That’s the capsule story of the end of a law firm. More importantly, though, it’s also a template — the founding partners’ retirement, coupled with a scattering of the remaining lawyers — that I expect to be repeated frequently throughout the legal profession over the coming decade, especially among small and midsize firms. It’s the natural outcome of the widespread inability of law firms to deal successfully with succession issues. And it reflects what can only be described as the failure of hundreds of law firm leaders (by which I mean founders and power brokers more than “managing partners”) to look beyond their own short-term interests to the long-term survival and success of the firms they created.

It’s a given that law firms exist to generate profits for their partners. The addition of leveraged associates, the admission of new partners, the arrangement of origination credits, the expansion of the firm to new regions and new practice areas — all these activities are undertaken in order to maximize partner revenue. Nobody really doubts this or has a serious problem with it.

The difficulty arises when the interests of the founding partners inevitably begin to diverge from the interests of everyone else in the firm, especially lawyers at the start or in the middle of their own careers. These lawyers’ own timelines extend beyond the expected career arcs of the partners who hired them, and they have an interest in seeing the firm continue to develop and thrive after the founders have moved on. This interest is primarily financial, of course — they want their turn occupying the most profitable seats — but it’s often also personal: they like the idea of taking up the mantle of a respected firm and leading it into a new age. I think most people would find these sentiments reasonable.

What has struck me over the past few years — what has shocked me, to be honest — is the number of founding partners and senior lawyers who don’t care all that much what happens to the firm after they leave. I mean, these partners talk a good game about legacy and continuity and a bright and promising future and so forth, and I’m sure that their well-wishing is sincere enough. But ask them to take steps to ensure that future in ways that might compromise their near-term revenue — especially as the economy worsens — and the conversation comes to an abrupt stop.

These partners essentially place their personal interests, even near the end of their careers, ahead of the long-term prospects of the firms they helped found. They do not share clients. They do not delegate work. They do not mentor juniors. And they do not approve compensation system changes that would motivate the next generation of leaders if those changes might also reduce the size of their own slice of pie. They couldn’t make their priorities much clearer. (My Edge International colleague Nick Jarrett-Kerr has written an excellent analysis of law firms’ challenges in this regard.)

This state of affairs creates immense levels of frustration and disillusionment among those members of the firm whose retirement is not in sight, for whom the firm is at the least a steady employer and at the most a stage for their own flourishing careers. These members of younger generations look at their leaders from an older generation and it begins to dawn on them: the founders weren’t creating an institution that could stand the test of time. They were creating a vehicle for their own financial interests, and once those interests draw to a close, so too does the need for the vehicle.

I don’t think it’s an accident that inter-generational tension within law firms has grown over the past several years, in both good times and bad. I don’t think it has much to do with the clichés about Generation Y and its “sense of entitlement,” except to the extent that younger members of the firm felt entitled to inherit some of the prosperity earned by the firm’s founders and leaders, in exchange for their own contributions and loyalty to the institution over the years. They’re now coming to conclude that there never was an institution — just a platform for founder prosperity. I expect them to react accordingly.

There’s a word you hardly ever hear mentioned in discussions of law firm leadership and succession planning these days. That word is “stewardship” — the sense that those who lead an organization have a responsibility to leave it in better shape than they found it, to ensure its future success for no other reason than that future generations will benefit.

Stewardship, among other things, requires the stewards to relinquish at least some of their own powers and priorities near the end of their terms in order to assure a better future. There are some stewards among law firm leaders today. There are not many.

Jordan Furlong delivers dynamic and thought-provoking presentations to law firms and legal organizations throughout North America on how to survive and profit from the extraordinary changes underway in the legal services marketplace. He is a partner with Edge International and a senior consultant with Stem Legal Web Enterprises.

Let’s start with the dominoes. Here’s an article from the Fulton County Daily Report about the impact of the credit crunch on law firms’ lines of credit, something I mused about last week. Lawyers who traditionally have not made accounts receivable a priority should read this:

Some banks are increasing their scrutiny of law firm loans, attaching more covenants and conditions and looking ahead to how well firms can collect their receivables in the coming year. According to some bankers and consultants who focus on law firm lending, a lag in collection time is pushing firms not just to borrow more money but also to increase holdbacks on partner compensation and, perhaps, decrease overall profit distributions.

Dan DiPietro, client head of the law firm group at Citi Private Bank, said his employer still views lawyers as a good credit risk — despite the crisis coursing through the markets and the collapse or merger of clients that supply billable hours to many of the nation’s law firms. … “What has changed is our focus and discipline on pricing and making sure that we’re pricing with the view that this is not a standalone credit facility but is generating other revenue. … In this market, there’s a huge focus on overall returns.”

Like many banks, Citi looks at firms’ cash flow, receivables and work in progress when assessing their creditworthiness and how much cash to advance on revolving or long-term lines of credit. … Citi is giving existing loans a higher level of scrutiny and is looking more closely at firms on an individual basis to assess how the economic turmoil might affect their receivables.

Then there’s law students, the vast majority of whom wouldn’t be able to meet tuition and living expenses without student loans — loans that are suddenly looking very dicey, according to an article in the National Law Journal:

[B]ecause banks are doling out less money to lenders, private loans are getting harder to come by, said New York Law School Dean Richard Matasar…. That means it will be more difficult for law school graduates to secure private loans, and graduates will, likely, pay higher interest rates if they do get a private loan to bridge the gap between graduation and the bar.

Recent law graduates also will be entering the work force during a slow economy, which means they may spend more time in the job search process. Consequently, they potentially could have a tougher time repaying money they borrowed to go to school, Matasar said. “It’s a time for caution. It’s a time for students to plan well for how much debt they are taking on and how they will pay for it,” he said.

Bleak tidings, potentially, and it’s not clear to me whether law firms or the bar admission system have the capacity to absorb the impact of a full-blown crisis in either area. But I’ve been pondering lately whether there’s another, far more dramatic potential result from the financial crisis: the underpinnings of many large corporate law firms.

Now, I’m far from a corporate finance expert — I’m a reasonably bright layman who reads The Economist whenever a spare moment presents itself. But it seems to me that a lot of the ballooning growth in the global financial sector over the past several years — the balloon that’s now rapidly decompressing — was driven by extraordinarily complex financial instruments that made derivatives look like child’s play. Consequently, over that same period, large law firms have transformed themselves from relatively balanced full-service legal shops to giant operations, powered by enormous corporate law engines and producing annual profits per partner to boggle the mind.

