Walker Clark Worldview

Perhaps the most difficult challenge for small law firms in small legal markets is to recruit and — sometimes even more difficult — retain high-quality associates. The assumption is that the small markets and the small law firms are at a substantial disadvantage. Our firm’s observations, advising smaller law firms, confirm that there is a lot of truth to this perception. However that disadvantage can be overcome.  Here’s how:

• Expand the scope of your recruiting in law schools. Many small law firms still allow their recruiting strategy to be shackled by the myth that the only the “best” law firms and only the “top quarter” of the law school class produce good lawyers. Research has not established such a correlation and, if anything, the it appears that lawyers who graduate in the second and third quartiles of their law firm classes actually are more successful as law firm partners.

• Remember that retention is seldom about money. Over the years, our firm has conducted focus groups of almost 1,000 law firms associates worldwide. When asked, “What makes you want to remain in this firm?” money is never one of the top factors mentioned. Instead, associates — especially in smaller firms — tell us that the more important factors include: opportunities to learn legal skills and gain experience; the opportunity to work with, and learn from, a successful partner; and to perform increasingly important responsibilities for clients.

• Invest in professional development and career management. The successful management of professional talent seldom does not require a lot of money.  It does require a serious investment of partner time and attention. It is no surprise, therefore, that the small firms that are the most successful in retaining legal talent have serious mentoring programs, in-depth performance evaluations, and a clear career path for each associate in the firm.

Norman Clark

Focus groups of more than 900 law firm associates, conducted by Walker Clark members worldwide, have consistently identified the availability of career planning as one of the most important factors that cause good associates to stay at their firm. Associates typically express this in terms such as:

I want to know what I need to do in order to become a partner in this firm someday.

I want to understand clearly what the firm expects of me in terms of performance.

On a parallel intellectual track, many law firm partners have never considered in depth the professional knowledge and business skills that every partner in the firm should display, nor how those requirements translate into observable and, in some cases, measurable behaviors. This is why, for some law firms, election of a new partner is more an act of faith, supported by hope and guesswork, rather than a well-informed business decision.

Many law firms have purchased “off-the-shelf” or slightly-tailored from “career management systems” from human resources consultants.  A few of the packages are reasonably good in terms of providing a basic structure by which to manage associate performance and development.  Most of them, however, appear to me to demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of the practice of law in a law firm.

As one law firm partner told me, “It was like the HR consultant just crossed out the word bank from his last project and wrote in law firm.“

Or as another one once remarked to me, “I don’t think the company that sold us our associate career plan ever even talked to one of our associates, much less any of the partners.”

These criticisms might have been exaggerated a little, but they point out the risks and disappointing results of purchasing an off-the-shelf HR package and calling it a career management program.

Nonetheless, any effort to provide structure, policies, and processes to career management in a law firm is a good step forward. However, even the best career management plan cannot implement itself. Even in detailed and well-documented career management systems, there is always a risk that weaknesses can sneak into the system.  These are usually the result of a half-hearted implementation by the firm or of diminishing partner attention and participation over time.

This is why so many law firms have very elegant-looking career management manuals gathering dust on managing partners’ bookshelves.

As you consider how you manage the careers of your firm’s associates, remain alert to these frequent flaws.  They can creep into even the best-managed law firms:

• Performance standards and evaluation criteria that focus on “knowledge” and “attitudes,” rather than observable professional and business behaviors
• Promotion criteria that are not linked to specific, defined achievement of skills and demonstrated business and professional performance
• “Competencies” that have not been tested to ensure that they skills that associates need to master in order to become productive partners
• A lack of ongoing coaching and feedback between the formal performance evaluations
• Performance evaluations that exist only on paper and fail to include any meaningful discussion of the associate’s performance
• Inconsistent or non-existent mentoring, regardless of the existence of a formal “mentoring program”
• Weak business skills development in areas such as marketing, sales, negotiations, law firm economics, and coaching and feedback of junior lawyers and staff

A weakness in any of these areas can dramatically affect associate retention and readinesses (on the part of those who remain) to assume the responsibilities of partnership in a modern law firm.

Norman Clark

In its Knowledge@Wharton site yesterday, the Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania, posted an interesting abstract about motivating employees: “Putting a Face to a Name: The Art of Motivating Employees.” This should be a quick, but worthwhile, entry on your personal “to read” list.

University of Pennsylvania professor Adam Grant draws several interesting conclusions from his research.  I believe that, although not drawn from observations in the legal profession, they have direct applicability to law firms.

People are motivated by an understanding of the positive impact that their activities have on others.  Here are summaries to two of their studies:

Grant and a team of researchers — Elizabeth Campbell, Grace Chen, David Lapedis and Keenan Cottone from the University of Michigan — arranged for one group of call center workers to interact with scholarship students who were the recipients of the school’s fundraising largess. It wasn’t a long meeting — just a five-minute session where the workers were able to ask the student about his or her studies. But over the next month, that little chat made a big difference. The call center was able to monitor both the amount of time its employees spent on the phone and the amount of donation dollars they brought in. A month later, callers who had interacted with the scholarship student spent more than two times as many minutes on the phone, and brought in vastly more money: a weekly average of $503.22, up from $185.94.

Even reading about the benefits that one’s work produces for other people can produce apparent increases in motivation .

