently, the National Law Journal reported that an Am Law  top 20 firm adopted a new policy allowing partners two addtional years before they must “begin giving business to younger colleagues.” Instead of 65, they’ll now have to start that process at 67. (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202458271311)

Meanwhile, a prominent 63-year-old white-collar defense attorney left his big firm of 16 years to avoid its mandatory retirement age (65). He declined his old firm’s offer of a two-year exemption that would have given him until 67. (http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2010/05/mark-tuohey-leaves-vinson-elkins-for-brown-rudnick-cites-retirement-policy.html)

And the June ABA Journal includes the following admonition from the organization’s president:

“In August 2007, the ABA adopted a policy rejecting mandatory age-based retirement policies. The recommendation urging this advance is worth considering and adoption by all legal employers.”

Yes, she’s a 60-something baby boomer in a big firm, too.

What’s going on? Forget lip-service paid to the old age-discrimination argument against forced departure of equity partners. That sword of Damocles has floated over the profession forever, yet somehow current big firm leaders replaced their predecessors.

So why the big outcry now? The current chorus reflects an unintended consequence of a flawed biglaw business model: resistance to intergenerational transition. But extending check-out time is a bad move for the firm that does it, the younger attorneys working there, and aging baby boomers unwilling to contemplate life after the law.

Aging rainmakers have books of business that make them indispensable to many large  firms. Why? Throughout biglaw, simplistic metrics (billings, billable hours, and leverage) have determined individual partners’ annual compensation with an eye toward maximizing short-term average profits-per-partner that appear in Am Law‘s annual rankings.

It’s become bad long-term news for the firm. In such a culture, partners have every incentive to retain client responsibilities and none to mentor proteges or promote intergenerational transition. As they age, the old-timers hoard their marbles and threaten to take them elsewhere. Does that sound like a prescription for long-term institutional stability?

What about younger lawyers hoping to inherit clients? Many will find themselves in the position of the wealthy parents’ child awaiting a large bequest. By the time it comes, the kid will be in his 50s. Meanwhile, blockage wreaks havoc all the way down the food chain.

How about the aging attorneys themselves? Encouraging them to deny their own mortality isn’t helpful. Sorry, but once you’re over 65, you may be young at heart, but to the rest of the world, your colorists and/or your combovers aren’t persuasive.

Here’s the painful truth: we baby boomers are not that special. Think you’re indispensable? Put your hand in a pail of water, pull it out, and look at the size of the hole you leave. That’s how indispensable you are. Do you remember any of your own mentors fondly? Well, someday that’s what you’ll be to others — if you truly succeed in the ways that matter most.

Those who have followed this blog from the beginning know that its first series of posts, “PUZZLE PIECES — Parts 1 through 12” (now archived in “CONNECTING THE DOTS”), dramatizes the problem of aging partners who hang on too long.  (https://thebellyofthebeast.wordpress.com/category/connecting-the-dots/) Special ciriticism goes to those who have also inculcated their firms with a business school mentality of misguided metrics. Such baby boomers are now positioning themselves to extract one  final pound of flesh on the way to dotage.

Are these aging leaders who retain literal death grips on their billings positive role models for successors? If the firms themselves don’t survive them, it won’t matter, will it?

IT’S NOT JUST ME

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They acknowledge it’s a tough sell.

The co-chairman of a large, well-respected law firm has teamed with the former senior vice president and general counsel of General Electric to write an article that appeared in the May issue of The American Lawyer. The title says it all: “Noblesse Oblige: Firms must teach the younger generation what it means to be a true professional.”  (http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pdf/Noblesse_Oblige.pdf)

Here’s the first paragraph.

“Law firms have been moving from loosely managed associations of professionals to disciplined business organizations for more than a generation. This shift has caused an erosion of professional values (lawyers’ traditional commitment to enhancing society) and has increased the focus on economic return (firms’ relentless quest for escalating profits per partner).”

So how did that happen? Why doesn’t the younger generation already know what it means to be a true professional? Who have been their role models?

Better not to ask. Like me, the authors are members of the baby boomer generation that, as a group, bears responsiblity for a culture that some of us hope younger attorneys can change. In other words, do as we now say, not as too many of us did and still do.