If, as I suspect, the modern mega-firm has grown so much and so quickly thanks largely to a ten-year injection of corporate law steroids, what will happen to all that bulk now? Most of the reports I’ve read indicate that once the crisis passes, the debris is cleaned up and things return to a new normal, corporate law will be facing a back-to-basics period of indeterminate length. The appetite for complex commercial instruments figures to be low — will demand for expensive corporate legal services decline accordingly?

Not only that, there’s a very good chance of an anti-corporate backlash at the legislative and regulatory level. Political parties with populist leanings are favoured to take power in the US within a few months and the UK within a couple of years, and there’ll be a lot of short-sighted “reforms” of the system designed to make sure this (again) never happens again. The Enron fiasco gave us the rushed and seriously flawed Sarbanes-Oxley Act — imagine what kind of laws will result from a crisis hundreds of times bigger than that one.

Sure, there’ll be work for lawyers — there always is. But it may require the transformation of an entire generation of aggressive corporate lawyers into painstaking compliance specialists. Compliance is less profitable now, and it’s going to be a lot less profitable down the road as software and systems take over more and more of the billable tasks and time. There’ll still be mergers and acquisitions, of course, and there’s always be a need for financing — but it’s more than possible that a golden age of securitization has just passed, and that it may take entire law firm departments with it.

If you’re in any way responsible for, or tied to the near future of, a law firm with a significant corporate practice, these are things you need to be thinking about. It is flatly not possible that the entire Western financial system will experience massive change, while the law firms that serve it sail through in peace and tranquility.

It’s going to take me a while to explain how I got here. I’ll try to do this in two parts.

1. Followership in law firms

This all started when I came across a provocative article called “Leaders need followers: tips for team performance“ by Australasian legal consultancy FMRC Legal. The thrust of the article is that successful law firm management hinges on followership — lawyers’ ability and willingness to align their personal values and goals with those of the firm. I first came across “followership” in the law firm context in a 2005 blog post by Gerry Riskin, which was in turn expanded upon by Patrick J. Lamb shortly thereafter.

Here are some excerpts from these three insightful articles that I think sum up what they’re saying.

FMRC: The values and goals of effective followers are aligned with those of the organisation. Satisfaction is gained from accomplishment. Effective followers will be committed to achieving a particular goal. … It is not the size of the goal that is important, but the commitment to achieving it that sets people apart. A high level of commitment can be contagious. Where others in the team share goals and values, these high levels of commitment inevitably build motivation and morale.

Gerry: Those who lead law firms are often experiencing more of a deposition environment than a business environment. Perhaps this is why some lawyers want their firms to be more “corporate.” … Leadership requires “followership,” which means that the more an internal meeting resembles a deposition … the less productive the business meeting will be.

Patrick: Businesses take risks; lawyers avoid them. It’s not a comfortable mix. Add in the out-dated legal structure of most firms, and you have the “herding cats” problem that has been discussed elsewhere. … “Followership” is not a normal attribute of many lawyers. In the business world, it is the norm. … Law firms should consider hierarchy: it could actually help improve performance.

Encouraging “followership” in law firms makes a tremendous amount of sense to me, because law firms are excruciatingly difficult entities to lead. Whatever most law firms pay their managing partner, it’s not enough. Lawyers are fiercely independent, resistant to change, risk-averse, self-centered, and play poorly with others. (Those of us who’ve dealt with both lawyers and pre-schoolers draw striking parallels.) Keeping the firm together, increasing partner profit, and building for the future is a Herculean task, but the obstinacy of lawyers can make it Sisyphean.

A lot has been written about how to improve the performance of leaders in law firms, but very little has been said about how to improve the performance of followers. I really believe that there’s only so much that you can ask a managing partner or firm leader to do. Unless he or she is blessed with extraordinary charisma and vision, lawyers’ natural tendency towards negativity, conservatism, and recalcitrance will drain the leader of the will and capacity to do much more than keep the ship afloat and heading in its traditional direction.

Think about it: a great many of the afflictions law firms suffer today result from a paucity of commitment to the organization and a surfeit of bullheaded individuality:

- Knowledge management struggles or fails in many firms because lawyers cannot be persuaded that sharing knowledge with their colleagues benefits the firm, and therefore themselves as well as others.

- Partners hoard work and client contact rather than sharing it with younger colleagues, with the predictable resulting rush for the door by unhappy, underutilized associates.

- Innovative marketing or business development strategies that could yield great organizational benefits are scuppered by partners whose individual biases or interests are threatened.

Unlike employees in companies, lawyers in law firms do not take orders. So if you could improve followership — if you could counteract these critical tendencies and encourage shared goals and organizational priority — then you could make the firm easier to lead.

The problem, of course, is that a term like “followership” is extremely unlikely to catch on among lawyers — as sound as the concept is, the name almost certainly would prove its downfall. Lawyers think of themselves as leaders — in their field, of their teams, with their clients, etc. Like most high-performing professionals, they associate “follower” with positions of subordination, submission, weakness and failure: no self-respecting lawyer wants to be thought of as a follower. The reality that everyone in a firm is at various times both leading and following doesn’t seem to get through.

As long as law firms are partnerships and partners can do what they feel like, followership will travel a rough road. That’s too bad, because within the concept of followership lies the key to tomorrow’s focused, successful law firm.

2. The culture-driven law firm

So, after all that, why do I think that this prevailing cultural inclination is coming to an end? Because the emphasis on individual lawyer priority over organizational commitment isn’t working.

Law firms churn young talent. Most associates bolt well before the partnership ring is in sight — they stay long enough to pick up some skills and contacts and to make a dent in their enormous student debt before leaving for more fulfilling opportunities elsewhere. The result: new blood drains away from the firm, leaving it increasingly dependent on lateral hiring, vulnerable to a collapse of leverage, and lacking sufficient numbers of young leaders to replace Boomer partners heading out the door.

Law firms also churn veteran talent. Partners change firms at unprecedented rates, accepting those offers that promise them the most money and/or prestige. The result: the partnership bond is constantly weakened, longstanding clients leave with departing talent, associates see partners leave for greener pastures and follow suit, and most importantly, the firm’s face and brand are in flux from one year to the next, no one knowing who will be the next to abandon ship. (And it’s not as if the departing partners end up much better off, some of them rotating through multiple firms in the space of just a few years, always chasing the rainbow’s end.)

