Trust and the marketing department

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Posted in: Management, Marketing

Timothy Corcoran’s excellent and essential new blog tracks and expands upon a provocative article at the AmLaw Daily called “How essential is a CMO?” As many large firms scale back their marketing spending or lose their Chief Marketing Officers, Tim finds both lawyers and marketers can share some blame. I was especially drawn to this dead-on observation:

BigLaw partners operate under the amusing notion that a flat governance model in which every partner is an equal owner with equal authority is somehow a rational business choice, when in fact it’s an inefficient, extraordinarily dilutive and disruptive structure that persists due to inertia.  To be clear, the partners can organize their sandbox however they want, but this scenario rewards senior marketers who have learned to please partners above advancing the financial interests of the firm.  Indeed, there are countless examples of experienced marketers from other disciplines stymied by the bizarre world of BigLaw.

As one CMO put it to me without irony, “Success in a large law firm is all about credibility, which means accepting that we don’t often do things the right way, we do them our partners’ way, but after about a year of serving their needs you should have built up enough credibility to gently make suggestions, most of which they’ll discard, but to survive you can’t try to do too much too quickly.”

Politics and personality do take on outsized importance in a large enterprise, such that the merits of any given initiative often take a back seat to figuring out which important people’s interests require catering or flattering. By effectively giving every partner veto power over business decisions, law firms make that situation a lot worse. Appeasement replaces innovation, expectations are lowered repeatedly, and pretty soon nobody has the heart to try anything new. It’s no way to run a business of any substantial size, and if non-lawyer ownership of law firms ever catches on worldwide, that might well be the beginning of the end for this model.

For the foreseeable future, though, the flat partnership structure is a fact of life.  But I tend to think the organizational model per se isn’t the problem so much as the fact that many lawyers seem incapable of letting other professionals do their jobs without interference or second-guessing.

Lawyers seem to come factory-shipped with the notion that they know better than you how to do things you’ve been trained to do. People who work with or for lawyers — secretaries, paralegals, marketers, recruiters, PD experts, consultants, and so on — can all relate eye-rolling stories of lawyers who really believe that their fleeting sentiments on a given subject merit equal consideration to what the trained professional in question has advised. It seems that only IT people escape this kind of treatment, probably because many lawyers are intimidated by anything more technological than a BlackBerry.

But marketing seems to get the worst of it. I’ve heard one business consultant, who has worked with professionals in numerous fields, say that nobody treats their own marketing people with as little respect as lawyers do. Many qualified law firm marketers are reduced to menial publicity tasks after yet another initiative of real substance has been stalled or buried. I’ve seen worthwhile legal marketing and branding campaigns snuffed out because one or two lawyers in the room didn’t like a particular tag line, image, or even colour scheme in an advertisement — even when it’s made clear that the campaigns are not directed to lawyers at all, but to clients.

Why are lawyers so prone to this kind of behaviour? Some of it certainly can be traced to the particular strain of arrogance that legal training seems to inculcate. Being a lawyer can operate as a kind of expertise multiplier, making a small knowledge base suddenly seem much larger. My English degree may be gathering dust in a closet somewhere, but I can at least remember Pope’s Essay on Criticism: “A little learning is a dangerous thing /Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring / There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain.”

But I think a lot of it comes down to trust — many lawyers are just plain reluctant to trust the opinions and instincts of people from outside the profession. One of the reasons lawyers invite a colleague into partnerships is that they trust the lawyer’s skills and acumen — a partner by definition is someone you trust without even thinking about it. I wonder if one of the reasons most ethics rules prohibit “non-lawyer” (a hateful phrase) admission to partnership is that lawyers can’t quite bring themselves to grant that same level of trust to those outside the bar. Yes, you’re qualified and diligent, experienced and savvy — but you’re not a lawyer, and that still matters for some reason. Few lawyers trust the merits of something they can’t authenticate through direct experience; most lawyers have never marketed; and marketing looks easy from the outside.