Their suggestions start with the toughest job of all: persuading firm partners to move away from “inward-looking economics (more hours, more leverage, more profits, regardless of value)….”

For example, consider the concept of “productivity” — a bill of goods that self-styled legal consultants have sold to willing biglaw buyers for the past two decades. Increasing productivity has become a nice way of saying: “Get your billable hours  up.” In the Great Recession, it has translated into layoffs so that survivors worked harder.

The authors’ approach would revolutionize most firms’ fundamental cultures. The resulting benefits would flow to partners, associates, the unrepresented, and the community.

But it all begins with a willingness to jettison the business school mentality of misguided metrics that has made profits per partner biglaw’s pervasive measuring stick — in substantial part because it has made most biglaw equity partners wealthy beyond their wildest law school dreams.

How will equity partners respond to the news that they’ll have to earn less now for the promise of longer-term non-economic gains to the profession and, I dare say, to their own improved psychological well-being?

Sophocles wrote in Antigone, “No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.”

Shakespeare’s formulations — subsequently condensed to “don’t kill the messenger” — were likewise on point: “Though it be honest, it is never good to bring bad news” (Antony and Cleopatra) and “Yet the first bringer of unwelcome news Hath but a losing office.”  (Henry IV, Part 2.)

And when it comes to a willingness to hear unpleasant news about average equity partner profits, those of us familiar with the profession know too well the pervasive presence of biglaw’s equivalents to Alice in Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts:

“Off with their heads!”

EARLY RETURNS

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No, the title of this post doesn’t refer to Tuesday’s primary election results in a handful of states, although they confirm what I’ve thought for a while. Voters are anti-incumbent, not just anti-Democratic or anti-Obama. That’s one reason Rand Paul trounced Mitch McConnell’s guy in Kentucky. But this is not a space for ideological diatribe or political spin.

Rather, today’s caption refers to personal referenda of sorts.

First, the Belly’s audience is growing.

The American Lawyer is now running some of my posts. On May 10, Am Law Daily published “The MBA Mentality Rethinks Itself?” (http://amlawdaily.typepad.com/amlawdaily/2010/05/harper1.html)  I’m grateful to editors willing to air a controversial voice.

Second — and speaking of controversy — my new legal thriller, The Partnership, (http://www.amazon.com/Partnership-Novel-Steven-J-Harper/dp/0984369104/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273000077&sr=1-1), is selling well and generating strong reactions.

Big firm attorneys have offered these responses:

“Great read…It’s a very fair and accurate representation of large law firms. This is how we operate.”

“I enjoyed reading your novel — and was reminded how things changed over the years…and hardly for the better.”

“Great stuff…highly enjoyable.”

In contrast, non-lawyers have said:

“Now I have a more informed concept of ‘billable hours.’ Wow!” 

“Your book has disturbed me. Greatly. Do lawyers really behave this way?”

Quite a juxtaposition, isn’t it? Lay persons become shocked and outraged at attorney attitudes that most lawyers themselves take for granted.

“How can we change people, so they look at things differently — without a myopic view that maximizes short-term profits at the expense of other things that matter?” the last commentator asked.

Here’s what I told him:

1. You can’t. The trends that trouble you are too imbedded; the resulting financial rewards flowing to the few are too great. Perhaps more significantly, the things that disturb you most — including undue reliance on misguided short-term metrics — aren’t unique to the legal profession. Big firm lawyers use billings, billable hours, leverage ratios, and profits per equity partner. Ask journalists, doctors, college professors, and others to describe the metrics by which they’re held accountable. Then ask them if they regard themselves as members of a profession or participants in a business enterprise.

2. Sometimes you can hold up a mirror to a person who then doesn’t like the image that appears. A book can try to do that, but it’s hard to dislodge internal rationalizations that justify a lifetime of unfortunate behavior.

3. Real hope resides with the next generation. Our kids and grandchildren will have to decide that they want things to be different. That’s what we baby boomers did, only to discover that different didn’t always mean better.

Unfortunately, without mentors and models of success that can compete with the MBA-mentality of misguided metrics now dominating too many big law firms and other once-noble professions, our progeny face a daunting task.

Now you understand the twin thoughts appearing immediately following The Partnership‘s inside title page:

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant” and “Forewarned is forearmed.”