What it comes down to is that too many firms are treading water in terms of talent — they pump in talent through one entrance while it bleeds out another. Management can’t spend the necessary time or attention on innovation and long-term planning because dealing with the talent churn consumes too much energy.

The unmistakable lesson of the last decade of lawyer turnover is this: you cannot win the war for talent when all you have to offer is money, because that’s what everyone else is using. If all you really have to offer prospective talent is cash, then you’ll attract lawyers who care deeply about cash — and you’ll always be vulnerable to a competitor with more of it. Ten years after lawyers began switching firms in earnest, most firms are no further ahead than when they started.

I think this reality is slowly dawning on some law firms, and they’re starting to look for another real differentiator that can not just draw in the right talent but keep it committed to the organization. (Many firms still cling to the delusion that they really are different and stand out in the marketplace: if their talent churn rate hasn’t dispelled that notion, half an hour’s conversation with law students certainly will.) How can a firm organize itself so that it wins the war for talent before the battles even start?

This is where I come back to what followership promises: a law firm culture in which every lawyer’s goals, values and objectives are aligned with those of the organization, and in which everyone is committed to the best interests of the firm because their own interests are tied closely to them. In such a firm, lawyers willingly acquiesce to giving up degrees of independence in service of building an organization to which everyone contributes, from which everyone benefits and of which everyone can be proud.

The followership culture in this sense reflects the well-known “one-firm firm” philosophy described years ago by David Maister:

The one-firm firm approach is not simply a loose term to describe a “culture.” It refers to a set of concrete management practices consciously chosen to maximize the trust and loyalty that members of the firm feel both to the institution and to each other.

The key relationship is that of the individual member to the organization, in the form of a set of reciprocal, value-based expectations. This, in turn, informs and supports relationships among members — who often do not know each other personally.

Everyone knows the values they must live by and the code of behavior they must follow. Everyone is commonly and intensively trained in these values and protocols. Everyone also knows that if an individual is in trouble, the group will expend every effort to help him or her.

David compares the “one-firm firm” favourably with the US Marine Corps and unfavourably with what he calls the “warlord” mentality that prevails at many law firms today. It’s that warlord culture that both perpetuates and results from the instability at most law firms. Warlord firms — those with a surfeit of free-agent lawyers looking out for number one — cannot break away from the pack. But a unified firm, where followership principles operate and team commitment is the primary objective, can and will stand out.

I already know the objections to this idea. Lawyers will never willingly sublimate their own selfish desires to the “greater good” of a firm. Lawyers don’t trust each other enough to believe that a partner won’t betray the partnership and bolt with the precious knowledge that’s been shared. Lawyers just want to “lawyer” and don’t care about all this leader-follower-training-mentoring stuff. Firms don’t deserve lawyers’ commitment and loyalty after repeated instances of chopping associates and “de-equitizing” partners to maintain profits. These are all perfectly valid objections, and they’ve all contributed in one way or another to the free-agent culture and strategic paralysis in the legal industry today.

But these are self-defeating objections — it’s evident on the face of it that these behaviours and biases hamper law firm growth and talent retention. It’s time for something new — a law firm that takes organizational commitment seriously and recruits people not just for skills, which are abundant in the talent pool, but also for their willingness to work, share, build, train and innovate as a team. Partnership in such a firm is extended carefully, judiciously, and with the expectation of permanence; associates are brought on with the promise of real participation and the requirement for patient commitment. The firm protects its people in hard times and asks for reciprocal loyalty in good times.

The next truly great law firm that arises is going to look a lot more like this than any of the mega-firms currently dotting the national and global landscape. I really believe that this is the organizational model that will succeed in the extremely demanding environment into which the legal industry is now proceeding. It won’t happen fast, and it won’t come easy. But it will happen, because it’s eventually going to be clear that nothing else really works.

The first is the Legal Transformation Study, a co-production of Decision Strategies International (DSI) and Legal Research Center that’s sponsored by, among others, Altman Weil, Jomati Consultants, and Dupont’s Legal Department. Subtitled Your 2020 Vision of the Future, the report makes plain the intensity of the shockwave heading towards the industry and discusses four potential scenarios that could play out in the near future. An executive summary is available for free; the report itself costs rather more. Here’s an excerpt from the preface:

The truth is, we dare not take any aspect of the future for granted. Paradigms shift, and age-old truisms will be reversed. Prudent and prepared legal leaders will be those who extend their minds beyond traditional thinking and anticipate a variety of outcomes and possibilities. …

During the next decade, operating discipline alone (e.g., “how” we work) will not be enough to meet the challenges our corporate clients face. In the more global, volatile, and uncertain future, “what” we work on with our corporate clients will increasingly define the client’s success (or failure). This is not just repositioning Legal’s relationship with our business colleagues. It is a fundamental shift in the nature of our work.

To truly engage our businesses differently — and better — we need to radically rethink our approach to risk, uncertainty and value creation. As our future unfolds, being absolutely right will be far less important than being nimble and adaptive. Studying every aspect of an issue will yield to a new, more rapid style of decision-making where the predominant belief is that even a decision that proves to be wrong is likely to provoke more useful information than could be learned by delaying decisions pending further study. …

Legal must learn to adapt to the speed of business at the speed of business, while continuing to adhere to our company’s core values and our own professional ethical obligations.

Meanwhile, friend and fellow Slaw blogger Simon Chester snagged this remarkable item from the UK Law Gazette, in a posting at the College of Law Practice Management blog: “Stephen Mayson, who heads up the Legal Services Policy Institute in London, made headlines this week when he revealed the results of research showing that the English legal profession already has twice as many qualified lawyers as will be needed in the new marketplace created by the Legal Services Act 2007.” Here’s his full speech, with the cheery title Catalyst, Cataclysm or Catastrophe?, and here are some of Mayson’s observations:

There has been a doubling of qualified lawyers in the last 12 years. We have to ask, what do we need those lawyers for? The brutal answer is, only for reserved activities. It is amazing how many lawyers do not get that… Lawyers are expensive and have been led to believe things about their status. They have that baggage. But if you want clients to pay you for being a lawyer when they do not need one, you have got to have a good story to tell.

We probably have twice as many qualified lawyers as that market needs. The number of lawyers has doubled, but the volume of work in reserved activities has not… We have got to get much tighter on what we pay for.

The AA (the English motorists organization) and HBOS (a financial institution specializing in consumer financial services and mortgages) are doing [legal] work on a massive scale. There aren’t that many law firms around that can compete. Are we going to roll over, or think about consolidation?… The one thing that makes an industry vulnerable is the incumbents not changing. Thinking like lawyers could spell the end.

