This process, which has been underway for a couple of years now, is behind the move of back-office and middle-office jobs to outsourcing companies (both offshore and onshore) and the transfer of associates’ jobs to LPOs, free-agent project lawyers, and innovative offerings like Axiom and Lawyers On Demand. (Some of these functions are also being replaced by technology, at a rate that will steadily increase in the next few years.)

The impact of these efforts is already clear, ranging from the emergence of new “capitals of law” outside the major financial centers to the steady decline in the partner-associate ratio (leverage is now just below 1-to-1 in the AmLaw 200). There’s nothing sinister about this: it’s the natural market-driven process by which labour shifts and reconstitutes itself to its most efficient and effective use.

But I suspect that the partners driving this process forward haven’t thought about where it’s inevitably going to wind up. When you’ve finished asking, “What’s the point of an IT department?” and “What’s the point of all these associates?” there’s really only one question left: “What is the point of a partner?”

Asking that question — and every firm is either asking it now or will have to ask it shortly — raises some uncomfortable issues. We know what function the payroll clerk performs, and we know her job can be done in Wheeling or Belfast. Ditto the paralegal, whose job can be outsourced to someone working from home in a small town in California. We know what the associate is for: either to be groomed for future partnership and leadership or (far more likely) to do highly leveraged work and generate partner profit until eliminated, voluntarily or otherwise.

Positions like these, whose role in the overall  scheme of things is clear, can be understood and moved around as needed. But what about partners? What are they for? I can think of three possibilities.

• Do they bring in big business? (That is to say, enough business to sustain much more than just their own practice?) A small percentage of partners do, and they’re incredibly valuable. (A friend of mine in a big firm estimates that the best rainmakers are probably underpaid by a factor of 10.)
• If they don’t bring in big business, are they superb client relationship maintainers? (And I mean superb.) Most great “relationship” partners are rainmakers covered by the first category, but this possibility should still be raised.
• If they’re not critical to client relationships in either of the two preceding senses, are they tremendous managers? That is to say, are they highly valued and indispensable managers of the organization, its people, or its processes?

To my mind, at least, those three categories cover virtually all the justifications for inviting a lawyer into a law firm partnership. These are the key roles that make a firm profitable and successful — they constitute the essence of what “partner” status is supposed to describe. But by no means do all or most law firm partners today qualify under one of these headings. And if a “partner” doesn’t fall into one of those three categories, then what precisely is he or she doing in the partnership?

I suspect that a lot of “partners” in law firms today are in that position because the firm didn’t know what else to do with them, because the other partners liked them, and because times were good — in short, they were made partners because it pleased the firm to do so. Not a few younger lawyers in law firms have glared upwards at the people above them and groused, “How did they become partners?” And in more than a few cases, they’re right to wonder, because these lawyers aren’t partners so much as they’re superannuated associates who came along at the right time. It’s my belief that, speaking from a labour utilization perspective, these partners are not occupying the correct role, either for them or the firm. They need to be reassigned.

And they are. Earlier this year came a report about increased profits at AmLaw 100 firms achieved at least in part by thinning the ranks: 2% of partners de-equitized over the previous two years. A recent survey reported that fully half the UK’s top 30 law firms are now either de-equitizing partners or considering doing so, a development predicted back in January by Hildebrandt and Citi Private Bank. In addition to steadily reducing the partnership ranks, firms are taking steps to ensure that future cohorts are smaller: Eversheds, for example, has gone so far as to create a brand new position (legal director) as an alternative to becoming partner.

There’s a growing belief among many firms that they invited too many people into the partnership over the past years and decades. Those firms are now starting the process of unwinding those errors. Record low realization rates being reported for some of the biggest US firms, as low as 85%, will only spur that development, because there’s nothing else left to cut and no one else left to reassign.

Nor is it likely that partner ranks will swell again in future, following some highly anticipated but nowhere-in-sight economic recovery. Partnership, as Stephen Mayson argues, is neither an appropriate nor a viable way to manage enterprises of the size and complexity of most law firms. The imminent arrival of Alternative Business Structures in the UK and the outside ownership they’ll bring with them should ensure that the partnership model will henceforth be reserved for smaller firms, as it was originally intended.

