Articles Posted in Talent

“Drink to me only with thine eyes” and you’ll get into a lot less trouble at the office fete than if you drink anything stronger. Sadly, wise advice about discretion and knowing one’s limits can too easily sip slip away.

Mad Kane’s Office Party Follies takes a humorous look at how to attend the holiday office party without sacrificing your career. This useful comment and link comes from Hannah Hasl-Kelchner’s Legal Literacy blog on Nov. 17, 2007.

Risk management takes on a particularly personal flavor when an office celebration mixes kegs and colleagues. It’s gin and toxic since staff and hard stuff don’t mix.

Of seven methods of consultant training reported on in Consulting, Vol. 9, Nov./Dec. 2007 at 47, the most common, accounting for 32 percent, is “formal in-house training.” I doubt that law departments conduct formal training programs for their lawyers, except possibly writing skills or negotiation skills (See my posts of Sept. 21, 2005 on writing programs; and Feb. 10, 2007 on negotiation skills.).

The next most common method is “professional workshops” (21%), which seems to have no counterpart for law departments (But see my post of Nov. 18, 2007 and its nod to appellate advocacy training.). Perhaps, however, CLE course fall into this category (See my post of Dec. 17, 2007 and references cited.).

Third, at 17 percent, are “e-learning online courses,” which again seem unlikely to apply to in-house counsel. “Informal learning” (11%) accounts for much more of the percentage of learning for lawyers — on the job training (See my post of Dec. 22, 2006 about the prior year’s survey and my comment about OJT.). Most lawyers learn most of what they know by observing and doing.

When lawyers in a law department are asked to fill out an upward appraisal of their general counsel, they probably feel a pang of unease, even if they have been assured that their responses will be held completely confidential. If too few people complete the review, or if there are text comments that might give away the identity of the evaluator, or if there is a scintilla of a chance that the response will be disclosed, lawyers shy away from taking part (See my posts of Sept. 27, 2005 on upward evaluations of leaders; Jan. 1, 2006 for a review of the tool; Sept. 27, 2005 for a partial 360 tool; July 9, 2007 for its use when two subordinates clash; and May 2, 2007 on upward evaluations of general counsel.).

Some personnel experts see the 360˚ report as a way to give difficult feedback to people who are too vain or ego-ridden to listen to it in any other format. To get a message to their boss may push back a bit on the insecurity, but the nagging worry can never disappear. If a third party collates the responses, most people think it is safe to complete 1-5 rating questions, but it is prudent to write carefully in the free-text replies

The bigger the law department, the more of his or her time a general counsel has to spend on personnel issues. You might think that with large law departments, more people are comfortably slotted into the right level and type of work for them. You might think an HR person assigned to support the department would offload much of the paperwork. You might think the administrator and administrator’s staff would absorb additional people-management tasks. Unfortunately, even with al that firepower, I suspect that the people demands grow faster as a law department adds people.

By this I mean that there are more divergent personalities, more invidious comparisons of titles or bonuses or perquisites, more desires to move around and take on different responsibilities – in short, more potential for jockeying and friction. People issues – whom to promote, whom to stroke, whom to deliver bad news to – may not expand exponentially with size but they certainly rise at a faster-than-linear pace.

The crucial and difficult decisions about promotions and responsibilities and career paths come to rest on the desk of the general counsel.

Antoine Henry de Frahan, writing recently on his blawg, Legal Management, discusses why general counsel should accept that some of their most talented lawyers will leave.

“In a profession where people are used to the “up or out” philosophy, when there is no way up, the only option is to move out. Hire high potentials, put them in an exciting position, but sooner than later they will come with the question: What’s next?“

Most law departments are fairly stable, with little attrition or growth opportunities, and lawyers in the top spots may not be due to retire for years. A general counsel in such a stasis department has to get used to periodically losing his “best and brightest”. Frahan finds some good in these losses:

“We define culture as a system of shared values that define what is important and norms that define appropriate attitudes and behaviors for organizational members” Cal. Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Fall 2007 at 179. “Culture” is a slippery notion, one that has confounded my efforts to come to an inductive understanding (See my post of Nov. 20, 2007 that admits confusion and includes 11 references.).