In this vein, I’m assuming you’ve already read Richard Susskind’s thoughts on “The End of Lawyers,” as well as Tony Williams’ counterpoints. If you’re not yet on board with the notion that Great Turmoil Cometh — with all this prophecy, with the recession, with globalization, with generational change, and so much more — you might as well skip the rest of this post, and this blog, too.

There is a mass chorus of voices, rising in volume and pitch, warning you to change how your organization thinks and operates, as soon as possible. Oddly enough, I’m not going to join in — not right yet, anyway.

Change is maybe the single most difficult human condition to experience, and almost everyone wants to put it off as long as they can. Even when they know what to do and how important it is to do it, people still resist change with ferocity, as David Maister’s terrific new book Strategy and the Fat Smoker makes clear. Most of us would prefer to change a year late than a year early, even knowing that the cost will be higher down the road. Trying to swim against that tide, as would-be change agents and innovators within law firms can attest, is exhausting.

The vast majority of organizational “change initiatives” are stillborn for precisely this reason: preventive change generates hardly any traction. Change invariably occurs only when it absolutely must (if not sometime after that). The more insulated your organization is from the effects of a changing environment, the more difficult it is to foment change before the crisis hits — and few organizations have traditionally been more insulated from reality than law firms. What’s really happening here is that that insulation is about to be stripped away.

My thought, worth every penny you’re paying for it, would be to take all these portents of imminent upheaval and use them to soften the ground in your organization — prepare the environment for major change without necessarily trying to force it through yet. It’s possible your organization may be sufficiently flexible, forward-thinking and innovation-inclined that a simple call to readiness will be enough to get the wheels of actual proactivity rolling. But in most places, resistance to change will be so fierce that you’ll wear yourself out trying to get everyone into the cellar before the tornado’s in plain sight.

But when the crisis is at hand, when the prospect of personal trauma is inescapable, then people will suddenly remember the lawyer who was thought to be crying wolf. You’ll find worried faces and willing hands at your door, people prepared to endure the sacrifice of real change because they feel truly threatened, maybe for the first time in their careers. At that point, you will be asked repeatedly for (a) a full understanding of the macro forces buffeting your organization, (b) a vision for where your organization needs to go and why, and (c) a plan to get there, all ready to roll out. This is the nest you can be building right now — the fallout shelter to which your neighbours are going to be drawn.

Change management will not be a priority for lawyers until it’s almost too late — I don’t see any way around that. So be ready to act quickly and decisively between the “almost” and the “too late.” Lay your plans, seek out and establish allies within the organization, and keep issuing the storm warnings. With luck, you’ll establish momentum and awareness with enough key parties that you can capitalize on the numerous opportunities the crisis will present before zero hour. But if not, then at the very least, your groundwork could be the difference between simply getting your organization through the storm, and being a victim of it.

I thought of M. Ledru-Rollin upon reading an article in today’s edition of the National Law Journal about law firms sending their lawyers on leadership training programs. One of the points it raises is that “leadership” is an elastic concept into which firms like to insert things like team-building or strategy buy-in exercises. I’m not really in favour of that, because leadership is too important a concept to be diluted: the more meaning you pack into that term, the less effective it’s going to be. That, in turn, raises the question of what law firm leadership is fundamentally about.

Well, I sure don’t have the answer. David Maister has said: “I think more rubbish has been written about ‘leadership’ than almost any other business topic. A lot of it is patently false, and even more of it is dangerous,” and I won’t add to the pile. But I will suggest that the collaborative aspects of leadership deserve more attention.

Strength, decisiveness and vision are often wrongly regarded as attributes of a lone, rugged, heroic persona — the brave individual who rallies the troops through the sheer force of being right. That works great in movies but rather less well in complex professional businesses, especially law firms of autonomous partners who will not be dragged anywhere they don’t want to go.

But good leaders know they don’t have all the answers, and they don’t care. What they do have is the judgment to tap into their best people’s collective wisdom and the confidence to integrate and orchestrate that knowledge in the right direction. They’re not diminished by seeking input, because they’re not looking for consensus or the path of least resistance: they’re looking for the right answer. Bruce MacEwen at Adam Smith, Esq. has written a lot of smart things about leadership, including this advice for managing partners:

You need to listen. Seriously listen. “Active listening” is one of the more depressing cliches to have emerged from the booming self-help industry, but I’ll tell you what active listening means to me: Actively encouraging disagreement. What is wrong with this picture I’ve drawn? What am I missing? If you were me, what would you do differently? “Conflict” it’s not; “consensus” it’s not. Common sense it might be.

That is so hard for lawyers to do — we hate, hate, hate not being right about something, especially when the stakes are high. A lawyer without all the answers feels deeply vulnerable. But leadership isn’t about owning the right answer — it’s about putting oneself in the service of the right answer, and recognizing that everyone has a piece of the map to get there. A leader who demonstrates the courage to be wrong, along with the firm conviction that we’ll get it right, has an intoxicating combination at his or her disposal.

In that regard, an innovative program just announced by Edge International and Managing Partner magazine shows the value of tapping into collective experience. Edge partner Patrick McKenna and Baker & Daniels Chair Emeritus Brian Burke are spearheading the Leadership Advisory Board, comprised of experienced managing partners who will offer new law firm leaders the chance to access their knowledge and insights. It’s a great example of mentoring, which the legal profession needs, in the service of leadership, which the profession needs even more.

The WSJ blog’s readers are providing their usual snarky responses: “This new ‘movement’ will dovetail nicely into the massive layoffs that will be coming in the coming months,” says one. “So, you want more time with your family or to pursue your passion for flamenco guitar? Here is 3 months severance.” Nice. So, here’s my answer to the blog’s question: yes. As Judith shouted at Reg in The Life of Brian, “Something’s actually happening!”

I can refer to you any number of articles and links about law firms that are making changes to the way they manage their employees and their work — see the Financial Times‘ law firm innovation report and the Innovaction Awards, for starters. In addition to the firms identified in the Times article, there are others making changes to how they operate in terms of compensation, of partnership, of billable hours, of women in law firms, and even of the entire firm itself. And these are just a few of the ones we hear about — other changes are occurring, quietly and beneath the radar, in areas such as recruitment, retention, training, parental leave, and evaluation.

