'Accommodation Practices' At Law Firms Versus Career Paths In-House

What is an "accommodation practice," and what does being in one mean for your career prospects? In-house columnist Mark Herrmann explains.

I have described before the challenge of creating career paths for in-house lawyers at many corporations. (But that was nearly four years ago; perhaps you’d forgotten?)

At law firms, opportunities for lawyers are seemingly limitless: If you work hard, do great work, and attract clients, the partnership will (at least theoretically) make room for you. Once in the partnership, you can work harder, do greater work, attract more clients, and cause the partnership pie to expand. You’ll accumulate fame and fortune and retire a rich and happy soul.

At corporations, the situation is trickier. Each in-house supervising lawyer probably has six to eight other lawyers reporting to the supervisor. If the boss quits, is fired, retires, or dies, then the boss’s job opens up and one of the eight underlings has a chance at promotion. If the boss doesn’t depart, then the corporation must be pretty clever to create career paths and other opportunities for in-house lawyers.

I mentioned this to another in-house lawyer recently, and he (or she, but I’ll use the masculine) surprised me: “Are you kidding? I didn’t have a career path at my law firm; that’s why I left. Now that I’m in-house, I’ve seen my opportunities expand.”

Whoa, I thought! This is intriguing. Better yet, this may be a blog post waiting to happen! “How,” I asked, “could you not see a career path when you were a lawyer working at a law firm?”

And then I learned about my biases, ingrained because I’ve lived the life I lived.

I spent 25 years (five at a small firm in San Francisco, and then 20 in the Cleveland and Chicago offices of one of the world’s largest firms) litigating at firms that emphasized litigation. My perspective of career paths at those two firms was exactly correct: At firms that emphasize litigation, brilliant, hard-working, client-developing litigators have unlimited career paths. There will always be room in the partnership for new lawyers who raise the average (1) IQ, (2) number of hours worked, and (3) profit per existing partner. The sky’s the limit for litigators at litigation firms.

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But that was where my narrow experience blind-sided me: There are not necessarily limitless opportunities for non-litigators at litigation shops. My in-house lunch companion told me, for example, that he had been an executive compensation associate at a typical big law firm. Litigators and corporate lawyers at his firm had obvious career paths, but not the executive compensation folks. “My firm had one — income — partner who specialized in executive comp. That partner knew that he would never be made an equity partner. He wasn’t bringing in much business, and it was pretty unlikely that any other executive comp lawyer would bring in enough business to move the needle. We had a very few associates supporting the one executive comp partner. When the one partner retired, the firm would have to replace him with a new executive comp income partner. But the firm was never going to have two executive comp partners or even one in the equity ranks. For the executive comp associates, there was no career path at my big law firm.”

Right!

I didn’t consider this point because I never experienced it (and I’m a fool). On reflection, it seems both self-evident and something that many recent law school graduates (and junior associates) probably overlook.

Many law firms have so-called “accommodation practices” — practices that don’t generate much money, but the firm tolerates to avoid having to refer big clients out to other firms for specialized services. Your big firm probably does not have a trust and estate practice any more. But it likely had one for decades, as an “accommodation practice.” CEOs need wills. When the CEO asked the big-shot corporate partner at your firm to recommend a lawyer to write a will, the big-shot didn’t want to refer the client out to another firm. So your big firm had one or two folks hanging around drafting wills for senior people at major corporate clients. No one expected the T&E lawyers to attract profitable business; the firm tolerated the practice because it was viewed as a necessary accommodation for the rest of the firm.

(I said that your big firm probably no longer has a T&E department. That’s because — ten or fifteen years ago, as the profession of law grew increasing business-like — your firm decided that the T&E lawyers couldn’t carry the freight. The T&E lawyers didn’t bring in profitable business, couldn’t charge rates comparable to those charged by the other practices, and weren’t worth the effort. The T&E lawyers either realized — or were told — that the firm really didn’t care to keep them around, and the T&E practice moved on. Firms will “accommodate” only so much — and it’s less and less with each passing year.)

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“Accommodation practices” weren’t limited to T&E. At some firms, executive comp may be an accommodation practice. The very few big firms that still practice family law are often doing so as an accommodation (to the CEOs who get divorced). Likewise for immigration practices: Corporations occasionally need to move employees between countries. Rather than refer that business out, some big firms historically had an immigration lawyer or two on the payroll. The defense of individual wrongful discharge cases has become the same at some firms: Big litigation shops are delighted to defend your wage-and-hour class actions, but one-off wrongful discharge cases? Only because there’s no choice; the firm feels compelled to accommodate the infrequent demand.

As I (foolishly) realized just last month, junior lawyers should think about this as they decide where to work and what practice to pursue. If you want to draft wills for a living — able to work 9 to 5, little stress, working with individual clients, and earning a decent wage — have at it. But think hard about whether you want to write wills at a thousand-lawyer firm that has only one income partner heading up a team of three lawyers who write wills. That may well be an accommodation practice, and you may not be able to find a career path — even as a lawyer working at a law firm.

As for my in-house executive comp buddy? He found the career path he was after. He did executive comp in-house, and then picked up other aspects of employment law, and then became general counsel of a business unit, and was thus on his way to the career he wanted.

But only after recovering from what he perceived as an early misstep: Working as an associate in an accommodation practice at a big firm.


Mark Herrmann is the Chief Counsel – Litigation and Global Chief Compliance Officer at Aon, the world’s leading provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, and human capital and management consulting. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.