“SEND THE ELEVATOR BACK DOWN…”

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Kevin Spacey regards late actor Jack Lemmon as a key influence in his life. He often quotes Lemmon’s famous remark:

“If you’re lucky enough to have done well, then it’s your responsibility to send the elevator back down.”

I thought about those comments as I read this year’s Am Law 100 listings and then took another look at last year’s. Rather than sending the elevator back down, most biglaw leaders seem to be pulling the ladder up.

A year ago, the editors of American Lawyer observed that since 1999, the number of non-equity partners in Am Law 100 firms increased threefold. But  the equity ranks rose by only one-third. For context, that was a decade when demand for all legal services surged and large firms in particular experienced explosive growth in revenues, headcount, and profitability.

In other words, there was more room everywhere — except at the top, apparently.

The May 2010 issue of American Lawyer noted that as gross revenues for the Am Law 100 fell, average equity partner profits for the group actually increased to over $1.26 million. How did that happen?

Answer: A multi-pronged attack.

First, firms increased productivity — which is another way of saying that some associates lost their jobs so the survivors could bill more hours. Remember Black Thursday in mid-February 2009 — a second St. Valentine’s Day massacre?

Second, they reduced staff, slashed summer programs, deferred or withdrew previous offers to new hires, and cut other expenses.

Finally and less publicly, some firms quietly moved equity partners to income status while putting the brakes on new entrants to the equity ranks. As a result, the number of non-equity partners rose again in 2009. That bulge in the biglaw python now comprises almost 40% of all Am Law 100 law firm partners.

Where will they go?

Maybe someday the biglaw benefactors bankrolling the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) will allow that organization systematically to gather tracking data that will tell us, just as it does for associates. You might think that all of the free market proselytizers in large firms would embrace more transparency on a topic of such central importance to law students trying to make career decisions.

Think again. NALP tried, but the organization ceased collection efforts in December 2009 because firms balked at providing it. In April, a prominent group of judges, professors, and attorneys wrote a letter criticizing NALP’s capitulation. In response, its executive director offered assurances that the board would consider the issue on April 26.

Now what?

25 YEARS…

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There are no other lawyers in my family. One of my sons has a rock band, Harper Blynn, that just released its new album, The Loneliest Generation. (http://www.myspace.com/harperblynn)

It’s an anthem for young adults, but it also engages my Beatles-era baby boomer mind. The album’s first track — 25 Years — resonates on many levels. Fortuitously, it also marks the end of a time span that began with the first ever Am Law listing of the nation’s largest firms.

In its 1985 inaugural appearance, there were only 51 Am Law firms. (A tie required expanding the first group from its intended 50.) For a while, the annual lists were of passing interest, mostly to the profession’s voyeurs. But eventually, the rankings assumed a status that revolutionized the profession — in a very big way.

Once upon a time, how much money a person made wasn’t the subject of polite conversation. At least in the large law firm world,  Am Law changed all of that. It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened.

For many firms, a key metric became definitive: average equity partner profits. Wrapped in illusory objectivity, decisions became easier:

“The numbers don’t lie.”

As firm leaders themselves became armed with MBAs, more business school-type metrics and jargon began to displace meaningful discussion about quality lawyering:

“What are your billable hours?”

“What’s the leverage ratio of non-equity lawyers working on the matter?”

“What client billings comprise the ‘business case’ for promoting an attorney to equity partner?”

And now the rhetoric is simpler as the transformation from profession to bottom-line business has become complete:

“A dollar of revenue is a dollar of revenue, period.”

“I’m just trying to run a business.”

Along the way, attorneys at many firms found the road to equity partnership longer and less certain. But things played out well for the winners, although retaining that status became more challenging, too. In 1990, average equity partner profits for the Am Law 100 were $565,000. Last year, in the midst of economic recession, they were still over $1.26 million.

How did all of this affect the culture of many firms? There’s no convenient metric for measuring that impact, but try this one:

In surveys identifying those who are the unhappiest and least satisfied workers in any occupation, lawyers — especially those in  big firms — consistently lead the pack. It’s a race no one wants to win.

Which takes me to the chorus of Harper Blynn’s 25 Years:

“You don’t have to go the lonely way —

— That wrecks your heart with sorrow and leaves your mind in disarray —

Don’t pretend that you don’t know –

         — Twenty-five years….and nothin’ to show.”