Now, though, culture is clear: in every law department of more than one lawyer there is an operating consensus as to what is important (Examples: be right, block wrongs, get the job done well, team with clients, cope with workload, etc.). Those are shared values.

Second, people act in ways that others accept and applaud (Examples: challenge authority, wear jeans, decorate offices, treat non-lawyers with disdain, kowtow to the general counsel, etc.). Those are norms. The article explains that “norms are central to characterizing how work is conducted at the organizational and group levels” (at 179).

The ABA J., Dec. 2007, discusses the class of service providers who staff lawyers in-house for relatively long-term assignments at senior levels. The article mentions several of these groups and there are others (See my post of Nov. 27, 2005 about outsourced general counsel.).

Here is a taxonomy of terms for various practices of this kind. The analogy I refer to in the header relates to unbundling legal services from large law firms and finding stratified price points for legal services. Not that the definitions are air tight; only that I want to sort out the types offerings and their essences as best as I can.

1. A general counsel can hire a lawyer outside of the United States – that is called “offshoring” (See my post of Dec. 16, 2007 for 18 references to that topic.). The differentiators are international geography and cost.

A session at The Lawyer’s Seventh Annual Summit For In-House Lawyers, which took place in Lisbon this past November, closed with an activity that has to be seen to be believed: “The session involved playing a communal game of snakes and ladders, with the snakes representing the perils of being an in-house lawyer and the ladders signifying issues that would facilitate their work and careers.”

Goodness snakes alive! Sheds new light on COBRA! But as long as you asp, I will adder one more point. All boas and girls enjoy games and I am a fang of stimulating activities at conference, but to garter together this many in-house counsel from slither and yon for a rollicking snakes and ladders is anaconda strange (See my post of April 15, 2006 on role play as a method to train.).

If the preceding paragraph struck you as odd (or adder) then peek at my post of Sept. 18, 2007 as I python the puns.

By Mark I. Sirkin, Ph.D., Hildebrandt International

A previous post explains how associates in law firms break into four distinct segments characterized by different goals, different work styles, and different needs (See Mark Sirkin’s post of Dec. 11, 2007.). Only two or three of these segments are really relevant for law departments and understanding them should help in recruiting and retaining the best lawyers.

Approximately 16 percent of the Flexibility Seekers and 14 percent of the Called Lawyers aspired from early on to practice law in a corporation. Both groups, however, chose “Don’t Know” as their career goal a quarter of the time. The Called Lawyers aspired to public service or the judiciary about 22 percent of the time.

The 2007 Legal Business Assistant Survey gathered data from more than 2,200 assistants. The extensive findings can be found in Legal Business, Iss. 179, Nov. 2007 at 53 et seq. Amid the sea of figures and analysis two small tidal pools about law departments caught my eye.

First, a chart shows the “modal average billable hours targets” of US firms in the UK (1,600-1,800 hours) “Global Elite” [Magic Circle, I believe] (1,700-1,800 hours), “Major City” (1,500-1,700), London midsizers (1,200-1,500), Major UK (1,400-1,500), Regional (1,400) and Scotland (1,300-1,350). Easier to see from the graphic (at 62), the trend is clear: the bigger and more prestigious the group of firms, the harder its associates work. The term “modal average” means, I think, that of all the average charging targets in a given group, the most common one is the modal average.

The second takeaway comes from a chart on page 76, which reports the results of asking the assistants, “If you moved, where would you move to?” The percentages of assistants who chose “in-house” started at about 28 percent among the Global Elite and US-firm assistants, then dropped to about 26 percent among those in Major City firms, and decreased steadily to Regional assistants where about 14 percent indicated that if they were to leave their firm they would seek an in-house position. It seems plausible that the assistants in top-end law firms have more exposure to large corporate clients, so they have a better feel for the attractiveness of that work place and they have better contacts.