This is more than just an annoying quirk — this is a major obstacle to the efficient operation of legal enterprises of all sizes. If you’re constantly overruling or second-guessing or stymieing the best efforts of your qualified professional associates — if you just can’t accept that someone without a law degree knows more about a business management issue than you do — then you’re wasting time, missing opportunities and burning money. Law firms everywhere are doing all three, at a time when the importance of these professionals to the firm’s survival has never been greater.

Successful law firms have figured out that there are some things lawyers do very well and some things that other professionals do very well, and they delegate authority accordingly. Good lawyers do more than just hire a marketing or recruitment or strategic professional — they trust them enough to follow their advice and give them enough room to operate. Good lawyers have the  wisdom to accept that they don’t know everything and the confidence to yield control to those better qualified. Of course they consult with these professionals and raise concerns when they have them. But at the end of the day, there’s no substitute for trust and no disguising its absence.  If you don’t trust your professionals to do the jobs you hired them to do, everyone in the firm figures it out pretty quickly and behaves accordingly.

So the fundamental problem might not be that lawyers can torpedo or hijack a given initiative. The problem is that they do, often reflexively, without sufficient grounds. Few lawyers have the discipine and confidence to keep from wading into unfamiliar waters until they’re over their head. Law firm leaders need to keep improving trust between a firm’s lawyers and its other professionals, until the latter can maximize the firm’s value and effectiveness without having to constantly look over their shoulder at the former.

Get ready for the process era

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Posted in: Management

You know the old expression, “Life’s not a destination, it’s a journey”? I have to say, it’s never worked for me. I’m all about the destination — the journey is the time-consuming necessity between Point A and Point B that I’d dispense with if I could. I don’t have much interest in the scenic route — my itineraries are designed to provide the shortest distance and quickest trip (though I’ll make an exception to avoid ever having to go through Heathrow again). Similarly, I never liked having to “show my work” in math class, or to follow the standard procedures, or to get bogged down in anything that delays my arrival at a solution. Let’s just get to it already!

I’ll also be the first to admit that this isn’t a particularly healthy or sensible way to be. Scenic routes are, well, scenic — they deliver numerous physiological benefits and they’re, you know, nice to look at. Showing your work demonstrates you actually understand the formulas and how they’re applied. Everyone should go thr0ugh Heathrow once, just so they can tell their grandchildren scary stories one day. Nonetheless, I appear to be wired for the destination first and the journey second, and I’m finding that it’s very hard to change.

I have a theory that many lawyers are like that, too. We think our essential purpose is to solve problems, and we focus our energies on cutting through the clutter in order to reach that destination. But you know, clients think the clutter is kind of important: telling the story of how they got here is at least as important to them as finding out where to go next. This applies to both corporate clients — who wish their lawyers would take a big-picture view of their ongoing business realities, not just the legal matter at hand — and individual clients, who want to relate personal stories of complex and difficult life events, but whose lawyers often dismiss all the “background” in favour of summarizing the facts and reciting the applicable law.

So I think we could all stand to be better at holistic legal services — putting the client’s well-being on par with the legal issue he or she has brought, paying more attention to the process by which we address client concerns. Now, you might not buy that, thinking it’s too touchy-feely for a gunslinger like you. If so, then you ought to consider that process is about to become the most important feature of modern legal services delivery.

There’s a process revolution coming to the legal industry. For decades if not longer, law firms of all sizes have tackled client issues the same way: by creating a file and giving it to a lawyer to complete (although the dullest tasks sometimes made their way to secretaries and paralegals). The lawyer’s process was simple: (a) identify the legal problem and work out a legal solution, (b) using a pen, a legal pad, and whatever precedents are on hand, (c) taking as long as required and docketing time spent along the way. Clients invariably didn’t know enough to question this process, and in any event, many tools by which more efficiency could be introduced didn’t yet exist.