Law firms are under pressure. They’ve gotten used to a comfortable world where they could set the tone and pace of operations. That comfort zone is evaporating from two directions: externally from clients and internally from lawyers. Clients really are more sophisticated and more demanding, and they’re looking for more than their firms have traditionally been willing to give them. And lawyers really are more inclined to walk away from (or try to change) work conditions that don’t satisfy a wide range of personal needs.

But even that’s not really new — both clients and lawyers are longstanding complainers, and pressure has been brought before, which law firms have ignored. And keep in mind that many, many law firms are continuing to ignore these pressures. What’s really new this time, I think, is not just that law firms are changing the way they do business, but why. I think they’re doing it, voluntarily, to gain a competitive advantage.

That’s what’s really changed about the legal industry: competition is now tough, brutally so — for the best clients, for the most lucrative work, for the finest talent. The genteel, informal, non-compete culture that law firms have traditionally relied upon with one another is gone. The pie has never been bigger or richer, but only the sharpest, best firms are going to get a slice of it. Some firms — not very many, but more than just a handful — get this, and they understand that business as usual won’t work now.

They need ways to get clients’ attention, so they switch their billing systems — not because they necessarily think it’s better, but because the clients do. They need ways to find and keep the most talented lawyers, so they fiddle around with billing, compensation and promotion methodologies — not because they care about their lawyers’ lives, but to hook young lawyers and stand out from the crowd. They need ways to ensure their whip-smart lawyers do better work than their rivals’ whip-smart lawyers, so they’re investing in training, skill upgrades and client secondments. They do all these things, as much as the partnership committee can stomach, because they understand how close to the edge they are, and how thin the margin is becoming between glory and disintegration. This is all brand new, and it’s not going to stop anytime soon.

They say no revolution ever started inside the castle. Well, you might want to creep up to the profession’s fortress and put your ear to the wall. You might hear something really interesting.

I honestly don’t know of any midsize or larger law firms, at least, that operate other than “to maximize the wealth of the current shareholders.” Talking about stewardship — propounding the idea that you’ve inherited something special and precious from those who came before you, that you don’t “own” it the way you own your car or your jacket, and that you’re compelled to pass on that legacy intact and improved to those who follow — that would be speaking a foreign language in most current partnership meetings. Certainly there are exceptional firms out there, but they likely operate so differently from the competition as to be exceptions that prove the rule.

I don’t think this is because of rampant employee turnover and lateral departures — they’re symptoms of stewardship’s absence, not a cause. I do think that, among law firms anyway, aggressive growth — “national” and “global” strategies meant to maximize business intake — have stretched the traditional model of a law firm beyond any coherent meaning. I mean, come on — an 800-member “partnership”? Can you seriously contend that the hundreds of lawyers nationwide or worldwide whom you’ve never met — who share only a letterhead and a remuneration plan with you — are your “partners” in any but the most formalistic sense of the word?

True “partnership” implies elements like trust, shared values, common commitments — it involves a conscious recognition that you and I hold the same approaches to professionalism and client service, and a decision to proceed together towards our shared goals. Receiving an e-mail in Montreal announcing that the Calgary office has admitted a new litigation partner whom you’ve never met and likely never will, that doesn’t cut it. Law firms that grow beyond a certain size and jurisdiction inherently can’t be much more than a loose affiliation of constantly revolving outside counsel. In this context, “stewardship” simply can’t apply.

The recent deals whereby major law firms have become the single source for a multinational’s outside legal work — Tyco and Evershed’s, Linde and DLA Piper — look more and more to me like the future of large law firms: really, really big corporate legal departments, half-inside, half-outside. That’s fine for them, but I look forward to the day when these firms no longer burn so brightly in the profession’s imagination that they set the tone and expectations for how other law partnerships are expected to define and conduct themselves.

I always tell law students to remember that large law firms are the exception, not the rule. Hopefully, stewardship still runs silent and deep among smaller firms, and will stage a major comeback as the nature of lawyers’ business associations continues to evolve in the years to come.

This post originally appeared as a comment to a post at David Maister’s blog on March 22, 2007.

The legal profession is turning upside down, and many of the familiar landmarks are disappearing or bring replaced by brand-new structures. There are so many changes afoot that National’s editorial team could match each letter of the alphabet to a development that presents a threat — or an opportunity — for lawyers. Twenty-six trends, 26 letters: which ones matter the most to you?

Associé (Partnership)

It’s always been the Holy Grail, the ultimate goal for lawyers starting out in private practice It has been considered the final step in a lawyer’s transition from simply an employee to a partner. But this is all changing, thanks to systematic and generational change.

Equity partnerships (partnership without capital investments or draws), salaried associate, permanent or advisory associate — new forms of quasi-partnership are born every year. The journey to the associate level is accelerated in some firms, delayed in others. Methods vary from one firm to another, from one individual to another.

And increasingly, there are lawyers who choose to not aspire to partner status at all — for whom client development, firm management, and the additional responsibilities that go along with being a partner hold little or no appeal. Will partnership become obsolete? No, but flexibility, rather than tradition, will rule this ancient institution from now on.

Runners-up: Asia, Latin America

Blogs

Forget the personal and political blogs you’ve been reading and hearing about — we’re interested in blogs solely as marketing and communications vehicles for lawyers. And what vehicles they are.

Weblogs allow lawyers to post their daily observations and insights into their area of law or the industry they serve. They help lawyers communicate informally with both current and potential clients on the Web, show off their expertise, and differentiate themselves
from their less visible competitors. Best of all, they indulge the wannabe columnist hidden away inside most lawyers.

In the short term, blogs will replace paper and electronic client newsletters, changing the way lawyers keep their clients updated and informed. Longer-term, they will both empower lawyers and require them to market themselves, to take their marketing fully into their own hands. Not only will lawyers be able to promote themselves every day in personal, hands-on fashion — that will also be clients’ basic expectation.

Runners-up: Billing, Billable hours, Biotechnology

Clients

This category was filled to overflowing — in addition to the runners-up below, we considered Corporate Counsel, Conflicts and Calgary. But how do you overlook the power of clients?

Clients are more demanding of lawyers than ever — they want fast results at low cost, and they have high expectations of how the law should solve their problems. Lawyers, by nature and training, are careful, deliberate, and usually reluctant to deliver bad news. Throw in lawyers’ erratic communication and archaic billing systems, and you have a potentially lethal mix.