Law firms are in the process of reinventing themselves, but the easy work — cutting staff and laying off associates — is long past. Removing lawyers from the partnership is (or should be) an extremely difficult experience for all concerned, but as times continue to be tough and worse, the stronger members of the herd will not hesitate to cull the weaker. But most firms have yet to face up to the hardest part of all — re-engineering the firm’s workflow, delivery, pricing and compensation systems in order to compete in a new marketplace. That’s a bridge, I suspect, that few firms will find themselves willing or able to cross.

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.

I fall into the latter category, for the reasons provided by Allison Shields in a comment on Carolyn’s post…

Why would a client care about time records or how the work gets done as long as it’s done based upon agreed-upon specifications? Clients only really care about time and time records because they perceive that’s what they’re paying for – and lawyers back that up by claiming that what they sell is time, instead of focusing on the value and the services they provide to clients. Lawyers don’t sell time and clients don’t buy time.

…and Jay Shepherd in a separate post at his blog:

Now folks at other law firms will whine that they need to know how profitable an associate’s work is, and how profitable a particular matter or client is. Without tracking and billing for time, they can’t possibly tell.

Nonsense. Take an accounting class. Profit is revenue minus expenses. The question is whether the firm is profitable, not whether an associate or a client is profitable. The relevant question for a client is whether you’re delivering enough value to the client to justify the best price they would pay. The relevant question for an associate is whether he or she does good work for your clients.

The whining continues: But if we don’t track associates’ time, how do we know if they’re working? After your accounting class, take a management class. You know by managing your associates.

But there’s another important point here, voiced by Doug Cornelius in a further Blog Watch comment:

When you go to non-hourly billing, the time sheets are focused on the internal process and business analysis. You can focus on the efficiencies and inefficiencies of your operations. You can use this data to better target your fee and find ways to get it done better, faster and more efficiently. Putting more money in the lawyer’s pocket.

Generally, I agree with this, though I actually don’t think a traditional time sheet by itself would be the best way to track productivity and efficiency, for a couple of reasons. One, lawyers are notoriously inconsistent docketers — many time sheets are filled out at the end of the day or the week through recollection and guesswork, meaning lawyers overestimate (or, with surprising frequency, underestimate) the number of hours they spent on a given matter. And two, forcing a lawyer to record her time, even if the sheets aren’t used to support invoices, reinforces the importance of “time spent” and encourages the belief that time really is what the lawyer is selling.

But Doug is correct — law firms need ways to measure the productivity of their lawyers, the efficiency of their practices, and the overall effectiveness of their working  days. Firms need lawyer performance metrics — that is, they need to (a) identify a lawyer’s activities and accomplishments that contribute the most value to the firm, (b) come up with ways to effectively measure those activities and accomplishments, and (c) create systems and encourage habits by which a lawyer can improve her performance in these respects. Larger firms would create performance metrics for individual practice groups, or regional offices, not just for individual lawyers. (And firms of all sizes should start with the definitive discussion of performance metrics in the law, John Alber’s July 2005 “Delivering Actionable Information To Front-Line Lawyers”).

Jason Anderman took a good step in this direction with a recent blog post 3 True Outcomes: Sabermetrics for Lawyers? Using Michael Lewis’s baseball best-seller Moneyball as a resource, he kicked off a discussion of legal practice metrics by echoing the concept of the only “three true outcomes” (strikeout, walk, home run) over which a pitcher has complete control. He suggested identifying and measuring the only aspects of a given legal process over which a lawyer has complete control (for example, time spent on a first client meeting, time spent to deliver a first draft to the other side, and revision turnaround time) and gathering them together under a “cycle time” statistic. While he acknowledges there’s more to the process than timeliness — a negligent lawyer who barely reviews documents would have very good cycle time stats — he thinks, and I agree, that it would be a good start.

Jason’s post drummed up a lot of interest when it was featured at Legal OnRamp. From a litigator’s perspective, Patrick J. Lamb agreed that total cycle time from engagement to resolution of a matter would be relevant, and suggested interim steps such as how quickly documents were obtained and examined, how long it took to draft written discovery, and average time of depositions (while noting that these aren’t all under a lawyer’s complete control). Fred Bartlit added measures such as preparation and examination of a two-day expert damage witness and research and drafting of a motion to dismiss. But he also observed that the ultimate metric from any litigator’s (and client’s) perspective is victory — as important as lawyers’ productivity and efficiency are, they’re secondary to the outcome. (See Ronald Baker for more on client-focused productivity metrics.)

