Articles Posted in Talent

According to researchers into positive psychology, the study of hedonics and eudemonics, a huge amount of our happiness is determined by social interactions. Having people we like around us brings us joy.

Collateral research finds that most moments of “flow,” of feeling involved and productive, result from collaboration with someone we like. The implication for law departments is that teamwork, communities of practice, projects, and joint efforts will probably give most lawyers the most satisfaction. That is, unless, by self selection and education, lawyers tend to be loners.

Spare me the travails of Harvard’s Lawrence Summers, who commented on women in science and unleashed, seriously but pun intended, a maelstrom. Still, having read that “in a recent personality-assessment survey of 420 executive men and women” the results, according to the executive leadership consulting firm conducting the study, were dramatic (Fortune, Nov. 14, 2005 at 144):

“In weighting 47 management competencies, from judgment to reasoning ability to decisiveness, the women surveyed scored higher on 36 of them.” Not sure about “weighting,” but sounds like the increasing incidence of women general counsel is a good thing.

The same article cited a survey by Catalyst of 296 corporate leaders, 57 percent of them women. The survey found that “men think men are better at problem solving or decision-making, while women think women are better at it. If the job is in general management, however, which is dominated by men, both sexes think men make better decisions. Similarly, women are perceived to be better in ‘female’ jobs, such as human resources.”

To attract and retain talent, law departments may need to bob and weave. Stamping the time card at 8:30, breaks at 10:20 and 2:20 with 40 minutes between for lunch, and rushing out at 5:30 doesn’t attract and hold today’s generation of lawyers.

For example, telecommuting encourages more freedom as to where work is done; it lets lawyers think outside the box: flex-place. (See my posts of Oct.19, 2005 on obstacles to telecommuting as well as Sept. 25, 2005 and Oct. 18, 2005 on survey data.)

Shifting away from a rigid insistence on 9-to-6 helps those who need to adjust their work hours because of childcare, commuting, or metabolic differences: flex time.

At a recent conference, general counsel from four large law departments estimated that their lawyer group consists of 60, 50, 50 and 45 percent women, respectively. They all acknowledged that the most senior levels were not as balanced but that over time the percentages might well increase. After all, more than half of all law school graduates are women.

The glaring shortages show up in minority positions (See my post of Nov. 13, 2005 on South Africa.). The consensus among the panelists was that, among other measures taken to find and retain minority lawyers, they must press executive search firms to uncover more minority candidates

While a traditional salary structure may proliferate 25 or more salary grades in a large law department—often, several ranges for lawyers with the same title, broadbanding reduces the number of ranges to a handful. The broader bands have wider minima and maxima than did the levels in the traditional system, with the maximum pay in a range much higher than the minimum and many more lawyers in the band.

Broadbanding gives managers in the law department more flexibility. It lets them reward more generously those lawyers who contribute the most, add competencies, take on new responsibilities – in short, those who bolster the law department. Broadbanding allows management more freedom in recognizing exceptional performance. Pay changes aren’t tied in so closely to changes in title and managing more staff. The more elastic compensation bands will support a more flexible law department.

As law firms grow into the thousands of lawyers, thus enabling and rewarding more and more specialization; as partnership decisions tighten, thus rewarding practitioners versed in narrower and narrower areas of law; as clients merge and grow, thus encountering more sophisticated legal issues and seeking just the right spice for the precise recipe, the pressure for lawyers to specialize intensifies. But specialists, whether in the company or outside, strike a Faustian bargain. Technocrats know trees and bushes; generalist counselors gain the laurels.

Most CEOs and Boards want a general counsel who has judgment, whose legal experience combined with commercial instincts encompass business broadly and the law more broadly. The problem is that the private law firm world admires those who know an area of law inside and out, who wrote the treatise, but the law department world favors those who know the world and have breadth of vision.

(As a meta-post on specialists, see my posts in 2005 of Sept. 10 on large law departments and specialization, July 16 on multi-sourcing specialty firms, July 30 on dual reporting of in-house specialists, July 14 on single points of contact, and Nov. 8 on use of outside counsel by inside specialists.)

I interview many law department lawyers who are not direct reports to the general counsel. These intermediate and junior level lawyers consistently complain about the insufficiency of communication from the leadership group. They want to know what goes on behind closed doors, among the elite. Sadly, if they actually knew, much of what transpires in the leadership group is page D4 material, not front page. Still, the yearn to learn persists.

The same lawyers usually chime in with a desire to have more communication across the department, between practice groups. They want to know what is going on, almost in a gossipy way. Yet, they never complain about any obligation they might feel to tell those below them about anything.

It’s human nature to want to be in the know; no one wants to feel excluded. But I often wonder what the lawyers think they would do differently having heard all the chatter that would result from so much circulation of communication.

A study of three law departments, all in defense manufacturing, looked at the percentage of lawyers in the departments whose law schools were listed in the US News and World Report rankings of law schools. Graduates of one of the top 25 law schools accounted for about one-third of lawyers in each of the three departments.

Graduates of schools ranked 26-100, a group with three times more law schools in it than the top 25 group, accounted for about 45 percent of the in-house contingent. The remaining lawyers, about 20 percent overall, graduated from a law school ranked 101 or higher.

The average age of the 250 lawyers in the three departments was just under 48 years, while the average number of years they had practiced law was just under 21 (See my posts of Sept. 4, 2005 on demographics and keeping the experience of aging lawyers and Sept. 25, 2005 on in-house lawyers working on average 6 years before moving into a company.)

My top ten reasons why it is difficult to manage in-house counsel (plus a bonus reason):

1. Lawyers view themselves as autonomous, self-directing professionals, not robots. Their scores on a psychometric test (Caliper) shows lawyers to value autonomy much more that the general public (median or average 90, compared to 50)

2. Many lawyers are skeptical about supervising and being supervised. By Caliper measures, lawyers – average or median score of 90 – have a much more doubting, show-me attitude than do members of the general public

Law departments award cash bonuses, but based on what factors? A colleague of mine raised the issue of how determinants of bonuses should be weighted for the following areas of performance:

• Company (revenue, share price, EPS, profitability, goal achievement, comparison to peers)

• Business unit (for lawyers assigned to support a business unit)