SECOND AND THIRD THOUGHTS?

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Business school deans searching for professional models that will restore ethical legitimacy to MBA programs and principles aren’t the only ones second-guessing their earlier impacts.

At last week’s annual meeting of the Seventh Circuit Bar Association, Hildebrandt Baker Robbins participated in a panel discussion as a representative of the cottage industry it spawned: law firm management consulting. A 2010 Client Advisory on the legal profession’s immediate past and predicted future included this line:

“In our view, one of the serious misues of metrics in the past few years has been the overreliance on profits per equity partner as the defining index of a firm’s value and quality.”

Great. Now you tell us. Or I should say, now you change your mind. Or do you?

As the 1990-1991 recession decimated a much smaller version of what is now called biglaw, the National Law Journal’s annual survey of the largest 250 firms in 1991 quoted Bradford Hildebrandt, who in 1975 founded the company bearing his name:

“In most firms, current management has never operated within a recession and didn’t know how to deal with it…”

So who could save us from ourselves? Hildebrandt Inc. became one of the leading players in bringing business school principles and MBA-type metrics into law firm management.

By 1996, Mr. Hildebrandt himself had analyzed our situation and offered this assessment in that year’s NLJ 250 issue:

“The real problem of the 1980s was the lax admissions standards of associates of all firms to partnership. The way to fix that now is to make it harder to become a partner. The associate track is longer and more difficult, and you have a very big movement to two-tiered structured partnership.”

Did most big firms heed his advice? And how. It was an easy sale based on the promise of higher equity partner profits. That was the definitive metric, wasn’t it?

Now Hildebrandt offers a new metric to replace profits per equity partner as the key measure of overall firm performance: profit per employee.

What’s the new goal?

“Greater efficiency in the delivery of legal services,” the Advisory asserts.

Does the new guiding metric embody a more extreme version of an approach that has dominated most big firms for the past 20 years? Perhaps. But some proposals for individual partner evaluation hint at the need for a mid-course correction. Instead of billable hours, Hildebrandt suggests client satisfaction ratings. Rather than leverage, employee satisfaction ratings would matter.

Confused? Hildebrandt knows just the consulting firm to help implement these complex and seemingly contradictory metrics:

“As always, we stand ready to assist our clients in negotiating through these new and uncertain waters.”

Thanks so much for all of your help.

THE MBA MENTALITY RETHINKS ITSELF?

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Yesterday, the Harvard Business School named its new dean.

According to the Wall Street Journal (May 5, 2010, p. B9), Professor Nitin Nohria says “his focus will be on business ethics, a cause he has long championed, particularly during the financial crisis. He has also been a vocal critic of management education and the leaders it produces.”

What does that have to do with the legal topics that usually occupy this space?

As the Great Recession deepened, Nohria and a colleague wrote that management should become a profession, complete with a code of ethics similar to that for lawyers. (“It’s Time To Make Management a True Profession,” Harvard Business Review, October 2008) Nohria wants to move business leaders away from a myopic focus on maximizing shareholder value toward a broader social vision of their roles as institutional custodians and citizens. Looking to the legal profession as a model, he hopes to restore legitmacy lost over the last decade.

Maybe he has Atticus Finch in mind. Sadly, Finch is a fictional character. It’s too late for the most lucrative and influential segment of the profession to help him.

The tide has already taken most of biglaw out to sea in the direction he seeks to reverse. Following their corporate clients’ examples, firm leaders have embraced an MBA-mentality. Increasingly over the past 20 years, large law firm managers themselves have MBAs and have relied on business-school metrics — billable hours, leverage ratios, and profits-per-partner — to dictate decisions that shape the culture of such places.

How that happened and the unfortunate behavior that adherence to such deceptively objective metrics can produce are subjects for another day (and the novel I just published — The Partnership.

For now, the point is this: If Dean Nohria is looking for a new model of something that is a profession, rather than a collection of bottom-line businesses where MBA-type metrics set the tone, he’ll have to look elsewhere.

Does anyone have any candidates?

LIZARD-BRAIN REMNANTS…

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Tuesday night’s Nova episode on PBS –“Mind Over Money” (April 27) — waded into the continuing debate over what went wrong to produce the recent economic collapse. Coincidentally, Goldman Sachs executives spent the day explaining themselves to the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. Meanwhile, biglaw leaders around the world anxiously await the April 29 release of this year’s Am Law 100 rankings.