What all this illustrates is yet another aspect of law firm business that needs to be re-examined and adjusted in light of new marketplace realities: how to measure a lawyer’s value to the firm. Pretending that billable-hour totals can pass for a productivity metric (as some firms still believe) won’t work anymore — firms are going to have to identify reliable lawyer performance metrics and, more importantly, figure out ways to help their lawyers improve the performances that those metrics reflect. Time spent on a task can be an acceptable piece of the puzzle, so long as everyone understands it’s only a piece and not all that big.

Lawyer productivity metrics will have to move away from the effort-based measures of the past (e.g., hours billed) towards metrics that focus on accomplishment, usually measured against a series of predetermined criteria. Firms that have decided to move away from lockstep compensation for associates have already committed themselves to going down this path anyway. It’s yet another perfectly ordinary aspect of running a business that lawyers have shied away from, but just as there’s a process revolution coming to the law, a productivity revolution is now also well underway.

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.

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.

Then there’s the check-in counter at the airport. I always get my boarding pass at home or at the self-serve kiosk, but I still need to drop off my bags and get my claim ticket, so invariably there’s another line waiting for me. And no matter how heavy or light the passenger traffic, I see the same thing — only a handful of the check-in stations are ever occupied. It should go without saying that checking out of a supermarket and checking into a flight are the most critical points of contact these companies have with their customers.

I wonder if my grocery store or airline has ever done the math here. You have to figure the cost of paying a reasonably diligent 20-something to run eggs over a scanner for eight hours would be covered by one family’s grocery bill, or that the cost of a few counter shifts at the airport ought to be paid for by one executive-class ticket. Meanwhile, the capital these companies have invested in their idle workstations depreciates away — a cost ultimately borne by those customers shifting irritably on their feet as they wait in a nearby lineup.

But this isn’t a post about understaffing in the food and travel industries; it’s about the growing downside of overcapacity. These companies evidently felt compelled to create a bigger footprint than they actually required or intended to fill. Possibly they anticipated greater growth in prosperous times ahead (though I think we just came through as much prosperity as we’re going to see for awhile).  More likely, though, they just thought (as we all tend to do) that size is self-evidently good. Maybe they liked seeing all those workstations on the blueprints. Maybe they liked being able to attach “bigger than ever” to a project that bears their name.

Here’s the problem: “more than necessary” is out. I don’t just mean as a matter of aesthetics, the fear of being seen as extravagant in a time of restraint. I mean that as a business imperative, carrying more than you need to get the job done is not just inefficient, it’s now dangerous. Seth Godin puts it this way:

Many businesses that are in trouble are in trouble for a simple reason: they’re the wrong size. A newspaper that only had a few dozen employees would be doing great today. But they have hundreds or thousands of employees because that was an appropriate scale twenty years ago. …

It’s tempting to get bigger. But is bigger better? In many cases, it’s worse, particularly when you can leverage reliable systems that are cheaper and faster and more stable in the outside world. If you can make your product better by assembling it yourself, you should. But if that action makes it worse, why do it?

That last paragraph applies to pretty much everyone except lawyers. Many law firms are as big as they want to be, not as big as they need to be. They hire and acquire and expand because of the peculiar financial logic of legal services: the more people you have working for you, the more you can bill and the more money you can make. In other industries, the market sets the price and demand drives profitability; in the law, the seller sets the price and supply drives profitability. But as the basic rules of commerce finally start filtering into the legal services marketplace, that’s all starting to change.

The mega-firms now chopping thousands of jobs are, as I’ve said before, not conducting layoffs: they’re reducing their full-time employee complement indefinitely. These firms were overlawyered (and often overstaffed) relative to the value of the services they were performing — but it didn’t matter, because there were no effective market pressures to reduce costs. Now, these firms are having to seriously consider ways to automate basic tasks, and to delegate and outsource mid-level work, in the name of efficiency. They have to “leverage reliable systems that are cheaper and faster and more stable in the outside world.” Reducing unnecessary capacity is only the first step; getting more efficient is the next and more important one.