The most successful lawyers in future will be those willing to adopt four Ps as the basis of their relationship with clients. They will be Positive (keep a good attitude), Proactive (initiate contact frequently), Professional (clients must stay within boundaries of respect and reality) and Partners (lawyers and clients share the steering wheel). Clients have power, but they need guidance. That’s the governing client relationship template.

Runners-up: Commoditization, Collaboration, China, Clementi Report

Diversity

Don’t think this is just another feel-good buzzword or politically correct concept. Diversity is a business imperative — just ask the large U.S. law firm dropped by Wal-Mart because the firm failed to meet the shopping giant’s demands for diversity among the lawyers handling its files.

For both demographic and global political reasons, Canada’s status as an immigration nation will only grow over the coming decades, which means the client marketplace will become even more diverse. Clients like to see familiar faces and hear their own languages at a law office — will you be offering them? Your firm’s diversity can easily become a competitive factor.

Diversity isn’t just about gender and skin colour, either — it’s also about background, age and life experience. In future, if you’re tempted to hire people who look, sound and act just like you, you might want to think again.

Runners-up: Demographics, Document management, Disaster planning

Ethics

At the ABA TECHSHOW last April, a panelist dropped an observation that resounded like a thunderbolt. “The biggest impediment to innovation in the practice of law,” he said, “is legal ethics.”

He didn’t mean that lawyers should throw away integrity and professionalism — he meant that our ancient rules about what lawyers can and can’t do could be blocking our ability to offer services in new, client-friendly ways. Non-lawyers are providing legal services bound by no rules except those of commerce, and the market is responding. Our ethics, rightly or wrongly, constrain what we can offer clients.

Consider this: ethics rules (and Supreme Court decisions) have made it very difficult for lawyers to represent clients in potential conflict-of-interest situations. But some law firms are now nationwide giants, and many clients are multinational beasts: conflicts are becoming unavoidable. Very soon, legal ethics are going to collide with marketplace realities. Which will win?

Runners-up: E-discovery, Extranets, Elder law

Facturation (Billing)

An unavoidable fact of legal practice, some lawyers relish the billing process, but most others see it as a necessary evil at best. Partly that’s because trying to get paid is rarely an exciting or fun process, but mostly, its bad reputation is thanks to the billable hour.

Increasingly an artifact of an era who time has passed, the billable hour remains the standard measure of a lawyer’s productivity, failing to deliver real value to the client and steadily encroaching on the lawyer’s private life.

But change is finally in the air, thanks to growing client pressure and the rise of a younger generation. Alternative forms of billing — project-based, fixed-fee, capped fees, result-based, to name a few — are slowly winning converts. New billing methods will require lawyers to re-examine and re-engineer their work processes, including billing by teams or practice groups.

There are any number of obstacles to progress in this area, but there’s also a lot of momentum behind it. Lawyers prepared to be innovative today will reap the rewards tomorrow.

Runners-up: Law faculties, fairness

Globalization

Thanks to political, market and technology forces, the world’s economies and cultures are growing closer, more intertwined and more interdependent. That means that eventually, legal service provision will cross borders.

It could be a threat: your competition won’t be just the firm down the street, the paralegals across town or the Grand & Toy selling do-it-yourself-will CDs — it’ll also be any lawyer anywhere who can offer services and advice to your clients over the Internet.

Or it could be an opportunity: selling your services to a worldwide market. You could specialize as narrowly as you like in your favourite area of law, and you’d still have a huge client base. Your imagination might be all that could limit your reach.

But for clients, what it will really mean is that they can negotiate the best service possible from a planet full of qualified lawyers. And that’s what you call a whole new ballgame.

Runners-up: Google, GATS

Home

Home is also where lawyers want to work. Especially in large urban centres, the daily commute is a brutal, multihour and increasingly expensive grind. Thanks to telecommuting and remote access, lawyers don’t need to be in the office every day to do their jobs. It’s going to become difficult to explain to these lawyers why they should be.

Home was irrelevant to North American work culture over the last 50 years; it’s going to be central to that culture over the next 50. To stay ahead of the curve, start figuring out ways to integrate lawyers’ homes into your law practice’s business model.

Runner-up: Human resources

Intellectual property

Intellectual property is exploding. The Internet and globalization have pounded traditional understandings of IP — from pirated DVDs in Mexico to cloning labs in South Korea, from genetically engineered mice in Boston to genetically engineered wheat in Saskatoon, from Research in Motion’s headquarters in Waterloo to any downloaded music collection in your own home.

There are literally trillions of dollars at stake in IP fights worldwide, and lawyers will be at the forefront of these battles. What’s more, our whole understanding of who is entitled to use whose creations, and for what purpose, is now up for grabs. IP lawyers are going to help change the world — how many practitioners can say that?

The Internet, of course, was the obvious choice for this entry, but it’s just too big to handle in 150 words: it encompasses many of the entries on this list all by itself.

Runners-up: Internet, Innovation, Industry groups

Journalistes (Media)

Lawyers and journalists have maintained, at best, a relationship of distant respect; at worst, one of outright mistrust. But in an increasingly connected world in which courts are called on to settle social debates, lawyers and the media will meet more and more frequently. Friction will also increase, unless a new relationship template can be forged.

Increasingly, lawyers are coming to understand that they have more to gain from collaboration with journalists than from confrontation. The primary interest of lawyers must be protecting the client’s interests and upholding the administration of justice. But that interest would be better served by clear, balanced, and publicized information, than by a denial of the crucial role media plays in our society.

A better understanding by lawyers of public relations in an Internet media age would only advance the cause of justice. Lawyers and journalists have much to learn from each other.

Runners-up: Justice, Jurisprudence

Knowledge management

If you read “Knowledge uprising” in our January/February 2006 issue, you already know how important KM is becoming to law firms of all sizes. Knowledge management allows lawyers to access a vibrant, constantly refreshing database of information, experiences, trends and wisdom, individually and collectively drawn from their colleagues.

Lawyers are part of the 21st-century vanguard of “knowledge workers” who will revolutionize the global economy. The problem is that lawyers are among the least efficient and effective knowledge workers around, thanks in large part to how they’re managed and how they sell their services.

KM is the first important step towards a new and truly collaborative model for legal service production. As KM software becomes more sophisticated and the process becomes automated, KM will form part of the seamless fabric of lawyers’ workday. Like all great advances, it will become so indispensable in our work lives as to be unnoticed.

Leadership

There are two subjects here. First, more law firms will come to recognize that managing partners can no longer effectively operate complex, multi-million-dollar businesses and practise law at the same time. Do insurance companies allow their CEOs to sell policies in their spare time? Leading a law firm requires multiple full-time professionals — not all of them have to be lawyers.

