This is for the young folks looking for jobs in private practice early in their careers. Here is what matters and what does not matter so much. Ignore this at your own peril (and I am sure that a great many of you will both ignore it and eventually be in peril.)
I speak to many lawyers who strike out on their own soon after being called to the Bar. They have various reasons for doing this. Some cannot obtain positions at established firms. Others get positions that come with no mentoring and abominable working conditions and decide that they would be better off on their own. And then there are those who are entrepreneurial by nature, distrusting of established law firms (often for good reason) and eager to build something for themselves.
One of the many nice things about being retired is that I feel free to write about topics that I would not have had the guts to speak up about back in the day. So, here we go again!
The year was 1995. It was one of my first forays into law firm management. I helped develop our firm’s first ‘maternity leave’ top-up policy and presented it at a partners meeting. We were getting a bit of buy-in, but that ground to a halt when one of our partners said, “let me get this straight. The people who come to work every day are not earning nearly enough (author’s note- we were never earning ‘nearly enough’) and you want us to earn even less so that we can subsidize people who are not coming to work at all? Seriously? You are all f**king crazy!”
The other day I heard a story about a furniture store in Toronto that was known to cater to the wealthy. The owner purchased an unusual item in Vietnam for twenty dollars. He brought it back to his store and promoted it as a one-of-a-kind item from an exotic destination. He sold it to someone with more money than brains for $10,000. The person who told me the story swears that she has fifth-hand knowledge of the incident and that it is absolutely true. Having shopped in that store once, I do not doubt it.
Welcome to the concept of value billing. Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them.
There once was a law firm which marketed itself as being a team of lawyers with deep expertise in different areas of the law who worked together seamlessly to deliver the best possible outcomes for the clients. Let’s call them “Super Team Lawyers.”
Super Team compensated its lawyers for bringing in business by awarding origination credits to the lawyer who introduced the client or referral source to the firm and paying them a percentage of their originating credits.
Back when I practiced law, it had been drummed into my head that every mistake was a potential catastrophe and a source of shame. I was a perfectionist and proud of it. I was also a little bit intense and not particularly healthy. I taught my Associates and Law Clerks to be just like me!
Back in the day, I would have an Associate join a client meeting with instructions to speak up if they thought I was getting something wrong. Of course, they would only do so occasionally because I was not wrong all that often. When they did, if their point was not so great, I would respectfully acknowledge it and move on, but if it was valuable, I would say so and say to the client something like, “that’s why I had her sit in.”
“Fools believe silence is a void needing to be filled; the wise understand there’s no such thing as silence.”
Michael J. Sullivan, Age of Myth
Client: Why do I want to pay for two lawyers to be in this meeting?
“This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Hamlet – William Shakespeare.
I drove into the Big City the other day and had brunch with an old friend who I will call Sandy, because that is her name.
Now that I have been retired for a few years, I sometimes wonder whether my experience as to how law firms work remains valid. Also, since I spent my days with medium-sized firms and not in Big Law, I occasionally worry that my view of what goes on in Big Law is not correct.
But then I speak to lawyers working in Big Law and they invariably confirm that Big Law is exactly what I always thought it was (which is just Medium Law on steroids, with worse side effects), and nothing has changed, and likely never will.