This applies to firms of all sizes, even solos, because it’s not just about whether you have too many lawyers on the payroll. It’s about whether you’ve struck the right balance between the services you’re delivering to the marketplace and the resources you’ve accumulated to deliver those services. It’s the rare law firm that has fewer resources than it needs to service its clients. More often, firms overextend themselves in terms of workers, salary, bonuses, equipment, decor, locations, practice areas — overbuilding their capacity because, at least in part, the costs of overcapacity have always been directly transferable to the client.

Overcapacity is bad from a financial perspective, but it might actually be worse from a marketing and client relationship angle. One effect of a multitude of workstations at the supermarket or airport is to create an expectation of convenient and rapid service. That’s why the failure to utilize those workstations  is doubly irritating to the customer: it’s not just poor service, but poorer service than the company evidently is capable of delivering. An unstaffed check-in or checkout sends the message: “You mean so little to us that we can’t be bothered to put someone at a station we’ve already built and paid for.”

Take a moment to look around your law practice for empty check-in counters and extraneous check-out lanes — acquisitions that have outlived whatever usefulness they once had, promises you’ve made to clients that you no longer intend to keep. If you say you practise w, x, y and z law, can clients get equally effective representation in each of them? If you give them your phone, fax, email and web coordinates, can they get fast information and responses on any of them? If you’re offering clients a host of newsletters, is their content actually worth the investment of clients’ time? If you’re making them wait in a million-dollar lobby, are they going to get million-dollar service?

Figure out the capacity disconnects in your practice –  from underemployed professionals to extravagant premises, from inefficient workflows to dusty websites and abandoned blogs.  And as soon as you identify them, fix them. Think of it as a new definition of “rightsizing” — as your chance to make your practice the size and shape it needs to be.

It’s not just that firms firing lawyers are also firing two to three times as many non-lawyers; an unusual number of firms are firing only staff. Here are just some of the staff-alone cuts reported in the last couple of months: 9 at Squire Sanders, 14 at Ice Miller, 20 at Moore & Van Allen, up to 25 at Buchanan Ingersoll, 30 at Fish & Richardson, 36 at Fenwick & West, 38 at Cassels Brock & Blackwell, 40 at Goulston & Storrs, 60 at Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, 65 at Akin Gump, 72 at Dechert, and an astonishing 106 at Ropes & Gray and 115 at Reed Smith. Remember, these aren’t part and parcel of bigger, organization-wide cuts — each of these firms let go of staff, but no lawyers.

The official reason for these layoffs, of course, is the recession, though the actual causes and motivations will vary from firm to firm. But a staff cut without a corresponding lawyer reduction is a little odd. If a firm chops 30 or 40 associates, you expect to see another 60 to 90 staff go with them, on the theory that these support staff no longer have lawyers to support. So what does it mean when a firm jettisons scores of staff members but leaves the lawyers untouched? Beyond the well-known fact that many firms view and treat their staff the same way golf and country clubs do?

One possibility is that firms have to cut fixed personnel expenses somewhere, but they fear the recruitment black eye that comes from associate layoffs and the seismic impact of partner cuts, so it’s the secretaries, paralegals, IT and marketing people who get the heave. Another is that these firms were overstaffed to begin with, not an unreasonable guess — everyone was living large in the recent boom times, and if a one-to-one ratio of lawyers to assistants made some of the fee earners happy, it was all worthwhile. A darker possibility — that associates are keeping the administrative tasks to themselves to maintain their billable hour totals, depriving assistants of work — is all too likely.

It’s also very likely that in many of these cases, the firms either don’t realize or don’t care about the negative effects of deep, across-the-board staff cuts. Aside from the damage to morale, chopping people in key areas like marketing is just foolish, a reflection of the belief that marketing is a cost center, not an essential element of the firm’s business model. Ron Friedmann rightly points out, in two recent posts, that indiscriminate staff cuts reflect the fact that the “firm has no idea what support is really required. Evenly distributed cuts imply that rational decisions were made in the past, that support needs remain constant over time in spite of the march of technology, and that wild gyrations in practice group revenue have no impact on support needs.”