In a follow up study to the one he published in 2007, he focused on lifeguards at a community recreation center. Some of them were given stories to read about cases in which lifeguards had saved lives. A second group was given a different kind of reading material: testimonies from lifeguards about how they had personally benefitted from their work. The results: Those who had been reading about their ability to avert fatalities saw their measure of hours worked shoot up by more than 40%, whereas those who had merely learned that a lifeguard gig could be personally enriching kept working at the same clip.

The Knowledge@Wharton post has links to the papers that Grant and his teams produced.

Some law firms try to minimize face-to-face contact with clients by junior associates and support staff.  Grant’s research suggests that this is a mistake.

Everyone in the firm needs to see the face of the client. In some cases this can be a simple face-to-face encounter, such as a partner taking time to introduce a client to associates and support staff who work on the client’s matter. Even when employees cannot literally see the face of the client, partners should make sure that each member of the team — from senior associates to the crew in the mail room — understands how their efforts ultimately benefit the client.

Norman Clark

In almost any discussion about law firm associates, the topic of mentoring eventually appears. Everybody agrees that mentoring is a good thing to do, but very few law firms do it well. Based on the observations of my colleagues in Walker Clark, LLC, here are the five most common reasons.

1. Failure to link mentoring to the skills that an associate needs to advance in the firm. To produce a worthwhile return on the investment of partner time, mentoring needs to be relevant.
2. Failure to make mentoring a basic responsibility of every partner. By contrast, some law firms even make mentoring an element of their partner compensation systems.
3. Failure to agree a basic level of attention and effort required of all mentors, so that all associates have an equal opportunity to benefit from mentoring. Perhaps the most frequent criticism that we hear from associates about their law firms’ mentoring programs are that associates have highly inconsistent experiences with mentoring and derive unequal value from the process.
4. Failure to reinforce to associates the importance of participation in mentoring. Mentoring requires two-way communication, not just passive listening to a partner telling professional “war stories.”
5. Failure of partners to share experiences and ideas about mentoring with each other in a structured manner. By contrast, law firms that do mentoring well usually devote part of a partners meeting, once or twice each year, to what works well and what needs to be improved in their mentoring programs.

Does your firm need help with mentoring? Walker Clark, LLC, can conduct a quick, low-cost diagnostic review of your mentoring program and recommend practical improvements to improve your return on investment. For more information, send me an email.

Norman Clark

During the past eight years, my colleagues and I in Walker Clark, LLC, have had the privilege of working with some of the most successful law firms in the world.  We have also had the challenge of advising law firms who want to turn around chronic disappointing performance.

One of the common elements in both types of law firms is performance objectives.

Successful law firms typically use them. Unsuccessful firms usually do not.

Properly managed performance goals produce clear, measurable benefits to a law firm’s financial performance and market reputation. These usually include:

• Higher fee revenue per lawyer
• Lower operating costs
• Improved quality assurance
• Higher lawyer and staff morale
• Lower lawyer and staff turnover rates

The bottom line is the bottom line: substantially improved and sustainable profitability.

This is why I continue to be amazed by otherwise intelligent, sophisticated law firm partners who say that individual performance goals, and the ongoing coaching and feedback that are needed to make them work most effectively, are a waste of time. This curious, old-fashioned notion is refuted by the real-world experiences of progressive law firms that have introduced performance objectives and manage them well.

Norman Clark

January is typically a time for law firms to plan their professional development and training program for the year. Unfortunately, many law firms will waste most of their training and development funds on seminars, workshops, conferences, and retreats that provide almost no long-term value.

As my colleagues and I have worked with law firms worldwide to develop custom-tailored professional development programs for them, we have heard persistent complaints about the hundreds of more-or-less generic training programs that are currently being sold to law firms. As one managing partner told me recently:

Last year we spent almost $2,000 per person on a weekend “leadership retreat.”  It was a mix of academic theory and some fun exercises. But it had no relevance to our law firm and what we need to do to achieve our goals. We kept asking ourselves “What are we doing here?” On Monday morning my partners’ leadership abilities were unchanged — except for the worse in a couple of cases.

There are certain things that law firms should look for, and also avoid, when considering a proposal from an external provider of training programs for lawyers. Most of these can be summarized into 8 questions.

1. Is the program designed specifically for law firms? How does it demonstrate that it takes into account the special characteristics and demands of the practice of law? Many programs in the areas of marketing, sales, and leadership present mostly generic principles and academic theories that do not always work in law firms.
2. Will the program include materials that were customized for our firm, our practice specialties, and our client base?  How will the program facilitators do this? This can be particularly challenging in an international multi-cultural law firm.
3. Does the program deliver tools and methods that participants can apply their very next day in the office?
4. Does the program include case studies or exercises that are relevant to our firm and the responsibilities of the participants? They should be based on realistic issues in the firm, its practice areas, and its client base.
5. To what extent is the program tailored to the individual participant to address each person’s background, needs, and roles in the firm. “One size” seldom “fits all” in a law firm.
6. Do the facilitators have experience in law firms and in the actual practice of law? Will our colleagues perceive them as credible experts or clueless academics?
7. What will be the follow up? Will there be ongoing advice, consultation, or support for individuals and groups after the program? Will there be a follow-up session later?
8. How will this program improve business performance? How will we be able to measure the business results? What return on investment can we reasonably expect, and over what period of time?

Leadership development poses some special issues, and will be the subject of a future posting in this blog.

Norman Clark