Reinventing The Law Business: How To Train Associates

Managing partner Bruce Stachenfeld breaks down the 4 categories of training and how each one should be done.

Associate training is SO important. It is SO important. It is SO important. I will start with a famous quote from McKinsey here. When asked how fast his firm would grow, the then-managing partner of McKinsey answered, “We will grow as fast as we can train our talent.”

Some firms completely recognize this, and some put it to the side. I am not going to go into the reasons it is important. But I will say that it is my guess (without researching) that firms that don’t believe in associate training and do not make it an absolutely critical initiative are more likely to be firms that churn associates out the door over time and think of them as “fungible billing units.” On the other hand, firms that really believe in developing their talent are ones that want to create super-lawyers who will be with the firm for the long-term and become a deep part of the culture, to the benefit of both the lawyer and the firm. But that is not what I am writing about here. In this article I am writing about “how” I think a firm “should” train associates.

I think training should be broken into the following categories:

Training on the culture and expectations of the firm: People are not widgets and organizations are not things. A great law firm is more than a collection of billing units in a profitable machine. It is – hopefully – a collection of lawyers that are knitted together with a common purpose and, almost certainly, that purpose did not evolve overnight. Sometimes a culture is forged through many years or through very rough times or other permutations. The first thing a new lawyer should be taught is the firm’s history – where the firm came from and its reason for existing. It is then easy to teach the values and culture, because almost certainly the firm’s values and culture evolved through the firm’s history and reason for being. I think this is extremely important because people who join a new company want to be part of something and the first step is letting them know what they are a part of. If the firm is one that inspires people to achieve great things, go the extra mile for clients, and things like that, this is the chance to let the new lawyers know of these expectations.

Training on how to do legal work: Actually this is the easiest to teach, because it is what the new lawyers expect to learn and what everyone else expects to teach. Also, there are so many ways to teach it, including classes given by partners, CLE, PLI, learning on the job, mentor/mentee, apprentice program, and a bunch more options. At our firm, after some trial and error, we concluded that different things work better for different people, so we provide variances of all of these training ideas. The goal for all of these is of course teaching the new lawyer how to become a great lawyer.

As an aside, I strongly believe in what we call “inconvenient training,” by which I mean avoiding pigeonholing new lawyers into a specialty area too soon. Pigeonholing “feels good” to the associate (who develops competency very quickly) – to the partner (who gets to dump the work on a trained associate) – and to the client (who reaps the benefit of lower cost); however, this can be disastrous for the associate for two reasons. The first, obvious reason is that at some point the area in which the associate has been trained may become unpopular or unneeded and the associate will become effectively useless. This is an awful thing when it happens. But the second reason is even worse, and more subtle, and this is the effect that early pigeonholing has on the associate’s brain. People who do the same thing over and over don’t realize it but their brains become unable to deal with new and difficult projects. This is because the associate has been in a warm comfort zone where she knows exactly what to do in a narrow area. There is little reason to think outside the box. The “inconvenient training,” which requires the associate to try her hand at just about everything that comes in the door, is very rough on everyone (especially the associate, who feels constantly underwater, besieged, inadequate, terrified and other unpleasant emotions). However, what happens after about a year or so is that the associate’s brain becomes battle-hardened and forged into what we all want; namely, an attorney who, when presented with something new and different, responds something like: “Never seen it before but, no worries, I’ll figure it out.” I call this being intellectually fearless.

Training on how to WOW clients: There are some lawyers who do a perfectly good job and the client is perfectly happy. And then there are some lawyers who just leave the client in a state of WOW. These latter lawyers are the ones who set the legal world on fire. They are the ones the clients keep coming back for, the ones who build the relationships, the ones that the clients, and the firms at which they work, simply can’t do without. This skill should absolutely be taught. I admit I don’t really have a magic formula for how to teach it except to say that the first step is to recognize the critical importance of the WOW factor; the second step is to identify those who have it; the third step is for those who have it to figure out exactly what it is, since it is often so subtle in nature; and the fourth step is for those who have this skill to teach it to the new associates.

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Training on Marketing and Relationship Building: I don’t consider marketing to be something associates stay out of and only partners do. I think it is an essential part of any lawyer’s job, so I strongly advocate starting to train associates on marketing and relationship building from the day they arrive. It seems the height of folly to not train an associate on these critical concepts and then when the associate becomes a partner tell her, “Okay, now go and bring in some clients.” At that point, she won’t know the first thing about how to do it. At our firm, as soon as associates arrive we start teaching them marketing skills, including how to source client relationships, how to build the relationships, how to prepare for a pitch, how to handle oneself at a pitch and, of greatest importance, how to build their careers so that they have something worthwhile to give to a client in the first place. We have found that newly minted lawyers, especially the ones in law school, find this of enormous value. Many of them know how important “getting clients” will be to their careers, and they see no reason to wait eight or nine or ten years to acquire these skills. By the way, I teach this personally at my firm, and I am consistently amazed at how fast the new lawyers pick up these skills and how effective they are with clients with just a modicum of training.

So there you have it. That is what I think is important. I will answer one more question here, and that is the question as to who should teach? The answer is everyone – no exceptions. This “especially” includes senior partners – and managing partners – who should be leading by example. There are no two ways about this. Your law firm either is really committed to training its talent or it is not. If it is, then this cannot just be delegated to the least useful lawyer or lawyers who are out to pasture. It has to be clear that the most senior lawyers in the firm support this one hundred percent. If not, everyone will very fast recognize that it is not considered a priority and so training will be generally ignored by everyone, and the firm and its attorneys will both suffer and miss out on great opportunities.

By the way, we have formalized these processes at my firm into DSU (Duval & Stachenfeld University). We used to be quite poor at training and then about five years ago realized how much we were messing up. Now it is part of our core mission: “to attract, train and retain talent.” We have about 50 classes per year, we have two of our partners as deans, and about 20 partners, including yours truly, teach the classes. As I get older, I mean more senior, this will be one of the last things I will give up.


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 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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