It looks like many firms are missing an opportunity here to carefully and intelligently review their support needs and re-engineer both their personnel and their infrastructure investment accordingly. Simply cutting staff jobs provides only a short-term bottom-line assist while creating many other short- and long-term problems, whereas a more creative approach could both save money and improve the firm’s operations at the same time. Here are just a few possibilities:

• Equip every lawyer with voice-recognition software, so that memos and messages need no longer be dictated or even typed out. Ditto for real-time docketing and billing programs.
• Get lawyers blogging about their areas of practice, the release of relevant decisions, changes to applicable laws, and more — instruct them in 21st-century personal marketing.
• Outsource or offshore functions like human resources, IT or even research and other quasi-legal tasks — firms have already done this, from West Virginia to India.
• Then, save jobs through upsizing: convert legal secretaries to workflow managers, specialize assistants by assigning them to practice groups, train marketers to conduct client meetings and do cross-selling — basically, give your non-lawyer employees the chance to show what else and what more they can do for you, rather than automatically putting them first in line on the chopping block.

There’s a better way to cut costs than simply throwing staff overboard while keeping lawyers around — all it requires is a little more ingenuity, far-sightedness and courage than law firms are used to showing. And as 2009 unfolds, we’re going to see all three of these traits evolve from nice-to-haves to full-scale survival skills.

Malcolm Gladwell has written a new book about the factors that most influence the likelihood that you’ll achieve (traditionally defined) career success. Outliers: The Story of Success posits that much of what affects our success is out of our control, and that arbitrary or even trivial factors play a disproportionate role in what we end up doing and how well we do it. As part of the book promotion tour, he spoke with the Globe & Mail the other day and made an observation that I think resonates deeply with the legal profession.

Giving an example of arbitrary success factors, Gladwell noted that a huge percentage of professional hockey players have birthdays early in the year. That’s because the standard cutoff date for hockey programs is January 1, so when all-star teams and other squads are recruited, the players who seem most talented are invariably picked — but in fact, they only seem more talented because they’re older and more physically capable. But then these players get special attention, more coaching, more opportunities, and by the time they hit their teens, they actually are more talented. The same applies in school — Jan. 1 cutoffs mean kids born later in the year are younger and therefore farther back on the learning curve. His point is that arbitrary dividing lines can have huge unintended consequences.

Then the interviewer asked Gladwell, at the end of their conversation, why anyone should care enough about this to actually do anything about it. His reply made me sit up straight:

Because we squander talent. Even in a country like Canada, where hockey is a priority, an obsession, we’re squandering a huge amount of hockey talent without realizing it. We could have twice as many star players if we just changed the institutional rules around finding talent. To me, that’s such a powerful lesson. Because it just says, look, in a simple area like hockey, in a country that cares more about it than almost anything else, if you’re still squandering 50 per cent of your ability, how much more are we squandering everywhere else?

I’d go further and say that squandering talent actually has two components: failing to realize the potential universe of talent at your disposal, and then failing to maximize the talent that you do choose. When you apply that analysis to talent identification, intake and management in the law, you come to realize just how arbitrary and undisciplined we’ve been. Look at it in these terms:

• We set law school admission criteria that aren’t specifically designed to select the best potential lawyers – sidelining from the start countless people who might make excellent lawyers but don’t have the GPAs and LSAT proficiency that schools look for.
• We allow law students to indebt themselves heavily and thereby restrict their early career choices – excluding or eventually driving out lawyer candidates who simply can’t afford the cost.
• We provide training in the legal certification process that aligns poorly with necessary lawyer skill sets – rewarding abilities and accomplishments (100% finals, lengthy memos) that don’t reflect professional demands.
• We recruit graduating lawyers on criteria not rationally connected to business or client needs – continuing to over-rely on student grades and law school reputation when assessing the “best” candidates.
• We give little assistance to new lawyers to acquire the professional skills they need – providing not nearly enough structured, supervised, institutional guidance to fill in the gaps in their first few years of practice.
• We routinely pick on new lawyers as the first ones to throw overboard in a crisis – adding to the growing list of associate layoffs all over the US and UK, White & Case has cut 70 lawyers and Eversheds is preparing to cut dozens more.