Maybe these things are related.

Nova interviewed scientific researchers who think they’ve identified the human brain’s unique response to money. MRIs show that it activates deep recesses in the mind — areas that evolutionists believe we share with the earliest forms of life, such as lizards.

Once engaged, those impulses become as powerful as any addiction and as strong as the instincts for sex and survival. They dominate our actions in ways that explain why, for example, people hold on to losing stocks too long and new participants in an auction experiment routinely bid more than $20 for a twenty-dollar bill. It’s not just that the efficient markets model of economic rationality fails; affirmatively irrational behavior takes over.

If these researchers are correct, money itself triggers something that can combine with competition and ego to produce a dangerous mix. When a subconscious reaction to dollar signs overrides rational thought, the resulting decisions can be — shall we say — problematic.

What’s the connection to Goldman Sachs and the Am Law 100? I’m not suggesting that obviously intelligent people at GS did anything illegal. Judges and juries will make that determination someday. Nor am I criticizing leaders of large or small law firms who pay attention to revenues and costs because they need to make a living, just like everybody else. The practice of law has never been an eleemosynary endeavor and never will be.

Still, the research shines an interesting light on the intersection of human behavior and free market capitalism. Just as stratospheric quarterly profits propelled Goldman to develop novel vehicles that continued to feed its insatiable profits beast, perhaps the fixation on annual Am Law rankings triggers an inner impulse in biglaw leaders that even they themselves don’t realize. When a money-laden thought — like average equity profits per partner — becomes a definitive decisional metric that defines professional standing and institutional culture, does reason become a casualty?

If so, what’s the antidote?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. There’s not much incentive to recover from a socially acceptable addiction that defines who too many of us are.

THE US NEWS RANKINGS ARE OUT!

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[UPDATE: This post first appeared on April 16, 2010. On January 1, 2011, Northwestern’s former dean, David Van Zandt, became president of The New School in New York.]

Earlier this week, I spoke with one of my former Northwestern undergraduate students. Headed for a top law school this fall, he surprised me with this remark:

“A lot of my classmates are waiting to send in their law school deposits until the latest US News rankings come out this week.”

Seriously?

Virtually every law school dean has condemned US News’ annual effort to do for law schools what the Am Law 100 has been doing for big firms. Those of you reading my “PUZZLE PIECES” installments know that annual profits-per-partner rankings haven’t brought out the best in us. It’s all part of a larger contemporary phenomenon: the MBA mentality of misguided metrics.

Unfortunately, students aren’t listening to the unanimous chorus of skeptical law school deans. It’s easier to follow the simplistic approach of a lonely outlier, Northwestern’s David Van Zandt: however wrongheaded, metrics matter.

For a decade, he has refused to join colleagues criticizing US News’ fatally flawed methodology. (See, e.g., Brian Leiter’s analysis) A self-styled maverick, Van Zandt insists that ratings are relevant consumer information.

His position proves too much. Not all misinformation should be allowed to pollute decision-makers’ minds. That’s why fraud and misrepresentation causes of action exist. There’s another problem: pandering to the US News criteria distorts law school administrators’ decisions. Once misguided metrics become governing principles, thoughtful reflection disappears. Teaching to the test is easier than creating imaginative lesson plans.

Lately, metrics seem to be foresaking the maverick. In 2009, Northwestern dropped from 9 to 10 in the US News overall standings; this year, it fell to 11.

Rationalizing the decline, Van Zandt says that his innovative programs haven’t gained traction because of “resistance within a conservative profession.” He argues from aneccdotal evidence that the future will vindicate him. Apart from his inconsistency in crediting a positive rating that suits his purposes but discounting it when things breaks badly, some might accuse him of magical thinking.

Is it time for Van Zandt to back away from his isolated defense of the US News listings? Sure, but it won’t happen. In an April 13 Above the Law post, he urges even more rankings, however dubious their value.

In the end, he’s a misguided metrics kind of guy — at least until Northwestern drops again next year. [UPDATE: It did — to 12th, but by the time the news hit, Van Zandt had already left to become president of The New School in New York.]