Now, however, the tools are appearing — not just through technological advances, but also with the development of business process theory and the rise of logistics. There are now entire disciplines devoted to making manufacturing and service provision more efficient, from workflow analysis to project management to business process outsourcing to just-in-time delivery systems. Contrary to what many lawyers might believe, a substantial amount of what law firms do is susceptible to the application of workflow and logistics. (You think document review can’t be automated, due diligence can’t be systematized, legal knowledge can’t be distilled and packaged?) Modern clients, especially on the corporate side, understand these systems very well and believe quite sincerely that they can apply to what law firms sell.

Ron Friedmann touched on these points in a post at Strategic Legal Technology late last year:

I think most GCs are failing, however, to focus enough effort on process, on how lawyers practice law. [Early case assessment] and staffing controls go to the “how”. Where … are efforts to require matter budgets, application of best practices, automation, risk analysis with decision trees, document assembly, and proper use of KM systems? … Real costs savings mean changing the process, focusing on how lawyers practice. The profession needs to overcome its “I am an artiste” attitude and develop better ways of working.

In The End of Lawyers?, Richard Susskind talks about “decomposing and multisourcing” legal tasks, chopping them up  and directing each segment to the solution with the best combination of competence and cost-effectiveness. Lawyers simply aren’t wired to think this way, but systems analysts are:

Sometimes, by decomposing legal work and viewing it with the eye of a systems analyst rather than a lawyer, it will become apparent, in the jargon, that some “re-engineering” can occur.  This means that some fairly fundamental reconfiguration or reorganization of the tasks can be introduced which of itself might being greater efficiency. An analyst, looking at some legal work with a fresh mind, might pinpoint, for example, some opportunities for avoiding the duplication of tasks or might identify some tasks as redundant. From a systems and process analysis point of view, the lawyer sometimes cannot see the wood for the trees.

I was listening to Richard deliver the keynote address at the ABA TECHSHOW last month when it occurred to me how fundamental a change this will be within our profession. We’ve never needed to worry about process or efficiency before — we dictated the terms of the marketplace, so we could take as long as we liked to do our work and in whatever fashion pleased us. That’s coming to an end, and most law firms will face a huge challenge converting their business models to adapt. I twittered as much during Richard’s presentation: “Future legal business: process consultant for law firms. Lawyers will need help mapping out and re-engineering their practices.”

In the near future, it won’t be good enough for lawyers to ignore the journey and focus on the destination — we won’t be able to focus solely on the ends and let the means take care of themselves. The nature and quality of how we do our work will become at least as important as the work itself. That’s going to be very tough for us to wrap our heads around, but I don’t see any way we can avoid it.

Graduating into a recession

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Posted in: Careers, New Lawyers, Recession

It’s rare that a reader asks me to write something on a specific topic, rarer still that multiple requests for the same subject come in. So the fact that a few people have now asked for a post about law students and the recession indicates just how much anxiety is rising in law schools and among new lawyers.

It really is amazing how fast everything changed. When the classes of 2009 and 2010 entered law school, the economy was booming (or more accurately, bubbling) and some big law firms were seriously contemplating $200,000 annual salaries for first-year associates. Now those same firms are rushing to cut salaries, while the economy, though probably past full-scale crisis, isn’t as strong as the markets would have you believe and likely is set for several years of mediocrity. So you can kind of see where young lawyers’ anxiety is coming from.

Not that everyone is sympathetic to their plight. But if you think they’re overreacting to the recession, try to remember how you saw the world in your twenties, and that no law school generation has ever graduated this deeply in debt. And try to remember, too, that our whole industry, from educators to employers, told these young people that the professional cow was full of cash and would only grow fatter. The growing ranks of unemployed young lawyers and frightened law students out there should remind us how poorly we’ve managed the business of law for years now. We raised their expectations too high and made promises we couldn’t keep, and it seems to me we bear at least some responsibility for helping them get through this.