I really don’t see how this is sustainable. Every prediction about the next few decades of legal practice assumes a much smaller lawyer population, with Boomers exiting and Millennials not inclined to give their lives over to work. Most forward thinkers in the law also foresee a more streamlined and efficient industry in the near future, where clients expect skilled lawyers applied effectively to requisite tasks. But our existing legal talent pool and our incoming talent selection systems aren’t prepared to deal with these emerging realities.

Our profession essentially places the initial screening process for a population of more than a million lawyers in Canada, the US and the UK in the hands of several hundred members of law school admissions committees. Our governing bodies directly provide only a small percentage of the training future lawyers need, leaving the rest to law schools’ discretion and the vagaries of the private sector. And our system allows law firms, driven by their mystifying business models, to treat their new lawyers like firewood, chopped and stacked at their front door to be either left out in the cold or burned at need, as if there’s an endless supply of the stuff.

What we need, right now, is an empirical, disciplined way to assemble legal talent. Here’s what I think our profession’s leaders ought to consider doing in order to assert some measure of control over, and inject some degree of rationality into, the process of locating and nurturing that talent.

- Mandate sophisticated criteria for law school admission. Law schools currently decide who they will accept and on what grounds, and in doing so shape the profession’s profile for years to come. Carefully crafted, holistic, 21st-century admissions processes should be decided by governing bodies — transparently and collaboratively with schools and other stakeholders — and then applied by law schools, so that we end up with the lawyers the profession needs, rather than the applicants law schools wanted.

- Mandate sophisticated criteria for lawyer education and training. Schools should of course continue to teach legal thinking, theory and history — a legal education should always be a higher one. But the profession has the right and responsibility to stipulate core skills and knowledge with which new lawyers are expected to start their careers. If law schools don’t want to do this, we should create training institutes that will. But the profession should stop pretending that this is anyone’s responsibility but its own.

- Encourage legal employers to better evaluate and mentor their lawyers. I’m a free-market aficionado, and once lawyers are in the private sector, those rules should apply. But a completely laissez-faire approach to how legal employers handle their employees is professionally irresponsible. Offer recruiting and talent management training with the strong expectation that respectable firms ought to apply it. Work to build a culture of compliance with a mature, big-picture approach to talent development.

- Make continuing professional development mandatory. I didn’t say mandatory CLE — we’ve seen where that can lead, seminars booked at the last minute and lawyers BlackBerrying during presentations. British Columbia’s model shows real promise by approving a wide range of development activities: from attending CLEs to publishing articles, from teaching law courses to being active in bar associations, from contributing to study groups to mentoring junior lawyers. Ontario is planning to mandate CPD for lawyers in their first two years: also good.

You know, it strikes me that, just as our consumer and industrial cultures got used to a ready supply of oil, our profession has gotten used to a ready supply of lawyers. In both cases, we squandered an important resource and kept at it until things turned bad.

With oil cheap and its supply apparently limitless, we over-consumed, created massive suburban vistas accessible only by car, and built great big gas guzzlers to ride around in, giving little thought to alternative energy sources. The unfolding collapse of the North American automobile industry is one consequence of this mismanagement, but there’s a lot more to come on this score.

Equally, with lawyers thick on the ground and clients not terribly demanding about how they were used, we built great big law firms around a business model that viewed new lawyers as fungible units to be hooked up to a billing machine. And we gave little thought to whether there were alternative means by which to identify and cultivate potential lawyers or better use the ones we had.

So here’s something to ponder. Is the legal profession at risk of becoming the North American automobile industry, about to be hammered by market forces we never prepared for? Are our clients, fed up with the cost of tapping our traditional resource, ready to cast about for alternative sources of legal talent? And does your firm in any way foreshadow General Motors, a well-known name poised to collapse from short-term thinking and a failure to give customers what they want?

I provide the link partly because I think it’s a pretty good article — but mostly because it’s turned out to be awfully timely as well, in two respects. For one thing, the UK reform process is accelerating. The Solicitors Regulation Authority is fast-tracking plans to allow up to 25% non-lawyer partnership in UK law firms. “The timetable,” LegalWeek reports, “would put the SRA ahead of schedule, allowing it to fast-track applications when the regulations come into force, which is anticipated in March 2009.”

