The culture-driven law firm

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Posted in: Big Firms, Leadership, Management, Talent

The era of the free-agent lawyer, and the law firm lateral hiring frenzy that it spawned, is drawing to a close. The rise of the culture-driven law firm is at hand.

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. Continue Reading

Authenticity and lawyer recruitment

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Posted in: Big Firms, Collaboration, New Lawyers, Talent, Technology

The editors at LegalWeek blogged recently about the results of the Sunday Times’ “Best Company to Work For” survey, which, remarkably enough, saw eleven law firms crack the Top 100. I think this probably signals not so much a renaissance in law firm working conditions, so much as that many UK law firms are getting pretty good at using workplace reputation rankings for their own ends. It’s a phenomenon not limited to the eastern side of the Atlantic.

The thing about “Best Employer” lists, as LegalWeek‘s editors point out, is that law firms consider them enormously important recruiting tools for new lawyers and lateral hires. A solid ranking adds lustre to a firm’s marketplace brand and reinforces the strength of its hiring pitch, especially to new lawyers who consider (accurately) that law firms are all pretty much the same. Anything that can help a firm stand out from the faceless crowd, especially on “soft” criteria like flexibility, mentorship and socializing, has a lot of value.

The trouble with third-party marketing and recruiting tools like this, of course, is that they’re destined to be gamed. Savvy firms figure out how the system works and take steps to ensure they do well. Some law firm associates know this first-hand, because they receive a memo “encouraging” them to fill out the “Best Employers” survey and help improve the firm’s standings. It strikes me as odd that firms expect these rankings to impress potential lawyer hires when their own lawyers have been directly involved in what amounts to a manipulation of the results.

In fact, it’s this “gaming” element of such rankings that raise what I think is going to become a problematic element of law firms’ recruiting efforts down the road. Young lawyer recruits, when deciding which firm to work for, are going to start zeroing in very clearly on the authenticity of firms’ marketing and recruitment efforts. This is a generation weaned on word-of-mouth recommendations, and they give a lot of weight to a friend’s or reliable acquaintance’s testimony that something is worthwhile or not. Failing those kinds of first-hand recommendations, they will tend to go, not to press releases, newspapers or magazines, but to collaborative knowledge portals to test the judgment of the crowd. This is where new lawyers are heading now, and law firms need to go with them. Continue Reading

The talent search, redefined and prioritized

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Posted in: Talent

Invariably, the best place to look for innovative perspectives and good ideas on legal management is outside the legal sphere altogether. Here are a couple of thought-provoking blog entries that apply to the recruitment of lawyers. Penelope Trunk says the era of the job listing is ending and identifies five new ways to find great candidates, while Seth Godin thinks “Human Resources” is an archaic term for a compromised department and recommends rebranding HR as your Talent Division.

I like all of Penelope’s suggestions, but especially this one: tell people where they’ll go next. Advertise all the successful high-profile gigs to which previous occupants of the available position have moved. I’m going to try exactly that as we look to fill a Managing Editor position with National here in Ottawa. I’ve had two very talented professionals work with me as Senior Editor of the magazine: Gaëtane is now a Committee Clerk with the Senate of Canada, while Mélanie is a judge with the Immigration & Refugee Board. You could be next!

What Penelope and Seth are really talking about is rethinking your entire strategy for securing talent, both because the old methods aren’t working very well and because the consequences of missing out on the best talent from now on could be fatal:

–> If you’re hiring new law graduates, I’d love to hear your advanced, rational talent assessment model, but I don’t think you have one. There are a very few notable exceptions, but many firms hire new lawyers on the basis of second-year grades and less than an hour of actual face time. No firm can reliably pick winners with this approach.

–> If you’re still placing job ads for associates in the local legal periodicals, either directly or through a recruiting firm, there’s a pretty good chance you won’t get any satisfactory candidates — in fact, some firms that go this route wind up with no candidates to interview at all. Young lawyers today look to their networks first, the job pages much later.

–> And if you’re simply hiring a big-name partner with a book of business away from a competitor, well … they don’t talk about it much, but a lot of firms that go this route find that the revenues the partner brings in do not outweigh the partner’s purchase price, including importing the partner’s favourite associates and secretary (Bruce MacEwen has the authoritative word on superstar recruitment).

