Why don’t at least some firms facing this non-trivial decision declare moral victory and announce that henceforth their policy is to invest in associate training and development in a serious, programmatic, and sustained way. Because of the money they’ll be spending on training and the accelerated career development their associates will experience, with lower billable hour expectations, they will offer a new choice in the marketplace of entry-level legal recruiting: You can go to the Big Dog firms, get paid handsomely and be worked to death; or you can come here and trade the top-of-market paycheck for true immersive professional development.
Previously, our hypothetical recruiting target was offered the other side of the firms’ “trivial” set of choices: Go to as prestigious a firm as would have you and get paid top of market, or, if that option was shut off to you, go to a less prestigious firm for less money and probably be worked to death anyway. Some choice. (By the way, this exposes to the light of day the reason partners who grouse about how sensitive associates are to pay differentials are wrong-headed to complain: If a difference of $5,000 [say] is all the hypothetical associate can see, then that’s good and sufficient reason right there.)
But now our target has a real choice: Get paid top of market and earn every penny slogging away while being trained in the “sink or swim” school of life, or opt for a small short-term sacrifice in terms of compensation (“short-term” in the arc of a 40-year career), but actually learn what this lawyering stuff is all about in a focused, real-world way that no law school has ever tried to teach and no law professor should ever be trusted to try to teach.
But maybe I’m dreaming.
In the meantime, the message from the elite market leaders to everyone else is clear. We have re-drawn a key financial line in the sand. Cross over to our side if you dare.
Great idea.
Sadly – you are dreaming
The most important word in your comment is “sadly.” And we all know this, doubling down on the “sadly.”
Yet I retain hope!
I wonder how many clients are impressed with law firms matching first year associate salaries?
I imagine clients couldn’t care less, *unless* the new rates lead to higher invoices. At that stage, there had better be some reasonable story about how the value to the client has risen as much or more than the billings. Econ 101, surely.
ASE’s proposed alternative would work extremely well in consulting engineering. (It is how a small, specialized firm can compete for premier talent with big wide-spectrum firms. “Do good work, have fun, and make a few bucks,” as the business was explained to me when I was a lad by a founding principal of such a firm.) The proposed approach effectively sets out the logic by which the investment will improve the value of the product to Client.
Mark:
Again, thanks for weighing in.
I’ve always thought there must be in many trainees’ heads a sort of tradeoff curve/indifference or utility frontier between starting pay on one axis and “training quotient” on the other. Less pay and more training has to be at some rational level (and the coefficients will differ and are personal but neither one should be 0.0 or 1.0) on a spectrum with more pay and less training.
It remains to be seen whether law firms will ever offer a market-clearing opportunity not at the “more pay” extreme.
The problem, Bruce, is that training programs at second-tier firms cannot provide cutting edge knowledge. The associate coming out of AmLaw 99’s training program on m & a, for example, just won’t have the battlefield and practical experience of a survivor of AmLaw 10’s sink or swim program. Nor will she have the same opportunities to do intensive, cost-unconstrained research and work in a substantive area. Your alternative provides the associate at the “humane firm” with inferior credentials to move on, both in perception and in reality. And so there’s no good trade off training against more pay/more hours.
As long as high end law is an artisan activity, training doesn’t fill the gap.
Dear Joseph:
Fascinating and entirely unexpected response; many thanks.
I wonder if there isn’t an unspoken assumption underlying your hypothesis, namely that “training” is a sort of black/white, all-or-nothing sort of thing. I’m not saying you believe that (I try to avoid putting words in people’s mouths), but if you’re right and only the gilt-edge pedigree is worth anything, then it would imply there’s no market for “good enough,” as in clients who say, figuratively or literally, “Good enough on this one will do.”
We can stipulate the training is “inferior,” to the Top 10 artisanal firm, but in ordinary markets inferior doesn’t mean worthless, at least not if it comes at lower cost, wrapped in a different service package, etc.
I also have to wonder, if I were the associate to whom the doors to the Top 10 firms were shut tight, if I wouldn’t be prepared to at least start out with “inferior” (but not nonexistent) credentials. Superior credentials wouldn’t appear to be an option to these many tens of thousands of grads.
In any event, a fascinating perspective and thanks again. I hope more readers chime in.