(The article is a little unclear on an important point. It refers to the SRA accepting applications for new Legal Disciplinary Partnerships (LDPs) — these are operations that comprise solicitors, barristers, licensed conveyancers and other legal professionals who up till now have not been permitted to form partnerships in the UK. But the proposal to allow non-lawyers to practise law in partnership with lawyers, a far more radical notion, envisions something called Alternative Business Structures (ABS). This article in Managing Partner magazine explains the difference very well.)

So the UK reform process is gathering speed. But the other reason why National‘s cover story is timely lies in the front pages of your newspaper over the past week — the financial crisis besetting the US (and increasingly, the world) economy. I won’t recap what’s going on — you already know about it, and the news is changing by the minute. Suffice to say it’s serious and it will directly affect lawyers (consider these comments by veteran Canadian corporate lawyers in today’s Globe & Mail).

Why should lawyers and law firms care about the financial crisis? The reason has little to do with the Dow Jones, the TSX, or any other stock market index that’s fluctuating wildly right now. The reason lies in the  more important indices in the credit markets. Credit is freezing up around the  world — the cost of borrowing is climbing higher by the hour, as banks grow far less trusting of other banks and of borrowers generally. Financial analysts are paying a lot more attention to the credit markets than the stock markets. Lawyers should, too.

Credit markets matter to Main Street, as opposed to Wall Street, because a lot of modern businesses rely on the liquidity of credit to keep their operations going. More than a few companies need access to credit just in order to meet their payrolls. And I would submit that few modern enterprises are as heavily dependent on credit as law firms.

Law firms have always been odd business structures. They pay out all their profits at the end of every fiscal year, and rarely commit any serious funds to long-term investments or anything more than the most essential capital or infrastructure needs. They’re also notoriously bad at cash flow — many lawyers don’t bill quickly or frequently enough, and they let outstanding receivables gather dust without forcing the collections issue. When your coffers empty every December and it takes you three months to get paid for a service rendered, you’re living an unnecessarily precarious financial life. Law firms are walking a very thin tightrope, and right now, the financial crisis is producing gusting winds.

In that context, the concept of stable outside funding is going to seem a lot more attractive in the years, and maybe even the months, to come. Many law firm leaders have so far shrugged off the idea of floating shares in the firm or taking on outside investment, on the grounds that what do firms need with deep capital reserves? That’s an attitude borne of an era of cheap and easy credit, an era that’s gone and might not be back for quite a while. The premise, and the promise, of outside investment in law firms could become a priority consideration a lot sooner than anyone expected.

Related post: Credit crisis: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

We’ve all heard and said a great deal about how law firms need to better address the treatment of their new lawyers and associates. The volume of that conversation has grown sufficiently loud to capture at least a few firms’ attention, suggesting that we’re building towards a critical mass. Consider this update on Ford & Harrison’s successful decision to drop billable requirements for associates, as well as Denton Wilde Sapte’s move to give associates more control over their own business development plans and even Curtis-Mallet’s decision to start a recruting page on Facebook.

All well and good — nice to see a few firms coming to appreciate the importance of adapting their traditional practices to make best use of the incoming lawyer talent wave. Now, let’s see; we’re working on the associates, the partners always look after themselves … is there anyone we’re missing? Any significant group within the law firm that’s still being overlooked?

Employee survey reveals support staff dissatisfied, says The Lawyer in reporting the results of its first employee engagement survey. The poll “shows a chasm between lawyers and business services staff, with the latter feeling undervalued, underpaid and out of the loop. An overwhelming ­majority of business support staff -– 64 per cent -– did not feel that non-fee-earning roles are valued at their firm.” Read the article for the depressing details, including one recruiter’s characterization of how lawyers view support staff: “lackeys to ­support the real business of generating fees.”

I’ve argued before that most law firms come up very short in this regard. Lawyers are notorious for their habit of treating employees without law degrees as separate and lesser entities within the firm structure, less worthy of respect and collegiality. We’ve done articles in the magazine on sensitive topics within law firms, including advancement of women and associate dissatisfaction. But the only time we’ve ever been turned down flat by every potential interviewee was when we tried to do an article on legal secretaries’ views of their workplace. Not even the offer of anonymity could overcome the intimidation factor.

