Articles Posted in Talent

The larger the footprint of a legal department, the more it needs lawyers who can lead. Local offices need someone who can show the flag, at the high level, and agree to toner purchases at the low level. Different languages and cultures put a strain on distant, senior lawyers at headquarters, let alone time zones, so often the local senior lawyer must pick up the slack.

The more office sites a law department maintains the more opportunities it has to select high-energy leaders. If that is a goal, it’s important to provide some leadership training.

Three years ago I collected 32 blog posts from this blog that covered leadership (See my post of June 11, 2008: leadership with 32 references.).

Remarks on a recent panel by Robert Weber, the General Counsel of IBM, are available on Law.com. In the past, the company mostly hired lawyers with four to eight years of law firm experience. Now IBM increasingly hires straight out of law school.

The decision to hire students from law school came three years ago, according to the summary of Weber’s remarks. “There was nothing wrong with the candidates they were hiring after five, six, or seven years at law firms. But the skills they’d learned as associates didn’t match up very well with their responsibilities at IBM.” The fit wasn’t good. “The company still had to train them for six months before they were really ready to contribute. The freshly minted lawyers they hire now require the same amount of training, but their starting salaries are much lower. And they’re getting IBM training from day one.”

Weber also spoke about turnover. “Retention is a big concern of many large law departments. IBM has had pretty good luck there, too. With more than 500 in-house lawyers, Big Blue loses very few it wishes it didn’t.”

A wonderful article in the ACC Docket, July/Aug. 2011 at 29, describes how the law department of Reckitt Benckiser Group, a global consumer products company, had all its 44 in-house lawyers take a psychometric assessment. It was one of several available for law departments, specifically the Caliper Profile (See my post of Nov. 27, 2005: Caliper findings and the skepticism of lawyers.). The company’s lawyers came from 18 countries and worked in 15 of them so they had widely varying backgrounds and styles. The Caliper Profile measures 23 different personality traits and motivational factors such as leadership, problem solving, and time management.

The article compares personality traits common to lawyers to those of business executives and also compares the traits of inside and outside lawyers. It also weaves in Emotional Intelligence and results of a test called the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence test (See my post of Dec. 3, 2007 #4: EI with 5 references.). The article provides much to think about.

Not giving junior lawyers exposure to senior business people harms their development. It helps them feel more engaged and more in the flow of the business. Most law departments suffer from the problem of top lawyers who hoard access to top clients, to put it harshly, or who fail to let lower-level lawyers interact with senior managers, to give it a more humane spin.

For the senior lawyer, wider-spread dealings by those below them lowers the ego rush of proximity to power and the felt-importance resulting from dealing with senior people.

In the longer run, it is better to spread the contacts. The solution is to try hard to bring in junior people to presentations and meetings. Let them step into the limelight in a variety of situations. There is a bit of performance evaluation that naturally goes with that. As a development tool, wider contact helps the law department improve.

Five challenges that arise from inept communication often show up in law departments. I wrote about them in my latest National Law Journal article, published on Oct. 10, 2011, and had the temerity to suggest some ways the vorpal blade might snicker snack improve them (if the end of that sentence confuses you, enjoy “Jabberwocky” this weekend, especially with a small child).

If you would like to see the article, click below for my frabjous communication piece.
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Proving yet again that in-house lawyers around the world share similar sources of job satisfaction, consider the survey results cited in Benny Tabalujan, ed. Leadership and Management Challenges of In-House Legal Counsel (LexisNexis Australia 2008) at 51. Conducted in 2005 by the Institute for Knowledge Development (IKD), the survey data from the unpublished report shows that when asked “What do you enjoy most about your role?” 85 percent of the in-house respondents checked “being part of the business” and “variety and diversity of the role.”

Other surveys or posts have revealed similar attractions of in-house practice (See my post of April 13, 2006: nine advantages for corporate practice; May 3, 2010: nine attractions of an in-house position; and July 26, 2008: benefits provide most attraction.).

