Wouldn’t you suppose that inarguable goals are, well, inarguable?
Welcome to law-firm land.
This is a story about how we let our firms be knee-capped in fealty to principles of individual autonomy.
Consider a hypothetical firm:
- It might be a boutique and it might be a Global 50;
- It might be primarily lockstep or primarily eat-what-you-kill;
- It might be US or UK-based;
- And in governance it might tend more towards Athenian democracy or more towards centralized management power.
In response to the Great Reset, or perhaps out of a sense that it’s time for a generalized reassessment of its business, the firm’s management embarks on a sustained and disciplined exercise in re-examination of its position in the market: How its partners, associates, even paralegals and staff, as well as its clients, and the media, perceive it.
You might think of this as akin to an individual (you?) undertaking a serious assessment of where you are, what you’ve achieved so far, and how to capitalize on your strengths and underplay your weaknesses. If you did this seriously–lose weight, quit smoking, treat your colleagues with more professionalism and respect, be more loving to your spouse or significant other–you would consider it a serious failing if you didn’t carry through, and would rightly berate yourself.
The results of the firm’s reassessment are not alarming but not entirely comforting either (so, I suspect, would your own personal reassessment of yourself be or, I regrettably confess, mine of myself).
- Some things can be improved;
- People are not entirely living up to their potential;
- The firm has assets that it’s not taking full advantage of;
- And, most tellingly, people seem a bit smug and complacent about all of this.
Proceeding rationally and logically, you present these findings to the firm as a whole. Perhaps even–quelle horreur–with suggestions for improvement. People need to move out of their comfort zones; place a bit more value on ambition and aspiration than on entitlement; let clients know how hard they will work for them, and proceed to demonstrate it. This is potentially a seminal moment, even (in Andy Grove’s famous phrase), an “inflection point.”
Now what?
Pushback is what. Instinctively. We (lawyers) can’t seem to help ourselves.
“If we implement any of what you’re implying we should do, we shall put our culture at risk.”
“Other firms who have reformed themselves along the lines you’re suggesting are soulless places committed to revenue and profit maximization at the expense of clients.”
“I didn’t go to business school, I went to law school. For a reason.”
“I practice law because I believe in and care about client service; that’s all there is to it.”
And how predictable is all of this? Utterly. You can see it coming from a mile away.
At this point, you have two choices: You can reassure everyone that nothing really is going to change, certainly not radically, that we’re not going to ask partners to do anything not of their own unbridled free will, and that it has all been an illuminating exercise but such it shall remain.
Or you can insist that this is a key moment in the aftermath of the Great Reset and that your firm has a very rare opportunity to capitalize on its process of self-examination and, potentially, steal a march on your more complacent or nervous competitors.
Your decision turns, I submit, on the degree to which you credit the legitimacy of your partners’ desire for unfettered autonomy.
And doesn’t so much of it come down to that? The long-run best interests of the firm versus the reflexive and intrinsic cry for autonomy and individual self-determination from the partners?
This should serve as a clarifying moment.
This isn’t just about one initiative or one, albeit critical, moment in the strategic trajectory of your firm. It’s the opportunity to take a stand.
I hope few of you doubt that we are facing once-in-a-career challenges, not just from the economic conditions of the past few years, which I don’t need to rehearse, but also from the incipient arrival of non-traditional competition as the UK’s Legal Services Act kicks in for real and as outsourcing/disaggregation/unbundling continues to gather its irresistible force. The decades of quiet, incremental change are over.
What does the future hold?
The short answer, which unfortunately also happens to be true, is that no one knows. In the face of uncertainty, the only stance that makes sense is one of agility. Your firm needs to be standing on its toes, ready to move in a concerted and forceful fashion as the competitive landscape begins to gain clarity.
So let’s re-examine the source of the opposition to firm-wide initiatives.
I have a modest diagnosis: They’re juvenile. And “juvenile” not in a beguling or charming sense, but in a self-indulgent, callow sense. That is not the sensibility that should serve as the template for governance of any serious firm in a globalizing market.
In high school I had four English teachers in a row–freshman through senior years–who could not have been more different on the surface. One, “Mr. Worth,” never referred to by any other name whatsoever, had the mien of an Oxford don and was probably, in distant hindsight, a closet gay (exotically, he lived on the Lower East Side), but with the impeccable manners of one to the manor born. Another, Mr. Reilly, looked perpetually as if he’d just come back from surfing at Malibu and had the attitude, tousled blond hair, and worldview to match. Mrs. Seiden was a Sadie-married-lady with the bottomless repertoire of brooches and hairpins to match, and the last, Mr. Greenwald, was an emaciated and ascetic academic to the bone with conspicuous disregard for the merely material.
But they all had one thing in common, and for this, at the time, I thought them all more or less Fascists: They could not leave anything I wrote–essay, report, book review, you name it–alone. Nothing was ever good enough.
You put pen to paper at your peril, knowing that everything from the overall architecture and flow of the piece to the order, substance, and length of the paragraphs, to the selection of subjects, predicates, and objects would be relentlessly scrutinized, critiqued, and second-guessed.
And improved.
From this sometimes demoralizing and occasionally excruciating experience, given the balm of time, I learned that few experiences in life are more rewarding than seeking excellence in intrinsically difficult pursuits. Sometimes there is no substitute for hard work, second-guessing yourself, setting the bar of ambition ever higher, and relentlessly challenging yourself to be better and better than you ever thought capable.
To have shrunk from this challenge would have been, well, juvenile.
Working in–being a partner in–a great global enterprise is surely as worthy a challenge as there comes. Ambition, hunger to achieve more, ceaseless dissatisfaction with the quality of the familiar, the comfortable, and the rote, are not irritations standing in the way of your professional pursuits and they are not challenges to the culture of the organization. They are essential to achieving excellence.
So you, and your partners, have a choice.