I first wrote about graduating into a recession last January, and most of what I said then still applies. But in the intervening  months, it’s become clearer that this isn’t just another cyclical downturn. Economically, it’s all bad enough: many banks are still on life-support, people are still paying off or defaulting on various types of debt, and government spending can’t replace consumer spending indefinitely. These problems aren’t going away anytime soon. In the legal industry, the financial crisis has accelerated already-existing trends towards more power in the hands of clients and more downward pressures on lawyers’ fees — major change should now arrive ahead of schedule.

Most of all, though, the crisis has triggered upheaval for large law firms, which for years have been providing the profession with on-the-job training for its new law graduates. The newest trend is toward what NALP’s James Leipold refers to as the “collision of classes” — all those retracted job offers and deferred starting dates for 2009 graduates are leading towards their logical conclusion: no new hires from the class of 2010 (here are recent examples from the US and the UK). Granted, hiring untrained law grads and paying them scads of money to fill out dockets is a recruitment model long overdue for replacement; but for the purposes of new law grads, it means one of the tightest job markets in memory.

So what would I recommend? Well, students currently in law school need to ask themselves a tough question and come up with an honest answer: why am I here? It might well be that you’re a law student because you’re bright, well-meaning and helpful, and the law seemed like an interesting, prestigious and financially reliable career path — that pretty much describes my route. But if that’s all that brought you here, then I think you should give some serious consideration to quitting.

I know how harsh that sounds, especially since a lot of great lawyers went into law school not fully certain if this was their calling. But this is not the same profession that your parents or older siblings entered, where entry barriers were relatively low,  learning curves were pretty gentle, and steady employment was more of a question of “where” than “if.” Law is becoming a tougher profession for new entrants — standards are higher, footholds are fewer, breaks and opportunities are disappearing. It used to be that you could spend the first few years of your career learning the ins and outs of practice from large-firm employers — they’d work you hard and train you poorly, but they’d pay you well because they made money off you no matter how long it took you to get the hang of things.

Those days are ending. The vaunted law firm pyramid is being replaced by the law firm diamond — few partners at the top, few trainees at the bottom, a lot of experienced workers in the middle. Because of the economy, and because technology and outsourcing are taking away new lawyers’ traditional tasks, there just won’t be as many opportunities to get your professional sea legs in a law firm. It’s going to be a lot harder for you to gain work experience — and that’s a real problem, because these same firms, perversely enough, are also narrowing their hiring criteria to lawyers with  experience and skills. I need hardly point out that most law schools provide no training in lawyering skills, client relationships or anything else that firms are suddenly deciding they value.

Many of you, then, will find yourselves standing in front of the profession’s gates with a key issued by your law school, only to find they’ve changed the locks. And since most schools don’t seem ready to issue a new set of keys, you’ll need to find another way inside. You’re going to have to develop the necessary skills and gain the requisite experience on your own. That might take several years, during which you’re not going to earn much or make much of a dent in your student debts, and at the end of the process there’s still no guarantee of a job. So unless you’re driven to be a lawyer, unless this really feels like a calling and you’re prepared for a north-face assault on this mountain, you owe it to yourself to think about suspending or abandoning your law degree. I don’t say this lightly or happily, but I do think it needs to be said.

What if you’re among the committed, or you’ve already graduated, or you’re so close to your degree that, even taking account of the sunk costs fallacy, you might as well finish it off? To start with, you’ll need to reorient your expectations along the lines of what I’ve just mentioned, accepting that the rules changed on you mid-way through the game and that there’s nothing to be done about it. Don’t underestimate the importance of attitude: the faster you can readjust your mindset from disappointment or victimhood to determination and opportunity, the wider a gap you can create between you and your classmates-turned-competitors. Take all the time you need to fully make this transition, but don’t take a minute longer.

