(1) "Our firm is only as good as our lawyers." (2) "Our lawyers are our most valuable asset." (3) "Associate attrition is costing us a fortune." (4) "Why do so many women drop off the partnership track?"
If all these statements strike you as true—as well as contradictory—you are not alone. Yet, in my experience, as a profession we’ve done little to attempt to square the circle, as it were, and to find a way out of this disequilibrium situation.
But Mark Dawkins, Managing Partner of Simmons & Simmons, now writes in the UK’s Managing Partner magazine that his firm is introducing a new program called the "Career Development Center," which he describes as follows:
"When each lawyer reaches a certain stage of development (currently set at about four years post-qualification), he or she is invited to our Career Development Centre: an off-site event held for three days, during which each lawyer participates in a series of assessment, training and coaching sessions.
"The purpose of the centre is to conduct a thorough, collaborative review of the lawyers’ development and assist in producing a personal-development plan. This plan would typically chart the next two to three years of development; identify types of experience and competence that the individual wishes to acquire; and indicate how it will be acquired. With lawyers at this more advanced stage of development, we often find personal coaching in discrete areas is more valuable than training. Where it is needed we will therefore provide the individual with a coach."
The impetus for this initiative? Precisely the problem I described in the opening: We as an industry recognize in an intellectual fashion that our principal asset is the knowledge and experience in the brains of our lawyers, and that managing it should therefore be a business priority. However, as Dawkins puts it, we have been "neglecting the development of wider business skills, and often failing to provide lawyers with any real sense of a structure to their careers to fill the ever-growing gap between qualification as a solicitor and partnership."
He suggests a more complex career path than the linear, bifurcated associate/partner dichotomy. As Dawkins puts it, "three stages of progression (trainee, associate and partner) is not many in a career that may span 40 years."
What, then, is Simmons & Simmons doing?
Essentially, they are changing the One Gate tournament model of admission to partnership (or not)—the Ur-Judgment on one’s career and professional value—into a series of expectations, tailored to what stage one is transiting through in one’s career. So they establish expectations about professional skill sets, ability to relate to and cultivate clients, financial and technological acumen, awareness of economic and business factors, and softer skills such as leadership and communication.
The second prong of their initiative is cultivating more flexible career paths per se—"less conventional options," as Dawkins puts it.
For example?
The chance to take "beach time" between large, intensive work on deals. A sabbatical after three or four years to re-group and re-charge. Fixed-hour working to accomodate family obligations. A four-day week or a nine-day fortnight. Understand that Dawkins is no airy dreamer, and he understands a firm’s lifeblood is serving its clients. While he realizes that technology may lessen the need, ultimately, for one key individual to work on a deal start to finish (enabling others to pick up where he/she left off, for example), client expectations are ultimately non-negotiable:
"A law firm is there to serve its clients, and clients typically want the certainty of knowing that their established lawyer, or team of lawyers, will be available for the duration of a transaction. There is also good reason for this. The work that lawyers do is often complex, and the efficiency of a lawyer depends heavily on the accumulated knowledge an individual has acquired of a transaction or a client’s affairs over a period of time.
"Thus, a corporate lawyer, working on a set of listing particulars due for publication the next day, is unlikely to endear himself to a client by going home at 5pm just because that is what his working pattern permits him to do. […]
"In other words, the nature of the work many lawyers do is such that they are not easily interchangeable."
To attempt to balance the preferences of individual lawyers with Simmons & Simmons’ needs (and those of its clients), the experiment they are launching is to "engage in a candid dialogue" every 12 months or so about the work-time preferences a lawyer has—starting in about the 4th year. To the extent possible, the firm then attempts to accomodate a stated preference, for, say, no more than 3 big deals, or fixed-hour expectations, or something else.
The firm protects itself by extending this privilege only to lawyers who have achieved a certain level of competence and respect within the firm, acknowledging that "there will always be a large pool of lawyers who are working conventional patterns [and that] the firm is not obliged to accede to any individual request."
Will it work?
Dawkins, cautious fellow that he seems to be, hedges his bets:
"Of course it is possible we will decide such a scheme is not workable, or that there is not enough demand to make it worthwhile. I hope this is not the conclusion, however."
But who else is even trying such a thing?
Here’s my prediction: The cognitive dissonance—not to mention the economic cost—of the collision of the four statements with which I opened this piece will demand that firms begin to experiment with alternatives to the "Cravath Model," now a century old. Early pioneers such as Simmons & Simmons may fail. Or they may point the way. In either case, let the laboratory experiments begin.