Secondly, the practice of law itself also requires leadership. Lawyers have often been accused of driving a car by looking in the rear-view mirror: the reliance on precedent discourages innovation and forward thinking. Numerous initiatives to reform legal services and benefit both lawyers and clients have starved to death in partnership and committee meetings, not primarily on their merits, but because lawyers resist change.

No industry would benefit more from a willingness to innovate than this one. The stage is set for a pioneering firm or lawyer to step up and lead the way. Who will emerge?

Runners-up: Law schools, Legal research, Laterals, LLPs

Médiation (ADR)

It’s not a new development — mediation has taken the legal world by storm over the past 15 years — but this trend is not close to done yet. From its origins in family law and building upon its great success in the business world, ADR will continue to redefine how the public really accesses justice.

In the past, mediation was considered an extra-judicial conflict resolution method. But now, in a growing number of jurisdictions, mediation is now a part of the official process of bringing a case before the courts or administrative authorities.

In fact, the growing popularity of mediation, arbitration, collaborative law, negotiation, and other forms of facilitation mean that very shortly, we’ll have to rethink our terminology. How soon until ADR becomes “SDR” — “Standard Dispute Resolution” — and courtroom litigation is considered the “alternative”? Maybe we’re already there.

Runners-up: Mentoring, Managing partners, Mobility

Niche

General law practice in Canada is in tough. Many GPs have seen their bread-and-butter work taken away by non-lawyer service providers; few new lawyers are decamping to rural Canada; GPs are older than average and may not have succession plans in place. But even aside from that, general practice is falling victim to the relentless drive towards specialization.

Most lawyers, it seems, need a niche: a distinct segment of a practice area where he or she can set up shop and attract ever more specialized clients. Without a niche, it’s more difficult for a lawyer to differentiate himself or herself from the competition — and thanks to the Internet, niche marketing is easier than it’s ever been.

Ten years ago, who would have foreseen today’s video game practice groups or genetic engineering lawyers? Who can foresee what 2016 will bring? Niches are the future of lawyers’ careers.

Runners-up: NAFTA, Networks

Outsourcing & Offshoring

Every industry eventually learns a hard truth: work migrates to the lowest-cost environment. Garment workers, auto manufacturers and telemarketers are among those who’ve received this economic crash course. Lawyers are the latest students.

As a feature article in our June issue will describe, legal work is being outsourced from North American law firms to countries like India. Millions of ambitious, well-educated, English-speaking Indian professionals are already doing legal research and basic legal tasks for North American clients — and they won’t be content with low-level work for long. Check out the world-class Indian technology industry if you’re skeptical.

Most Canadian law firms don’t differentiate themselves in terms of quality of service or work product, at least as far as clients are concerned. So those clients look to price as the difference maker — and Canadian firms simply can’t compete with Asian competitors in this category. We’ve only just seen the tip of this mammoth iceberg.

Runners-up: Open-source, Outside counsel

Practice groups

Our article “All for one,” on p. 42, lays it out. Any firm of a certain size will eventually have to restructure itself to accommodate practice groups, often in the form of industry and client groups. Increasingly, these groups will run their own affairs, hire, promote and compensate independently, and take responsibility for everything from rainmaking to marketing.

But look behind the trend, and you’ll see the force driving it: clients. Practice groups have evolved to their present form because they suit clients’ interests, offering focused, well-organized teams of professionals geared to increasingly specific demands.

This level of integration will only grow — as extranets and secondments become more common, the day will come when it’s difficult to tell the in-house department from the outside counsel practice group.

Runners-up: Podcasting, Practice management, Pacific Rim

Quasi-lawyers

The large and growing field of non-lawyer legal service providers includes independent paralegals, notaries outside Quebec, immigration consultants, title insurers, and the makers of do-it-yourself will kits. If you want to stretch the definition, it also encompasses unrepresented litigants.

What they all have in common is that they compete against lawyers for clients’ legal business; generally speaking, quasi-lawyers have fewer qualifications than lawyers and charge a lower price. Lawyers’ responses have fallen into two categories: (a) prosecute or (b) ignore. The former is expensive and has few successes to show; the latter is becoming harder to do every day.

Even the most diehard defender of the legal profession would agree that the days when lawyers monopolized the legal services market are over. Savvy practitioners will partner with or co-opt these quasi-lawyers into their own practices, allowing them to offer more services in a wider price range; they will accept that these competitors are not going away.

Runners-up: Qualifications, Qualité

RSS

Really Simple Syndication emerged from blogs, but this technology’s impact will go far beyond. If blogs replace newsletters and perhaps even newspapers, RSS might someday replace blogs and even email itself — completely transforming electronic communications in the process.

RSS is a technology that automatically informs your computer every time new information is posted on Websites for which you’ve requested updates. You no longer need to constantly visit those sites — your computer quietly assembles the latest information and waits for you to access it whenever you want. Unlike email, which constantly interrupts your daily workflow, RSS is a silent servant.

In the short term, lawyers will adopt RSS to keep their clients informed of new developments. In the long term, they’ll use RSS to learn the latest court decisions the moment they’re posted and to subscribe to customized news and information from numerous sources. Three small letters; a world of change.

Runners-up: Reward systems, Retirement, Risk management

Self-governance

In 2004, former Bank of England Deputy Governor Sir David Clementi recommended a series of reforms to a British legal profession that had become unresponsive to client concerns. Legislation enacting these changes, including the near-total overhaul of lawyers’ self-regulatory and disciplinary systems, could be proclaimed there within nine months.

Canada is unlikely to experience this sort of upheaval, thanks to stellar work by our law societies, but there is no guarantee that self-governance will continue unopposed. For instance, heavy-handed attempts by lawyers to try to beat back non-lawyer service providers might well gain the attention of competition commissioners, who take a dim view of perceived attempts to maintain monopolies.

Moreover, if public respect for lawyers and the justice system does not rebound, the risk that lawyers could someday make easy political scapegoats will rise. In short, the legal profession will have to be doubly protective of its independence in future.

Runners-up: Sarbanes-Oxley, Solos, Self-represented litigants

Télé (Telecommunications)

It’s a long-distance world. Today, we cannot communicate professionally without using the telephone, participating in teleconferences, telecommuting to work, or telecommunicating with clients and colleagues. And let’s not forget television and teleconsultation.

