Biglaw, Boutique Law Firms, Partner Issues, Small Law Firms

Reinventing The Law Business: You Don’t Have To Be Good At Everything, But You Have To Be Great At Something

Take a look around at your partners and your associates; how many are truly “great” at everything?

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This is one of the great insights in the law business. I credit my partner Terri Adler (who heads our real estate group) for this insight and I now follow it religiously in my role as managing partner.

Consider the folly of the normal way of doing business. Typically a law firm decides that in order to be qualified to be a partner, or succeed as an associate, a lawyer must:

  • Be great at written legal work.
  • Be great at oral legal work, including advocacy and negotiations.
  • Be great with clients, building relationships, and similar matters.
  • Be great at marketing and business development.
  • Be great as a teammate for partners.
  • Be great in helping to grow the firm, train associates, and similar matters

Be honest and take a look around at your partners and your associates. How many are truly “great” at all of the above? How many are even “good” at all of the above?

Maybe there is a firm somewhere where all people are great at all of the above items. However, I don’t know any place like that. I have to live in the real world instead of fantasyland.

If the test to be a partner, or even to advance, is one that almost everyone will flunk, maybe this isn’t the best plan of operation. Consider another idea, following my partner Terri’s suggestion:

Instead of trying to force everyone to do all of the above items, look in each person for potential greatness (superstar behavior) in even one of the above criteria and then think long and hard whether this person can help the team.

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In this regard, do you really think that someone who is pretty bad at legal work but has incredible rainmaking talent is useless? I suspect you can’t admit it but I bet there is someone like that in your firm right now. If so, there is likely also a group-think pretense that this person isn’t really that bad at legal work.

In the same vein, consider a brilliant legal thinker and creator of incredible legal work who would rather gnaw his finger off than do any marketing or business development. Is this fellow useless?

I could go on here but you get my point. The great thinker Peter Drucker generally says that as any organization gets bigger, simple mathematical laws will require that the quality of the persons working there moves closer and closer to average. He then says that “Management” – the science he created – consists of getting extraordinary results from ordinary people.

The way to do that in the law business is simple. Instead of trying to shove everyone into a mold that only a few can fit, look for the greatness in the people on your team and then mold the environment around them so that this greatness can flourish. At the same time manage their weaknesses so that at the end of the day each person can spend the maximum amount of time doing what she is great at and the minimum amount of time doing what she is poor at.

I will close with a caution that even though I do think this is exactly the thing to do and the way we run our firm, there is a risk at taking this too far. You don’t want a functional illiterate as a partner in your firm even if he is a great rainmaker – you don’t want a jerk in your firm because she is a great lawyer or a great rainmaker – and so on. There are limits to what you can or should put up with in order to mine for greatness in your team.

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Bruce Stachenfeld is the managing partner of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, which is an approximately 70-lawyer law firm based in midtown Manhattan. The firm is known as “The Pure Play in Real Estate Law” because all of its practice areas are focused around real estate. With over 50 full-time real estate lawyers, the firm is one of the largest real estate law practices in New York City. You can contact Bruce by email at thehedgehoglawyer@gmail.com.

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