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Next Generation Thinking

Lawyers, sustainability and genuine change in Australia's business culture

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A brilliant career?

24 March 2010 | by Nick James Print this article Comments Share this article

What does it mean to be a lawyer in Australia in 2010? Nick James writes

At the centre of a meaningful human life there exists a set of aspirational ideals and values. Our capacity to embody and live up to at least some of these ideals and values is a crucial factor in determining our happiness. Nothing is more vital or satisfying than to live according to one's authentic values. No force has been more powerful in shaping the world, rightly or wrongly, than the pursuit of or conflict over values.

Sitting in an office as a lawyer in Australia in 2010, it can seem almost impossible to see the potential for connection with this dimension of human experience. We live in a time where, apparently, the great human struggles of ideas are behind us. Where we have reached a consensus that our energies are best applied simply towards working to get ahead, to paying our mortgage and struggling to afford a better life for our family. Indeed it can be so challenging and difficult to keep up with the demands of the marketplace that we can be fooled into thinking that, when we have done so successfully, we have achieved all there is to achieve.

That there is a cost to this mistake and that there is a latent desire for authentic purpose in our industry seems to follow from the evidence of widespread dissatisfaction and disengagement among lawyers, particularly in junior ranks. That this desire represents a business opportunity for law firms capable of tapping into and enabling an authentic sense of purpose seems beyond question. Such organisations would be, like the example of Google in the IT industry, potentially capable of harnessing and funnelling the energies of the best minds of their generation.

A sustainable society is a society grounded in the enduring well-being of its individual participants. Ultimately a sustainable law firm must be grounded in the same principle. To be genuinely supportive of the well-being of its participants, a law firm must ultimately connect its lawyers with a sense of purpose in their role as citizens in the outside world. That there is a genuine moral dimension to this challenge is undeniable.

Commercial lawyers in 2010 have a unique, historic opportunity to be useful to society not only by contributing to pro bono or public service work but by contributing to new forms of business. In particular, for example through their participation in two great and very immediate challenges:

1. The process of civilising our workplaces to make them more responsive to our overlooked human needs for balance, purpose and self-determination: And also ensuring that the resulting organisations supplant the previous models because they do a better job of attracting emerging talent and (in a law firm context) servicing clients. New law-firm models can, by demonstrating their success in a hitherto highly conservative industry, begin to lead the way and provide a thriving example to other businesses of the superior effectiveness of new ownership and management structures.

2. The process of nurturing and furthering the interests of other innovative businesses particularly businesses currently struggling to establish the new-energy and low-environmental-impact technologies that are badly needed in order to facilitate an urgent rational societal response to the information presented by the current climate change science. Lawyers have helped make the world safe for large, polluting corporations. Now they need to play an equally important role in paving the way for the next wave of innovative and low-carbon businesses. These new organisations will need their own (vocal) supporters and advisors who are genuinely culturally aligned with their missions.

The reason why these challenges are exciting is that they have the potential to be both personally rewarding and also highly profitable: A disruption of the idea that as a lawyer you need to choose between values and a sacrifice in income. Highlighted by examples like Google, Virgin, InterfaceFlor and Semco, emerging changes to our business culture show, that in the new world there are opportunities to merge values and profit in genuinely new and energising ways.

This is what it could mean to be a lawyer in 2010.

via thenewlawyer.com.au

What do you think?

The current large law firm model is vulnerable to new and better ways to organise lawyers

Here is a link to my latest article in the New Lawyer with the article reproduced below:

"The nature of the top tier law firm has fundamentally shifted in the last three decades, writes Nick James, so isn’t it natural that those most adversely affected would begin to cast around for new alternatives?

OBSERVERS of the legal industry have for a while been describing a new set of behaviours and attitudes displayed by emerging lawyers. Generation Y in particular is described as a challenge and sometimes a problem for the existing law firm model.

The new generations, we are told, are less interested in doing the work required to become a partner and are more interested in:

  • profit share at an earlier age
  •  flexibility
  • being given greater responsibility and client access
  • experiencing an individual connection with their personal values and the subject matter of their work.

While both Gen Y and X are different from the generations before them, it is important to note that many of the ‘changes’ in attitude ascribed to them are in fact natural responses and adjustment to dramatic changes in the large law firm environments they are inheriting.

Today’s mega law firm juggernaut is a relatively recent phenomenon. The very largest law firms in Australia in 1980 had only just exceeded 30 partners. They also operated under a very different set of conditions. In 1979 an article comprehensively surveying the phenomenon of the emergence of the “corporate” law firm in Australia, noted that “one firm has gone so far as to … specify weekly minimum billing targets for its partners and employee solicitors”. The article continued “other law firms have clung longer to a sense of individual autonomy in the partners”.

As law firms have grown since then, in only a few decades, what once was a system of a community of partners bounded by either personal friendship or acquaintance evolved into a highly impersonal/competitive/corporatised and semi-political structure. Its decision making model: Requiring the consensus of a large group of partner-owners who have a window in their career to collect profits before retirement; has (arguably inevitably) driven management decisions which have over time tended to serve the short-term profit interests of the equity partner-owners at the expense of other important interests, including those of the emerging lawyers and even of the firms’ clients.

The fall-out has been a large factor in the crisis in our legal profession of unhappy lawyers (even in partnership ranks) and dissatisfied clients, not to mention a decline in the general level of community respect for the profession. Increasingly higher fees; higher hours worked by lawyers; behavior driven by billing targets; the overheating of the leverage model; the creation of salaried partner/special counsel roles; and the increasing delay of promotion both to and beyond senior associate; are all a result of the intense focus on profits-per-equity-partner as the fundamental goal sitting at the centre of the top tier firm.

Ultimately these sorts of observations don’t mean much in a business sense unless they necessarily lead to two conclusions:

a) Factors inherent in the current large law firm model actually make the model bad at what it must do in the long term in order to remain sustainable and successful; which is to keep its workforce and its clients happy. 

And therefore:

b) The current large law firm model is vulnerable to new structures that can do a better job of giving lawyers a better place to work and clients better service and value while being able to accommodate the scale of needs of modern globalised corporations.

The structure which will win in the long term will need more than the simple advantages of incumbency which make the modern top tier law firms appear invincible at this point in time. Any new structure must, to be successful, rebalance the needs of lawyers for conditions which were once an embedded part of their working life as well as provide a dynamic engine capable of driving the growth of the business. How this is to be done is the task for the next generation of lawyers; those who have inherited a large law firm model which they can now plainly see is flawed and requires rethinking. The urgency of this task is heightened as they increasingly realise they themselves are among the primary victims of its basic dynamic and the cost to their lives as well as their professional enjoyment is too great to continue working within the existing model.

It is important to remember, that emerging alternative visions for the future for top tier practice, like the aspirations of the new generation of lawyers, are not a radical departure from the history of the legal profession. It is instead the overheated, current big firm model which is the aberration. It seems arguable that ‘new’ visions for the practice of law in fact represent a continuation of the sorts of things we have always wanted from our workplaces and which are only resurfacing now because they have been left behind for a while too long."