So what can you, the innovative legal professional, take from all this? Valuable members of your rivals’ firms are disaffected and alienated, seeking workplaces where they’re fully integrated into the firm’s business and culture. Build or reinforce those elements in your own operation, developing a deserved reputation for proper treatment and engagement of non-lawyer professional staff. When that reputation starts circulating in your legal community’s support staff grapevine (and there is one, believe me), you’ll have a major lead over your competitors in the pursuit of these underrated and underappreciated employees.

Firms work hard to rank highly in surveys of associate satisfaction, as well they might. There may never be similar surveys of support staff, but all the better for you: recruiting the best of these professionals in stealth mode means your lead will go unnoticed, and unchallenged, that much longer.

In terms of partners, consider this article from The Lawyer about firms trying to expand overseas but having difficulty persuading lawyers to transfer to the new offices (especially in Dubai). One tactic firms are employing is to offer lawyers who accept the foreign posting the opportunity to make partner much more quickly than they normally would. Think about that one for a moment.

Partnership, which was once considered the ultimate law firm goal, is being reduced to an incentive the firm dangles in order to get what it really wants — boots on the ground in fast-growing locations worldwide. It’s been a while since admittance to partnership actually was a genuine endorsement of a lawyer’s skills and professionalism through invitation to an exclusive, tight-knit community with common goals. But it’s still surprising to see the fast track to partnership deployed as just another behavioural incentive — especially since partnership really doesn’t turn so many associates’ cranks nowadays.

To get a sense of how firms view those associates, take a look at how the chair of Simpson Thacher responded to a rumour that his firm was culling 30 associates through poor midyear reviews, an attrition tactic not unknown to large firms: “This is something that was made up by that rag in the U.K., it’s just complete nonsense” — the rag in question being The Lawyer, not a newspaper normally associated with Fleet Street standards.

That’s an unusually harsh reaction, and there could be a number of reasons for it. But one of the most compelling is that firms are increasingly allergic to any suggestion of associate layoffs, because of the severe negative publicity that accompanies it.

In the short term, the firm suffers the slings and arrows of the blawgosphere’s crasser elements — not fatal, but not fun either. But in the long term, the firm’s reputation as a safe, solid presence in the marketplace is damaged — and for more than a few firms, that reputation is what keeps them together in an incredibly competitive and fluid market for both clients and talent. Perfectly competent law firms have collapsed on short notice before, when both external and internal opinion of their unsustainability hit a critical point. In these volatile times, firms understandably want that risk to approach zero.

So here again, we have associate retention not viewed as a goal in itself, but as a PR element to be managed in order to serve the real objective: marketplace confidence. It’s not like there’s an epidemic of associate layoffs underway — quite the opposite, the National Law Journal points out — but in the powerful light of scrutiny from an increasingly influential legal media (traditional and online), firms are willing to go to great lengths to project the image that everything’s fine here, nothing to see, move along now.

What all this points up, I think, is the decreasing importance of partnership status and associate retention in firms’ strategic thinking — a quiet recognition that neither is as important as it used to be in the grand scheme of things.

These have always been two of the cornerstones of law firms’ survival and growth plans — having a partnership worth striving towards and an associate complement primed and suited to be the firm’s future leaders. It’s the prism through which we’ve become accustomed to thinking about law firms’ talent and viewing how these firms behave and succeed. But I think that’s about to change, and I think we need to get ready to adjust that prism and start watching other talent indicators instead.

Any candidates? Here’s one, courtesy of LegalWeek: Clifford Chance and Eversheds both announced plans to increase the amount of real legal work outsourced to India. It’s only small commercial contracts, due diligence, and document review — so far. But it’s pretty rare for law firms, even innovative Magic Circle members, to be so nonchalant about offshoring, and it remains unknown for North American firms to go public with similar activities. This is the future talent focus for forward-thinking law firms — not associates or partners, but the best legal talent anywhere in the world that can accomplish tasks with a combination of maximum competence and minimum cost.

So get ready to see partners morph into full-equity rainmaking shareholders, huge associate cohorts shrink into scattered contract specialists, and the majority of a law firm’s legal employees stationed outside its headquarters — assuming it even has headquarters at all. This is not that far in the future, and you can see it starting to happen today in the way firms prioritize — or not — their one-time cornerstones.