Articles Posted in Talent

In 2003, the law department of Reuters, slashed by cost cutting, made redundant 20 percent of the legal staff. Legal Week, Nov. 3, 2005, at 78 The general counsel, Rosemary Martin, “took creative steps to keep up morale and stem any further exits.” For example, she increased secondments to other countries, as well as to external firms. She arranged it so that an attorney who wanted to quit and travel could instead work in Asia.

To send a lawyer from a department shrunk by 20 percent to a law firm sounds perverse, but may be the lawyer(s) kept doing Reuters work. To second a lawyer to a country means, I assume, to send them for a period of time to a foreign location of the law department. Whatever, I commend the creativity of a general counsel who seeks for ways to keep the troops happy. (See my posts of Sept. 21, 2005 on recruiting secondees and May 1, 2005 on morale surveys and April , 2005 on morale boosters, and Oct. 29 and 30, 2005 on other techniques.)

For those working in a law department, “engagement” has a different nuance than satisfaction and morale. As a recent article explains, engagement involves deeper attachments, or the lack of them, than does satisfaction. The level of engagement in your department makes a big difference in its effectiveness.

For other thoughts about how to measure engagement, see my posts of April 3, 2005 from Stanton Marris, May 1, 2005 about employee morale surveys, and June 28, 2005 about Gallup polls on disengagement.

The number of graduates from US law schools has stayed almost flat for years (about 38,000 new JDs); worse, LSAT scores of law school students – thus, presumably, academic intelligence – have declined (See my post of July 31, 2005 on emotional intelligence.).

During those same years, the premier law firms have swollen and now suck up increasing numbers of the top law school graduates. To retain their talent, those same law firms have fashioned different career paths and alternatives than the old-school up-or-out. Other industries lure top drawer lawyers, especially consulting and investment banking.

Associate salaries rise steadily, yet companies are being required to expense the value of option grants, the grants that allowed law departments to compete on total compensation packages.

Several months ago, I criticized the use of forced ranking in law departments (See my post of May 4, 2005.), but a review of Dick Grote, Forced Ranking (Harvard Bus. Press 2005) presented arguments in favor of that technique. A typical system might classify the top 20 percent of all lawyers in a department as A’s, the next 70 percent as B’s, and the last 10 percent as C’s. “The A’s are given more challenging assignments and disproportionate nurturing. The B’s strive to be A’s. The C’s are fired.” Chilling, no? (See my post of May 14, 2005 on high potentials and executive development.)

According to Grote, “The payoff for developing a rigorous forced-ranking process … is enormous and well worth the effort.” We need some empirical research to back that assertion.

Among Grote’s benefits from forced ranking, the article says that it fights inflated performance reviews and forces managers to identify and state performance differences among their reports. It provides a framework for all manner of personnel decisions and it lets employees know exactly where they stand.”

If general counsel were to articulate their management philosophies, I suspect many would order up military metaphors. “I’ve got the troops, having succeeded in the war for talent. My chain of command will hold the line and we can charge into battle if we marshal our resources to attack and exploit the competitor’s patent weaknesses.”

Sports metaphors also have a field day. “We’ve got the team (and I am the quarterback, naturally) and we can out-play the other side if we stick to our playbook and don’t fumble. I know we took two quick strikes but we don’t need a Hail Mary pass, we can ace them on the next serve and eagle the class action certification!”

More gently, organic metaphors grow luxuriantly. “I have pruned and weeded this department and let my star lawyers flower. We have fertile soil here for knowledge management and best practices, so long as we keep planting and watering good ideas and keeping an eye on the forests, not the trees.”

A fascinating article in Legal Week, Vol. 7, Oct. 27, 2005 at 82 explained how legislation in South Africa has driven and will drive diversity at both firms and departments. For example, financial services institutions must procure 50 percent of their services from ‘black-owned,’ ‘black-controlled’ and ‘black-influenced’ companies by 2008. The article does not say whether a law department will be held to that requirement, but presumably if the entire company must comply, each part of it will be held at least partially accountable.

A second oddity was the statement that “South African rules prevent general counsel from instructing counsel directly, meaning that communication must take place via an attorney.” I can’t offer more on that strange-sounding constraint. If it means that the top lawyer in a company cannot retain or direct a law firm, but must do so through an intermediary lawyer, I am at a loss for an explanation.

Third, a law requires that there be a minimum proportion of company employees who were “previously disadvantaged,” which term now refers predominantly to black South Africans. Again, I can only suppose that each law department will have to hire and retain lawyers to comply with that minimum requirement.

An article (Legal Week, Vol. 7, Oct. 27, 2005 at 22) that mostly emphasized emotional intelligence (Ei) explained the differences between these four attributes.

“Competence is about what I can do (skills), IQ is about what I could do (cognitive potential), personality is about how I do it (style), and Ei is about why I do it (attitude and motivation).” My reaction is that IQ is academic cerebration, which is more limited than this rough definition.

The take-away is that any assessment or development process in a law department should integrate these parts of every lawyer into a whole picture of their development needs and strengths of contribution. (See my post of July 31, 2005 on the predictive accuracy of Ei instruments and July 14, 2005 on another set of definitions.) No law department or HR group even scratches the surface of compiling – let alone making use – of these lawyer attributes. (See my post of Nov. 8, 2005 on the contributions of HR reps.)

Based on compensation surveys and an analysis of titles in my book, Law Department Benchmarks: Myths, Metrics and Management, the title, Associate General Counsel, bespeaks more authority than the title, Assistant General Counsel.

Two other points about titles deserve mention. I heard from a General Counsel for three law departments that no one should have the title, General Counsel, unless they control virtually all the resources typical for that position. That is to say, to make someone the General Counsel of the widget division when that person does not control the litigators – they have been centralized in a group – or various specialists such as Human Resources, IT and intellectual property, overstates that lawyer’s authority. His preferred title for that person is “Chief Counsel.”

This same General Counsel also removes corporate titles, such as Vice President or Senior Vice President, from his lawyers’ titles. He continues the same level of perquisites and internal recognition that those promotional levels bestow, but he has removed them from official designation.

Most HR departments assign a person to support the law department. That person may also support other functional areas, such as finance and information technology. For a law department, the HR rep typically carries out a number of tasks.

They provide comparative compensation data (See my posts on March 26, 2005 about executive search firms possibly inflating compensation and June 15, 2005 on compensation in Asian law departments.) They prod people to complete the annual evaluations of lawyers and staff (See my post on May 4, 2005 decrying forced rankings.) Often, the HR person helps in decisions about promotions, which include setting titles and compensation levels.

The more ambitious representatives will also contribute in terms of ongoing, professional training. (See my post of Nov.6, 2005 on continuing legal/business education.) And even further afield they can assist on teamwork development in the department (See my posts of 2005: Oct. 1 on the Johari window, April 9 (Hartman-Kinsel), April 18 (MBTI), Oct. 19 (MLE4), and Oct. 21 (MBTI as amusement.).

Most general counsel would nod agreement with David Krasnostein, the General Counsel of Australia’s National Australia Bank. His department of more than 120 lawyers looks to recruit third and fourth year associates from private law firms. “They’ve already been very well trained by the firms and you don’t have to go through the pain of training them from scratch and that’s a big advantage.” (See my post of Sept. 21, 2005 about hiring secondees.)

A consequence of having no lawyers less than several years out of law school is that in-house counsel, if they are not supported by a cadre of paralegals and capable admins, may end of doing tasks that are below their training and compensation levels.