The next thing to understand is that it’s time for some career triage.  You might not yet be sure what type of law you really want to do, but you no longer have the option of  browsing through the racks and trying things on. Pick something you think you can do and where you already have some experience or contacts — if you DJ’ed in college, think about entertainment law; if you majored in engineering, think about IP; if you worked at a nursing home, think about elder law. This isn’t about making career choices that will bind you for decades; this is about finding a door to put your foot into, an area where you already come with some valuable attributes. You need a place to start, so choose one in familiar territory.

Next, start building networks and skills. Which networks to construct depends on where and what you want to practise. If you’re settling or setting up shop in a given jurisdiction, join the bar association of that state or province (new lawyer fees are generally low) and go to as many meetings of your local chapter and area-of-practice section as reasonably possible. Meet people, introduce yourself, ask questions, follow up. At the same time, investigate your industry: join trade groups, read industry newsletters and websites, get to know the issues facing your future clients.  And get involved in online networks: join LinkedIn and start making contacts. Join Legal OnRamp and make your mark in the groups, conversations and debates there. If it’s at all feasible, blog.

Skills, of course, are the hardest thing to acquire, part of the “how do I get experience/skills without skills/experience” vicious circle. If you’re lucky, you’re with a law firm that will actually pay you while it trains you in the lawyering skills you need. If you have the luxury of volunteer time, identify an organization (preferably in your chosen area) that needs and accepts unpaid legal help and use that opportunity to acquire skills and make personal connections. If you can afford to pay for an associate position, Dan Hull would be happy to hear from you (it would be a pretty good investment, actually).

But maybe your best immediate investment might be Solo Practice University, an online legal learning and networking institution that fills in the many practical gaps in your law school education. At SPU, lawyer faculty teach real-world skills required in numerous areas of practice as well as marketing, management and technology know-how. I received a guided tour the other day and came away impressed. Even if you don’t intend to go solo, you could learn a tremendous amount (inside and outside class) from some very knowledgeable people at your own pace for about 1/20th the cost of the average American law degree — give it a look.

Really, it might help to think of yourself as a start-up — because in a  lot of ways, you’re a start-up law business. You have a law degree, which is far from worthless; it’s now just a piece of the puzzle, not the whole thing. You also have talent, drive and dedication, which is pretty much all that most startups ever set out with, along with your own unique life experiences. Now you need to build your personal law business, from the ground up.

Like other start-ups, it might have to be a part-time effort, since you’ll likely need to take a non-lawyer position (or even one outside the profession altogether) to pay the bills. But that full-time  job is just a source of income; your part-time start-up is your calling and your passion, and it will occupy your nights and weekends. If you think that sounds like a lot of work and not much life, you’re absolutely right. Don’t leave your student lifestyle behind yet: the long hours and tight budgets will probably continue for a while, and the discipline they impose, while absolutely a short-term pain, will prove to be a long-term benefit.

A good book to read right now might be Seth Godin’s The Dip: it’s about the importance of quitting the wrong things at the right time, sticking out the right things for as long as it takes, and knowing the difference between them. The most important lesson I took from it was that every worthwhile path has numerous barriers designed to do nothing else except winnow down the number of users. These barriers are what cause the dry spells, frustration, and pain that drive many people to pursue other paths that are easier or better for them — they constitute The Dip, and they separate the curious from the committed.

For a long time, law didn’t have much of a Dip, didn’t have many barriers — most everyone who acquired a law degree ended up with a law job if they wanted it. Now there is one — a law degree has become the start of your legal training, not the end of it. If you’re in law school or just emerging from it, you need to decide whether you can and want to make it through these barriers, the ones that right now are winnowing out thousands of people from this profession. If not, there’s no harm and no foul — life is long, and there’s a new century of opportunities opening up for you.

If you do decide to go for it, get ready for a long and often difficult haul, early-morning work and late-night second-guessing. And you still might not make it. But as that wise man Tom Waits once said: if it’s worth the going, it’s worth the ride. Good luck.