Thanks to laptops, cellphones and PDAs, distance is increasingly unimportant in a lawyer’s life. Practising law in several towns at the same time, collaborating with colleagues across the country, doing legal research without leaving your office chair —none of these could have been imagined 20 years ago, but they are necessities of practice today and will be indispensable tomorrow.

The real impact is coning soon for those who live outside of Canada’s urban centres — both for the lawyers who can better serve their far-flung clients, and for a legal system that has always relied on “in-person” meetings to dispense justice. Can we truly administer justice without standing face to face? We may soon find out.

Runners-up: Technology, Temp lawyers

Unbundling

Unbundling isn’t new — for years, lawyers have been carving off discrete parts of their legal service packages and offering them on an individual basis. What has changed recently is the public’s surging appetite for pick-and-choose legal services, and lawyers’ gradual adoption of new business models in response.

As clients grow more sophisticated, there are more things that (rightly or wrongly) they feel they can do themselves with simply a lawyer’s assistance, rather than paying the lawyer to do it all. So, a litigant may decide to represent himself or herself in court, but with legal research or procedural advice provided by a lawyer. Unbundling is lawyers’
response to clients’ new willingness to trust to their own skills or luck.

Eventually, unbundling could evolve into a true give-and-take partnership between lawyer and client, with each playing to her strengths and concentrating on her preferred aspects of the solution. It represents a whole new type of lawyer-client relationship.

Runners-up: United States, Université

VOIP

It stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol, which is essentially a high-tech term for using the Internet as your long-distance telephone. Basically, VOIP converts a voice signal from a telephone into a digital signal to travel over the Internet to its destination, whereupon it’s then converted back into a voice signal. Think of it as warp drive for your phone call.

VOIP’s immediate advantage for lawyers is that it can offer essentially free long-distance calling if you have a Net connection. It also improves lawyer mobility — you can use a VOIP-enabled wireless laptop as a telephone. This technology is in its infancy — there are numerous improvements waiting to be made in call quality, security and reliability, and the marketplace is still in a state of flux. But the time is coming when pretty much every lawyer will use the Internet for phone services, in the office and on the road.

Runners-up: Virtual law firms, Videoconferencing

Wikis, Wireless, Web 2.0

We just couldn’t decide, so we ended up with a three-way tie.

Wikis are collaborative Websites to which any group (public or private) can be invited to contribute and build a joint database or document. The most well-known is Wikipedia, but thousands of others, including numerous law-focused Wikis, are flourishing every day on the Internet.

Wireless access is revolutionizing communications: connectivity among people and computers without having to plug into a phone or Internet land line. It started with cell phones, but its current applications include computers, smart ID cards, and even signal-transmitting clothes. There’s almost no telling where it will go next.

Web 2.0 is a shorthand term to describe what many observers call an evolutionary step in the Internet’s development. The Net used to be about static Web pages; now it’s about collaborative tools that bring people together to create groundbreaking concepts, products and services. Keep an eye out for Law 2.0, too.

Runners-up: WTO, Writely

eXtranets

Okay, so we cheated a little here. Extranets are yet another high-tech application of the shifting ground in the lawyer-client relationship. Extranets are password-protected Websites set up to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and skills between a client and its professional service providers.

Savvy law firms began creating extranets for their clients a few years ago. Sometimes, they set up a small extranet for a specific project like a trial or corporate deal; sometimes, they create a large, multi-track site for a major client. Lately, however, clients have grown tired of waiting for lawyers to catch on and have created their own extranets, inviting valued lawyers to participate.

Essentially, extranets are virtual war rooms, securely locked down and open 24/7/365 to invitees only. They allow lawyers and clients to trade knowledge, ideas and perspectives at little cost. And they only presage better tools in future to cement a lawyer-client relationship.

Runner-up: XML

generation Y

The Boomers had kids — lots of them. In the U.S. alone, 72 million Baby Boomers produced 60 million children between 1979 and 1994, as compared to fewer than 20 million Gen-Xers. Generation Y ranges from 10 to 25 years old — which means that the leading edge is entering the legal profession as we speak.

The current generation of young lawyers has already thrown law firms for a loop, rejecting Boomer notions of devotion to work and financial success in favour of personal fulfillment, family and community interests. This vanguard foreshadows the even bigger cultural body blow that Generation Y is poised to deliver to the practice of law.

Nobody yet knows what kind of workers and citizens Gen-Yers will be. But within five years, they’ll be associates; in ten years, they’ll be partners; and in 20 years, they will own the legal profession.

Runner-up: Yahoo!

Zero hour

This final entry means, simply, that time’s up. These preceding 25 trends aren’t way off in the future somewhere: they’re happening today, and no law practice can afford to be unaware of or uninterested in them. These are 25 forces that are already shaping the legal profession, and they will continue to do so, with escalating force, in the years to come.

What can you do to stay ahead of this fast-moving curve? If your law firm doesn’t have a Chief Strategic Officer in charge of mapping out trends in the lawyer and client marketplaces, consider appointing one. Bring your younger lawyers into the strategic
planning loop and get them to advise you on the changes they see. If you’re in a small firm, match the trends that most affect your narrow focus and track them closely.

But if there’s one silver bullet available to help you cope with all these trends, it’s this: maximize the effectiveness of your client relations. Clients are driving many of these changes, while riding groundswells and wholesale shifts in the professional services landscape. Be aware, be adaptable, and communicate with your clients as much as possible.

The practice of law is becoming almost cryptographically complicated — clients are the codebreakers.

Rather than criticizing their newest recruits, firms might instead try learning to maximize what this generation has to offer: intelligence, creativity, technology skills and, yes, a solid work ethic. Today’s new lawyers are quite willing to put in the hours — but many need a good reason, one more compelling than “increasing firm profits.”

Today’s new lawyers also understand that associates are a fungible commodity in this marketplace. And when these associates read in the newspaper about senior partners switching firms for more money and more “challenges,” is it any wonder they feel inclined to follow suit?

And this brings us to the heart of this generational rift: leadership.  Today’s new lawyers — and their whole generation, incidentally — are starved for leadership. They’re seeking an actual vision for what a lawyer and a law firm could be, and they will respond enthusiastically to the keynotes of leadership: mentoring, coaching, feedback, vision, and a sense of higher purpose.

If a law firm chose to truly prize leadership, and dedicated the resources to prove it, that firm would have its choice of the very best and brightest young lawyers. It would have to turn them away at the door.

This post originally appeared as the editorial in the October/November 2005 issue of National magazine.