Thought leader

By Nick Jarrett-Kerr, Kerma Partners

Throughout the world, law firms are struggling to keep their lawyers at happy and motivated levels. The globally linked problem of recruitment and retention demonstrates the symptoms of a greater malaise of discontent within the profession. It is also clear that throwing money at young lawyers does not make the problem go away – Maslow may have proposed his ‘hierarchy of needs’ more than sixty years ago, but there is something in his theory which suggests that once the need for financial security is met, a person naturally seeks other motivations and inspirations.

The law-firm economic model, with its concentration on leverage, is part of the underlying problem of discontent. Under the standard model, non-partners become the economic engine room while partners focus on managing people, relationships and business development. Of course, there are many lawyers who just love sitting in an office doing legal work from dawn until dusk, particularly if the work is stimulating and intellectually demanding. But the brutal truth is that for many lawyers, legal work is steadily becoming more and more commoditised in many areas, and can become boring and monotonous in the absence of other activities. One partner once told me that he saw each engagement falling into three distinct phases – winning the work, doing the work and invoicing the work – and that he enjoyed only the first and third links of this chain. In short, doing the work bored him. Here’s the point. If law firms involve more of their people in winning the work, then doing the work becomes more palatable even to the most jaded of professional.

There is no one solution to the retention problem in law firms. However, there are two key ways in which they can instill greater job satisfaction and loyalty among both partners and non-partners.

First, the more established firms start to involve their junior fee earners in marketing and business development, the more content and motivated those fee earners will be. In the same way, early involvement in client-relationship management is important. An old sales slogan comes to mind. ‘People like people like them’. Law firms have found time and again that a client contact in their early 30’s, for example, will generally respond better to a lawyer of their own age than to a senior partner in their late 40’s.

Second, it is clear that lawyers respond best if they are involved in all aspects of their client engagements rather than orientated just to the performance of discrete tasks within the matter. Hence, holistic team and people management tends to be more efficient and satisfying than old-style hierarchical task delegation.