Job Searches

Reinventing The Law Business: Where Is The Legal Profession Heading? (Part 1)

Columnist Bruce Stachenfeld identifies different categories of law firms and predicts how they will fare in the future. First up: the brand-name Biglaw firm.

By  
on

What a ridiculous topic. As if I have a crystal ball. But we all have to do our best to predict the future every day in order to run our businesses and our law firms. Here are my thoughts regarding different types of law firms and my subjective views of their prospects of success as the legal world changes. To make my thoughts and predictions more useful, I have also added my two cents as to how useful these different legal models will be for lawyers starting their careers and lawyers growing their careers.

This will necessitate a multi-article series with four separate articles, starting with this one. There are different approaches out there to law firm categorization (such as, for example, Bruce MacEwen’s taxonomy). From my perspective, I see law firms falling into the following groups:

  • Branded Law Firms
  • Super Mega-Big Vereins
  • Pure-Play Law Firms
  • Regional Law Firms
  • Single-City Law Firms
  • Solo Practitioners and Firms with Less Than Ten Lawyers

Branded Law Firms

My thinking is as follows, starting with Branded Law Firms:

As I have written before, the demise of the major branded law firms has been over-heralded and I think is just plain wrong. I think these behemoths are stronger than ever and becoming increasingly well run and — annoyingly for me — much better competition for my firm. For many of these law firms, the Darwinian model they effectively emphasize has the result of producing overall great lawyers who produce high-quality legal work for their clients. There is a reason that major institutions turn to these firms when their business is really on the line.

Having said this, the strength of the firm’s culture and the talents of the firm’s management are going to assert themselves front and center as critical survival issues for even these strongly branded law firms. With the ease with which people can switch jobs and the wealth of information about everything out there, I don’t think even a major law firm will be able to last that long if it doesn’t have a strong and powerful culture and highly skilled and talented management.

Sponsored

I predict that the powerhouse law firms will continue along, for a long time, as industry leaders. The Dewey and Bingham blowups were actually very lucky breaks, not because they removed some competition, but because they reminded management of these top firms how important it is to not just add on piles of additional lawyers without a cultural nexus and, also, most obviously, that poor management can wreck even a law firm with a sterling reputation. When things go bad it is just too easy for everyone to leave, and especially easy for those who are laterals, and not culturally bound, to depart.

My prediction therefore is that the well-run major law firms will be just fine. The ones playing profits-per-partner games and pretending to be top players when they really are not are going to disappear over time, largely because these top-tier-wannabes will essentially become training camps for the more successful top firms that will remain “The Show.”

Following along this thinking, I think the branded law firms will continue to be excellent places for top law students to start their careers. As I have mentioned in other articles, it is critical to make sure that the niche in the firm they join will give them both (i) great training and (ii) necessary industry contacts. If so, there is no better place to start a career (except possibly one that I will get to later). The branded law firm has résumé cachet (which actually rhymes) and permits career mobility, not to mention good compensation during the training. I also don’t think it will matter much to a junior lawyer whether the branded law firm is one of those with staying power or is a top-tier-wannabe.

Branded law firms, if they are well run, will also continue to be great places for powerful and strong lawyers to expand and grow their practices. The combination of a great lawyer with a great reputation, nestled within the walls of a powerful branded law firm, is hard to beat, and hard for a client to negotiate cost with too. Lawyers with strong practices considering joining firms of this nature will have to do careful due diligence to determine if the firm they are joining is truly a branded law firm with staying power or is a top-tier-wannabe. It is certainly not as easy as just seeing which one has the highest profits per partner. Also, and I think this is ridiculously obvious, but despite that obviousness often people are sometimes blind to it — and that is that even a great lawyer with a great reputation considering joining one of these super firms should be very secure that he/she fits within the culture. Because — no — the culture will not change for her/him. If there is not a fit then after a year or so of mutual misery, that great and wonderful lawyer will be leaving one way or another. I’m just sayin’… underestimate the cultural fit at your peril.

The place where branded law firms are (potentially) a complete career disaster is for the mid-level/senior associate hoping to “make partner” or the junior partner finding out that partnership isn’t really much more than glorified associate-ness. Basically, the branded law firm works great for those in a position to harness its resources but can be crippling for those effectively enslaved by it. For these people, my prediction is things will not get better for you and instead will get worse over time as you become in a weaker and weaker position and you are perceived, both within your firm and within your industry, in a subservient capacity. My advice is that unless you really perceive a very strong path to partnership (which is very hard to actually to assess but easy to kid yourself to the positive), you get out as quickly as you can before you are festooned with a wife/husband, kids, and other recurring costs that make job adventures simply too risky.

Sponsored

I will be continuing this discussion in the next article in this four-part series.

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.

Topics

, , , , , ,