In the Australian survey, the grumbles come from “Administrative tasks,” bemoaned by 68 percent of the respondents and “People management” by 55 percent. Other problems have shown up on this blog. In fact, for some unknown reason, this blog has dwelled more on the downsides of inside practice than sided with the upsides (See my post of March 28, 2006: reasons not to go in-house; April 12, 2006: among least rewarding aspect of practicing in corporation is “career advancement opportunities”; April 13, 2006: advantages of working in-house: “career advancement” rated low; May 10, 2006: hours not necessarily shorter; June 24, 2007: the intractable problem of career paths; Jan. 16, 2009: disadvantages include stress; and Jan. 16, 2009: lack of pro bono opportunities.).

No claims of originality or eloquence, but a writer in Diversity & The Bar, July/Aug. 2011 at 31, condensed the advantages usually cited for in-house counsel very succinctly. As background, Corporate Counsel Women of Color (CCWC) collected survey responses, among other forms of data gathering, from 857 women of color attorneys. Summarizing why they liked practicing in-house rather than in a law firm, they found the experience to be better “based on interfacing with senior management, working with clients, quality of work assignments, an atmosphere of inclusion, upward mobility, and training and development opportunities.” That’s a good list.

Someone can counter these positives, either by pointing out what law firms offer (more sophisticated problems, more money, autonomy as a partner, for example) or by attacking the stated benefits of in-house practice (limited career path in the department, cost center stigma, lots of humdrum work, no choice of clients, corporate politics and vicissitudes). Still, these six reasons hit most of the commonly given pluses.

General counsel, especially, as well as other managers should never use the parental put-down: “Because I told you so.” David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (Viking 2011) attacks throughout what he calls bad philosophy, bad explanations. One form is the peremptory end-of-discussion just quoted (at 311).

That final word fails because it can be used to “explain” anything. Second, it addresses only the form of the question, not the substance. Third, “it reinterprets a request for true explanation (why should something–or-other be as it is?) as a request for justification (what entitles you to assert that it is so?).” That end-of-the-discussion answer “confuses the nonexistent authority for ideas with human authority (power).” Fifth, and finally, “it claims by this means to stand outside the jurisdiction of normal criticism.” The employee must take the assertion on faith.

Because I tell you not to, don’t use it!

Ironic, isn’t it, that this blogger, who tries hard to write clearly, admits to the impossibility of writing completely clearly. “[W]e habitually underestimate the difficulty of communication,” writes David Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (Viking 2011) at 254. “It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood,” wrote the philopher Karl Popper (at 404). Eight pages later Deutsch repeats that: “no idea can be represented entirely explicitly.”

This intractable problem consists of more than an inability to choose the right words or sentence structure. Indeed, its source is deeper than the fuzziness that surrounds every word. The difficulty also stems from the cognitive distortions our brains are subject to and the physical impediments of hearing. Deeper still are the tacit assumptions, pieces of background knowledge that the speaker and listener do not share and do not realize they don’t share.

At the epistemological level, we don’t know what we know, so how can we convey a bit of it accurately, let alone receive it faithfully. All cognition is creation, so when someone says something, the other person creates the message. No brand or stamp reproduces the idea exactly. Repetition helps communicators converge on the bones of what is being said; a form of error correction.

Judge Richard Posner, the prolific Circuit Court judge, was interviewed by the New York Rev. of Books, Sept. 29, 2011 at 49. Asked about the ages of appellate judges and their effectiveness in their seventies and eighties, Posner offered his obiter dicta: “I think for anybody in a management job, ten years is the limit; you make enemies, you get stale.”

My goodness, what a change that would foist on legal departments if the top position had a term limit of a decade. “Career path” would take on a whole different meaning; search firms would exult. Senior titles would flex and “general counsel” would change to “chief legal officer” or there would be much more turnover at the top.

Do not misunderstand: I do not recommend this disparaging fancy of Posner’s. It takes years to learn the ropes at the top and to cast that hard-earned knowledge and social capital away prematurely would be a waste. Reversed and remanded for further consideration.