Biglaw Fail #1: Management

Unlike most of the business world, Biglaw promotes its associates using the lockstep method.  Meaning that your seniority is entirely based on the number of years you have been with the firm.   This puts people into leadership positions without any training.  

The second an associate starts, they are technically (though rarely in reality) the managers in charge of the support staff.  As they become more senior (i.e., stay with the firm longer), they are put in charge of vendors and more junior associates.  However, neither the original hire nor their inevitable promotion even takes into account their ability to manage people. 

Associates are recruited from law schools almost entirely based on the school and their grades.  Then, if they're in the margins, they are also judged on their ability to make things up  interview and how they would "fit in" to the firm's culture.  Never is their ability or background of managing others asked about or taken into account.  

Similarly, when associates are given their reviews, they are judged primarily on number of hours worked and, as a distant second, their abilities.  From what I understand, in the first couple of years, they just expect us to bill a bunch of hours and not screw anything up.  Anything above that is neither expected nor recognized.  Again, these reviews have nothing to do with our ability to lead. 

The result is that as associates become more senior, they are given increasingly more management responsibilities without any ideas about how to manage.  Sure, there are some people who are naturally good managers, but the vast majority don't have a clue.  Rather than learn or seek help, they do what they've seen their superiors do their  entire careers -- make unreasonable demands, fail to recognize hard work, and generally continue the process of making Biglaw one of the worst places for a practicing attorney to work.  

The few who become partners, are even worse.  Since they are elevated to partnership based on how much of their soul time they commit to the firm and their ability to bring in clients.  A few are made partner for their skills as attorneys.  But none are promoted for their ability to manage.  So after years of mismanaging those who work under them, they are reworded by being made partner.  Why would they ever change?

Besides making our lives miserable, this mismanagement wastes an enormous amount of time and resources, which is ultimately billed to the client.  How clients -- who's General Counsels are often from Biglaw -- put up with such waste while simultaneously facing mounting pressure to cut costs, is beyond me.   

Unbalanced

Balancing our careers and outside lives is easily one of the biggest and most prevailing struggles that face professionals of any age.  It is one of the few things that I have in common with our most senior partners.  Even though I know the work-life balance comes up a lot with lawyers, I’m not egomaniacal enough to think that we have a monopoly.  In fact, what made me decide to write on this topic was a conversation I had with a non-lawyer friend who asked for advice. 

Here’s the situation.  She’s been in a high-stress, extremely busy (24 hour days) job since about June.  She was planning to take a break during the holidays and go visit her family but a couple days ago she received an offer to be immediately placed on another high-pressured project that would last about 3 weeks.  Unlike most of us, she actually has a choice, so rather than just complaining about it and resigning herself to her fate, she had to weigh her options and make an adult decision.  Clearly, she went to the wrong person for advice.

So here’s how we broke it down.  On the positive side, this would be an incredible opportunity and a project she’s wanted for a while.  If she turns it down now, she may have an opportunity to do it in the future, but she may not.  The negatives are that she’s already tired (I could actually hear the weariness in her voice), she was really looking forward to taking a break and she hasn’t seen her family in a long time.  She also has a new project starting in January, which will once again keep her busy until at least next July.

By the time she came to me with the question, as we usually do, she was clearly leaning one way.  She wanted to turn it down.  She wanted to go home and be with family and recharge her batteries (yes, she’s a robot).   But she needed to talk it out because she had this nagging feeling that she was not being faithful to her career.  That she was somehow derailing her chances.  That it was wrong for a young professional to ever choose rest and family (i.e. life) over work.

My question: why do we have to see it as an exchange of one for the other?  Why is time spent on your life necessarily bad for your career?  Clearly, if my friend took every opportunity she was given, she would have a stellar career for about 2 years, at which point she would have a heart-attack or jump off a bridge.  Either way, it wouldn't be good for career anymore.

Countless studies and reports have documented that a good work-life balance benefits both the employee and the employer.  It makes common sense.  The cliché that happy employees are better and more productive employees is a cliché for a reason, it’s true.  Happier employees will be more likely to throw themselves into their projects, work longer hours without diminishing returns and stay with the company who will ultimately benefit from their experience and efforts.  On the flipside, unhappy workers are more likely to procrastinate, waste time, and ultimately leave (as an example, just see Biglaw’s huge turnover rate).

Unfortunately, U.S. companies are far too slow in comprehending this idea. Instead, they've convinced us, and in turn we've convinced ourselves, that going home to see your family over the holidays is a detriment rather than an overall benefit to our professional lives.

Sometimes Questions Are More Important Than Answers

With ever increasing frequency I find myself wondering: "why did I become a lawyer?" I never used to wonder when I was in law school (which I actually enjoyed). But upon entering the profession, the question began to make its appearance. Now, it's a rare week when I don't find myself questioning just how I got here.

The usual reasons never appealed to me. The two that everyone always uses are: (1) to save the world, or (2) to make a ton of money. In the famous words of Montgomery Burns (The Simpsons) "Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she’s losing. Well I say, hard cheese." I'm not saying that there isn't plenty to be fixed, or that law is not a great tool for making some of those fixes (though not always), but I personally never felt the call to sacrifice my life for the greater good. I can only imagine how horrible it must have been for those who went to law school wanting to save the world, only to discover that after three years and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, that they were completely ill-prepared and ill-equipped for the task.

The second reason is even easier to explain. I simply had no idea how much lawyers made when I went to law school. I knew that they were regarded as well off, and long with bankers and doctors were considered one of the more lucrative professions, but as I had no close family members or friends who were lawyers, I simply had no idea how much they made when I went to law school. More than that, perhaps unforgivably, I did very little research on the subject. I'm not sure if the mere plethora of information existed then as it does now (I doubt it), but I can't remember seeking it and definitely didn't find it. So, I was only faced with the reality of how much Biglaw paid around the end of my first semester of law school, when I went to one of the recruitment events and started doing my research. What I found astounded me. There was no way anyone should be making that much money coming out of any school. Well-educated people work all their lives without making that much, and they manage just fine. (Of course, most of Biglaw has decreased that number, but it's still obscene)

So why did I become a lawyer? Simple. I like arguing. I like convincing others that I'm right. I like having a clear winner and a clear loser. I like thinking on my feet. I like feeling like I have accomplished something. I like working with smart people. I like collaborating with others. These are all the things I believed the legal profession would offer. So far, I've mostly been wrong.

Small Opportunities Are Often The Beginning Of Great Enterprises

Welcome!  I haven't written a blog since about 2002, so you'll have to bear with me.  As you probably figured out from the blog name, I'm a lawyer... or an attorney.  Whichever one sounds less horrible.  Anyway, I've been a lawyer for about a year now and work for what has commonly come to be known as Biglaw.  Besides complaining about my life pontificating the finer points of our existence, I'll try to give you a realistic idea of what it's like to be a tiny cog in the Biglaw machine.