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

The Law Firm Management Committee of the International Bar Association will participate in two outstanding legal management conferences in South America in June.

• Contemporary Management Issues in International Arbitration and Dispute Resolution Practices – Saturday, 12 June 2010, in Asunción, Paraguay.  This is a half-day roundtable conference aimed at the special challenges in the management of international arbitration and dispute resolution practices in law firms.  It is presented in association with CEDEP (Center for Studies in Law, Economics, and Politics), one of South America’s premier continuing professional education organizations.  It is part of the annual multi-day conference on international arbitration, which organizers expect to draw approximately 1,000 lawyers from Latin America and abroad.
• Managing a Modern Law Firm - Monday, 14 June 2010, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  This one-day conference, co-sponsored by the IBA Latin American Forum, will investigate four key challenges for law firms in the decades of the 2010s:  (1) a business approach to strategic development of the firm; (2) marketing; (3) associate career management; and (4) management of knowledge and know-how.

For more information, please click on the two links above.

Norman Clark

I think that it is very appropriate that South America will be the venue for three major international legal management events in the first half of 2010. During the past ten years, Latin American lawyers have emerged as global leaders of the legal profession; and some of  the best-managed, most progressive law firms in the world are based in the region.

Mark these three major events on your calendar, and click on the links for more information:

• Biannual IBA Latin American Forum Regional Conference , 17-19 March 2010, Santiago, Chile - This major international conference is produced by the Latin American Regional Forum of the International Bar Association. It  will include a showcase session on 19 March 2010 dedicated to law firm management issues, including interactive audience polling. I will be co-chairing this session with Jaime Carey, the managing partner of Carey & Companía, one of Chile’s leading law firms.
• Arbitration Practice Management, 12 June 2010, Asunción, Paraguay – This half-day program is produced by CEDEP, on of South America’s leading continuing legal education institutes in association with the Law Firm Management Committee of the International Bar Association. It is a special session of CEDEP’s annual Latin American Arbitration Conference, which attracts leading international lawyers worldwide. I will moderate this session, which will be a roundtable discussion focusing on the special issues in the management of an international arbitration and dispute resolution practice.
• Managing a Modern Law Firm, 14 June 2010, Buenos Aires, Argentina – This one-day conference is produced by the IBA Law Firm Management Committee and the IBA Latin American Regional Forum. It will cover four contemporary challenges for modern law firms: writing and executing a marketing plan; a business approach to law firm strategy; career management of associates; and know-how and knowledge management in a small or midsize law firm. My Walker Clark colleague Fernando Moreno will be one of the panelists during the session on marketing plans; and I will chair the session on law firm strategy.

Although these programs are being held in South America, I recommend them to any lawyer anywhere who is responsible for the management of a law firm or practice group, but especially for those from small and midsize law firms. Each one is also an outstanding networking opportunity, especially for lawyers from North America and Europe who are interested in meeting top lawyers from some of the best law firms in Latin America (and the world).

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

Is law school still a good investment?

The National Law Journal raises that question in an interesting post at law.com this morning.

In the leader to their article, the authors comment:

A J.D. used to mean a first-class seat on the gravy train. Now? Not so much. Critics say law schools have a duty to warn.

(For readers who read this blog in translation, I am not sure how “gravy train” will translate. In American English, a gravy train refers to a strategy, plan, or series of events that, once achieved, takes one to great wealth without any further hard work.  Once you have purchased your “seat,” all that you must do is to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.)

This excellent article leads to many interesting questions.

Does someone who enters law school expecting to board the gravy train after three years reside in a self-absorbed fantasy world?

Or is the continued demand for admission to U.S. law schools a sign of optimism about the economic future of the legal profession, notwithstanding recent bad news?

Is a law degree worth the investment? Do American law firms actually deliver value for money?

Or have they become an over-priced under-performing anachronism that are increasingly irrelevant to the practice of law in the 21st century?

For years I have heard a consistent set of criticisms of the quality and cost-effectiveness of law schools in the United States:

• Their instructional methods are archaic.
• High law school tuitions effectively exclude poor and working class people from the legal profession.
• Law schools do not give students the business skills they need to practice law in a law firm.
• American law school graduates are no better prepared to practice law than graduates of foreign law schools.
• American lawyers place too much importance on where a person went to law school and not enough on the practice skills and commercial awareness needed to be a good lawyer in a law firm.
• The traditional method in the United States of “reading law” to qualify for practice without a formal law degree, which has been abolished in most U.S. jurisdictions, actually produced better lawyers.

To be fair, one can hear most of these criticisms about legal education in other countries.

It is obvious that a law degree from a law school in the United States — whether one of the so-called “top” law schools or a relatively obscure one — was never a guarantee of a successful legal career.

It is also true that even the best American law schools do an incomplete job, at best, of preparing new lawyers for the challenges of legal practice today.

Perhaps it is time to rethink and reinvent the role of law schools in the whole system of legal education and professional development of lawyers in the United States.

Are American law schools willing to lead this effort? Or must they be dragged into it by law firms and law students that appear to be increasingly disappointed with the value that law firms deliver to the American legal profession.