Articles Posted in Talent

In my experience, a town hall meeting finds the general counsel sitting in front of most or all of the law department and answering whatever questions are asked. It hails from the fishbowl (“workout”) technique made famous by General Electrics. A town hall Q&A session is supposed to be open, candid, useful and to allow anyone in the law department to ask any question.

Sounds great in theory, but in real life no one wants to show up the big kahuna with a difficult or sensitive question. Nor to they don’t want to float softball questions and get battered later as a brown nose. So the administrator or someone else has to seed the questions or let people submit them in writing so they can even fake the questions.

Town halls try to address the chronic complaint of lack of communication (See my post of Nov. 30, 2005 on the clamor for more “communication”; and Oct. 19, 2005 on communication methods.) and they try to build morale (See my post of Oct. 29, 2005 on symptoms and underlying causes of departmental morale.). They try to, and look good on paper, but peer pressure conspires against them (See my post of Dec. 8, 2006 on the GC’s chilling effect.).

No one has devised a solid, generally-accepted methodology to measure talent in a law department. One approach is to ferret out several indicators of quality and create an index (See my posts of May 17, 2006 about a litigation index; Aug. 28, 2005 on a client satisfaction index; Aug. 14, 2005 on a trademark index; and Sept. 10, 2005 on an overall law department performance index.).

Some components of such an index might include: CLE spending per lawyer; the quality ranking of law schools attended by the lawyer team, using the results from U.S. News & World Report; years the lawyers spent at an NLJ 250 law firm; dollars invested per lawyer in knowledge management initiatives; collegiality (See my post of Feb. 7, 2006 on the Group Development Questionnaire.); average tenure with the law department (See my post of Nov. 6, 2006 about job security.); articles published; bar leadership positions held; MBAs, LLMs and other post-graduate degrees granted; and percentage of lawyers who clerked after law school. Each component can be scored and weighted to create an index.

Many promotions leave in their wake one or more disappointed lawyers. This is especially true when a new general counsel is appointed from inside. The passed-over lawyers in-house, those who thought they had a shot at the top job, may accept the new leader and remain as productive and loyal as before – or they may seethe with resentment. Those lawyers who are near retirement age will probably stay on, but the young turks, the disappointed and ambitious ones, may look elsewhere.

One would hope that If HR processes and feedback have done their job, there should be no surprises (See my posts of July 31, 2005; May 1, 2005 on succession planning; and Oct. 10, 2005 on internal competition.), but many people do not realistically size up their chances to seize the brass ring.

On top of all the rigors, it must be hard for the new general counsel to mollify and retain those disappointed former colleagues who feel jilted.

A profile of Mark LeHocky, general counsel of Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, ran in the Recorder, March 30, 2007. LeHocky, whose company is part of Nestle, represented Dreyer’s in the 1990s and was asked in 1997 to join the company as its top lawyer. He was reluctant because he enjoyed his litigation practice and also because he “had some reservations about in-house practice, in part because many of the in-house teams I had worked with in my private practice frankly did not seem like happy campers. There were folks who did not seem challenged or appreciated and were otherwise frustrated with their situation working in-house.”

Although undeniably true for some in-house counsel, and quite probably a myth cherished by private practitioners, the same discontents pervade law firms. Boring work, ignored workers, frustration with the peccadilloes of partners, competition, and uncertainties about making partner all darken their lives. In-house departments have no monopoly on malaise. If anything, I suspect that the general level of employee satisfaction is higher on the buying side than the selling side.

Studies referred to in Scientific Am., April 2007 at 36, show that “about 50 percent of each person’s happiness is determined from birth.” We each have a genetic set point of contentment that is to that degree largely set for life (See my post of March 8, 2006 for more on happiness set points.).

For this reason, efforts to boost morale in law departments are likely to meet with mixed results and be short-lived (See my post of Oct. 30, 2005 on low-cost morale boosters.). Members of the legal team will regress to their innate levels of happiness.

The article also discusses the other factors that influence our mood levels. “The smallest [explanatory] slice is circumstances, which explains only about 10 percent of people’s differences in happiness.” The remaining 40 percent is the dark matter of joy: we don’t know what accounts for it, although at least one researcher attributes it to “intentional activity,” mental and behavioral strategies to counteract the downward pull of adaptation, whereby we all quickly adapt to good fortune and take for granted it luster.

An article in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2007 No. 1 at 77, discusses the halo effect. “[I]t describes the tendency to make specific inferences on the basis of a general impression.” For example, a company’s “performance, good or bad, creates an overall impression – a halo – that shapes how we perceive its strategy, leaders, employees, culture, and other elements.”

Likewise, I extrapolate, a particular person’s rank in a law department creates an overall impression, good or bad, that shapes how we perceive the lawyer’s style, intelligence, ambition, leadership abilities, creativity and other elements. Halos surround not just companies but also people. General counsel, and all managing lawyers, need to be aware of the halo effect and evaluate people on objective measures and clear-eyed observation.

Some lawyers carry fat purses: international, M&A; some lawyers borrow food stamps: insurance, banking. Why?

InsideCounsel, April 2007 at 59 takes a look at several surveys of in-house compensation. One of the data charts (at 64) shows six practice areas ranked by lawyer pay: International ($226,200), M&A ($221,500), Compliance ($215,100), Antitrust/trade ($211,100), Securities/Finance ($210,000) and Patent litigation ($209,900).

The lowest paid of these practice areas is seven percent less than the highest paid, so in fact all these top salaries are tightly clustered. It may be that international lawyers enjoy some expat benefits, which drive up their pay. And experienced compliance lawyers are hot in demand now. Otherwise, I am hard-pressed to dream up any reason for the pay gaps other than statistically insignificant variability – except size of company.

InsideCounsel, April 2007 at 59, takes a look at several surveys of in-house compensation. One of the items looks at the criteria for bonus determinations. Data from the survey conducted annually by Hildebrandt International (this blogger’s firm) shows that 90 percent of in-house attorneys were eligible in 2005 for a bonus and that 96 percent of those who were eligible received a bonus.

Nearly every law department assigns a target bonus range to its attorneys (91% do so) and bases the amount of the bonus on several factors. Individual performance counts for 85 percent of the companies; company performance counts for even more law departments (95%), and business unit performance accounts for some part of some bonuses (52%). What surprises me is that the performance of the law department as a whole, such as whether it hit its budget or grasped its goals, is not reported as a determinant of bonus awards.

My view is that of the three determinants of bonus for in-house lawyers that ought to be major a reasonable distribution would be 40 percent company results, 40 percent individual achievement, and 20 percent departmental performance.

A general counsel who was blinded at age 25, before he attended law school and became the first Seminole ever to graduate from law school, inspires complete admiration. Jim Shore, now 61, is profiled in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 14, April 2007 at 76, and it is an impressive tribute to the man. To practice law without eyes is to compose music without hearing. It’s so rare that the diversity movement doesn’t ask about data on visually-impaired lawyers.

And, by the way, Shore survived an assassination attempt in 2002 during a campaign to clean up tribal corruption.

A truly extraordinary appointment just came to light. On March 28, 2007 Willis Group Holdings, the global insurance broker, appointed Adam Ciongoli its General Counsel. Ciongoli will oversee legal, compliance and audit functions.

What’s extraordinary is that Ciongoli was most recently law clerk to US Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. Has there ever been another Supreme Court clerk whose next position was that of General Counsel?

To be fair, Ciongolo “has served as a special consultant to the New York City Police Department. Previously, he was Senior Vice President and General Counsel for TimeWarner Europe, and Counselor to the United States Attorney General.”