Back in the days when everything seemed to be a binary choice, I was a young man who saw many things in black and white.
At the time, I would classify law firms as being one of two types.
Type One were “real” partnerships, where people were building a firm with a common culture and striving for the enterprise to be successful. At those firms, partners thought about the success of the firm first, and trusted that the rising tide would lift all boats.
Type Two were collections of sole practitioners operating under a common banner, each putting their own success ahead of the firm at every opportunity.
My many years in the legal profession have taught me that few choices are really binary. When it comes to law firms, they actually all fall between the two types which I have described. Some lean heavily toward Type One, and others more resemble Type Two, but they are all somewhere on the continuum.
I really don’t have a problem with these two extremes, or with firms which fall in the middle. The problems arise where:
- a firm professes to be one thing, when it is really something else; or
- some of the partners are in one place on the continuum, and some of the partners are at another; or
- a revolutionary enters the partnership and sets about to move the firm closer to one extreme or the other.
In all of these cases, tensions arise, and in some cases havoc ensues.
Take, for example, a firm which started off as a strong Type One firm with everybody pulling in the same direction, and over time morphed closer to being a Type Two firm.
Some of the old-style partners continued to put the firm first at every opportunity, frequently making important, but uncompensated, contributions toward building the firm brand and maintaining a supportive and empathetic culture.
Other partners discounted these contributions and advocated an approach which strongly rewarded the billing and client origination superstars.
Tensions built. There was some selfish behaviour. People left. The firm culture became more monolithic (which is a good thing in some ways and a bad thing in others).
Whether the changes were for the good or for the bad is not relevant to my point, which I am finally going to get to.
My point is that partners who thought that they were in one type of organization, found out that the organization was something different. Some of them toiled on in an uncomfortable situation, which contributed to mental health issues. Others found it necessary to leave, which created an upheaval in their professional and personal lives.
For people who are seeking to join a partnership, it is important that they grasp the importance of firm culture, and understand what is important to them, and whether they will fit in. Most importantly, lawyers have to understand that all firms are not created equally. Quite the contrary, actually.
A version of this article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.