Law Firms: From Small to Nuts

Score one for the little guy: Clients and mainstream media are noticing that mega firms might not just be the cure-all for the legal industry. E.g., Basha Rubin, Big Law, Big Problems: The Bright Future For Small Firms, Forbes.com (July 7, 2014 12:59 pm). Sure, there’s money, prestige, and comfort associated with hiring one: we can afford this, we mean business, I’m toast if we went with the smaller firm and it lost.  But there’s also a benefit to a client for choosing a smaller firm: probably lower fees, possibly more attentive service, fewer headache-inducing conflicts-of-interest issues.

There’s also benefit to the lawyer or support staff who opts for the small firm. Yes, there may well be less money, less prestige, and possibly less glamorous workspace.  But there may well be greater opportunity, more responsibility early on, exciting challenges on a daily basis, and a real sense of contribution to something being built. Is big firm v. small firm really such a tough decision?

—Lori Tripoli

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Where Will Your Job Be in Five Years? Two? Six Months?

The news that Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati is dumping 35 legal secretaries, or “making some adjustments to our existing legal support structure,” is a timely reminder not to get too confident in your own indispensability. Take steps now so that when cuts have to be made, you ‘ll be the cutter, not the cuttee.

Can I blame any firm for cutting back on use of legal secretaries? Not really. Lawyers, even the older ones, are far more fully functional than they once were. If some of them seem incapable of licking an envelope, I’m sure it’s a task they’re capable of learning. If they can’t, well, they can always email.

Yet, still, aim not to be one of those cut in your own office. If I were at Wilson Sonsini in any role, I’d take a look around at who was going and who was staying. What were the differences between the two groups? For whom did they work? How different were their personalities? Their skill sets? Their work habits? Their ages? Their ambition levels? Their kindnesses?

It’s not enough to do your job well. You should probably know (and be doing) portions of others’ jobs, too. Not in my position description doesn’t really cut it in these times of economic strife and, as the good folks at Wilson Sonsini put it, “increased operational efficiencies.” Keep yourself current. Pay attention to firm politics. Try to work with someone whose staff is always on the right side of any cost cutting. Know where else in the legal market you could possibly turn, and develop the skills you’ll need to be competitive there. Find an opportunity in a layoff, even if you are safe in this go-round.

—Lori Tripoli

The Dangers of One-Off 'Annual' Law Firm Reports

This week, I am liking law firm annual reports. More specific than firm brochures, these curated compilations of yearly accomplishments can provide some insight into a firm’s priorities, or at least into who is winning the battle for promotion.

Could these nice tomes be far more specific and provide office-to-office comparisons? Yes. Might losses or poor choices be chronicled? Absolutely. What I pay attention to is what’s not mentioned in the annual report. Or who is not mentioned. Which practice groups are given scant attention?

Then, too, firms that have issued annual reports once but haven’t issued subsequent ones make me wonder, What has changed? What is going wrong?

One report I like both for its relative financial candor and for its boldness in making yearly annual reports easily accessible is that of Clifford Chance. Reports from 2008 to 2012 are easily viewed.

Duane Morris features an “Annual Report” button on its home page, but when I clicked it, the most recent report I was able to access was issued for the year 2011. We’re a good way through 2013. What did the firm do in 2012?

I wasn’t able to find Nixon Peabody’s annual report on its website without a fair amount of hunting. There was no “annual report” button, and nothing easily identifiable as one came up when I searched the site for it. Ultimately, I googled “Nixon Peabody annual report” and found it posted on the site of a marketing partner. Then I returned to the Nixon Peabody site and found it here. It’s buried in the list of “Additional Brochures” on its Brochures page.  It’s not really identified as an annual report, but it chronicles a lot of accomplishments from 2009. Four years later, I wonder where the update is and why it hasn’t been issued.

A problem with reporting can be that once you’ve started reporting, you can’t stop. It’s got to be an annual occurrence. If you skip a year, or bury the report deep in your website, have you hurt your marketing more than you’ve helped it?

—Lori Tripoli

Who Merits Mention in a Firm’s History?

Law firm histories make clients and lawyers feel good and help preserve institutional memory, but someone needs to determine who will play a starring role in the work.

Firm histories, compiled in self-published or custom-published books, are feel-good ways to inspire both prospective hires as well as current and prospective clients. Knowing of a firm’s longevity and its typically humble roots, about big historical wins, about amazing acts of goodness during troubled times (the Depression, World Wars, the turbulent ‘60s), and about big personalities within the fold can warm anyone to an organization. But why do some firms seem to have difficulty publishing a firm history to commemorate major milestones?

Firms need to realize two things: No one is going to read a firm history cover to cover except—possibly—a suck-up summer associate. These volumes, whether thick or thin, are meant to be flipped through. Formatting and imagery should be attention getting. Publishing an encyclopedic tome is likely to be waste of time and money. Make it of manageable length.

The second point firms need to realize is that not everyone is going to get a starring role. That’s where difficulty sometimes creeps in. Firms agree, the marketers agree, the publicists agree that putting together a firm history would be a great idea underscoring the firm’s historical importance. As institutional memory fades as time wears on, a firm history will commemorate highlights that no current partner actually can recall. The problem comes with whose name will be mentioned first, whose anecdotes make it into the published work, whose practice area will be highlighted, who will be merely a footnote, who won’t be identified at all. All history is revisionist, told typically from the perspective of the winner. Fantastic firm feats will be told from the perspective of the firm, not from that of a losing opponent. There’s nothing wrong with spinning the narrative to emphasize certain contributors. No one wants to read book-length lists of deals and people involved with the transactions.

What some firm leadership is reticent to do, however, is to confront this reality early on. Partners may agree they want the firm to publish a history. What they’ll likely bicker about is how that history will be identified and who will be mentioned and who won’t. Don’t wait until the firm has invested significant time and funds to have a monstrous battle. Manage the process early on.

—Lori Tripoli