In addition to what’s in the linked articles, here are a few other thoughts to consider about successfully recruiting legal talent in 2008 and beyond. Continue Reading

Coping with fewer associates

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Posted in: Big Firms, Compensation, Demographics, Talent

The Ottawa Citizen ran an article over the weekend that caught my eye, thanks in part to this succinct summary of the gigantic demographic challenge facing the North American economy:

Baby boomers are retiring and the number of young adults behind them is on an irreversible slide. Starting in 2011, Canada’s workforce will lose two workers to retirement for every one that enters it. The ratcheting price on youth is a sign of things to come for the rest of the country as an aging population forces provinces to compete for dwindling numbers of young people.

Law firm associates’ salaries are already rising separate and apart from a talent shortage; in time, firms seeking to hire new lawyers are going to find out just what a full-blown seller’s market looks like, and they won’t enjoy it. I can see two long-term trends emerging from this.

First, those organizations and regions in danger of losing talent (i.e., most of them) will continue to look for ways to staunch the flow. Nova Scotia, according to the article, is introducing tax breaks to entice younger Nova Scotians to stay or return. The drawback to that approach is that if you’re trying to compete with Toronto or Calgary (or for that matter, London or Hong Kong) on money, you’re outgunned from the start. It will likely be a stretch just to be in the ballpark of the highest offer, and there’s only so much you can spend to keep up.

Consider instead the lawyer in the Citizen article, who’s returning home to Halifax because it’s a better community for her than Ottawa. Successful lawyer recruitment could in future be less about the firm and more about its environment. Forward-looking law firms could start getting actively involved in their own communities’ efforts to become more attractive to tomorrow’s scarce young worker. They’d join forces with other local organizations and identify potential opportunities and obstacles to young professional recruitment and retention. Continue Reading

Pro bono without borders

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Posted in: Globalization, Purpose, Talent

A press release came my way today from McCarthy Tétrault, announcing that the firm is the first Canadian “Partner Without Borders” of the Quebec division of Avocats Sans Frontieres. [Edit] ASF is an international NGO devoted to providing legal assistance and representation to vulnerable individuals and groups in developing countries or those in crisis. The organization is active in 30 countries, working with local groups on a completely pro bono basis. ASF Quebec has a number of law firm sponsors already, but McCarthys is the first to become un partenaire. Good for them.

Any law firm worth its charter has always been active in its community, of course, but in this age of megafirms with global reach, we’re starting to see super-national firms display a truly remarkable degree of involvement in issues and organizations that transcend the usual local undertakings. Check out DLA Piper, whose New Perimeter project is an incredible piece of work: a worldwide pro bono initiative that has seen 13,000 lawyer hours contributed to, inter alia, drafting new judicial laws in Kosovo, restructuring a micro-lending project, developing a worldwide food bank system and creating a human rights center in southern Africa. This is work on the scale of the CBA’s sterling International Development Committee, but supported by a for-profit firm rather than a non-profit association.

It would be naive to overlook the obvious marketing and recruitment benefits of McCarthy’s move here: the press release highlights the firm’s other pro bono efforts, including its support of Pro Bono Students Canada. This obviously invests the firm with some cachet among law students and new lawyers, many of whom take overseas development work very seriously. McCarthys, of course, will have to back up this commitment with active participation in Avocats Sans Frontieres (and now I have Peter Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers stuck in my head), because students can also tell real commitments from mere gestures. But I prefer to think McCarthys means what it says here about its pro bono commitment, and that what we’re seeing really is the white-hot trend of globalization applied to the age-old tradition of lawyers’ community service.

Millennial fever

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Posted in: Generations, New Lawyers, Talent

This post first appeared as an article at Slaw on October 1, 2007.

During the past 50-odd years, the North American legal profession has been notable for a ready supply of labour. The post-war population boom and increased access to post-secondary education, combined with the enduring lure of a legal career, ensured that there would always be a deep pool of lawyers into which firms could dip for talent.

When a buyer’s market lasts that long, the buyers’ advantages become locked into the prevailing culture of the marketplace. Much of what we take for granted in modern law firms — hourly billable targets, ever-increasing workloads, lengthening partnership tracks, client hoarding by partners, and more — can be traced at least in part to firms’ established ability to dictate the terms of employment to a fairly low-cost and easily leveraged labour pool. Law firm employers have held the whip hand for so long that we’ve come to think it’s just the natural order of things.

That’s about to change. Talent — in nicer terms, the actual human beings who provide legal services — is becoming scarce. This is new, and for a lot of law firms, it’s not going to be fun. Continue Reading