Boutique Law Firms, Small Law Firms

Reinventing The Law Business: How to Train Super Associates (Part II)

Law firms that make training a critical component of their DNA will do much better than those that do not.

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In my last article, I wondered how we train amazing associates without being mean and nasty, lazy, incompetent, or other negative attributes. To figure this out as best as possible, I solicited views from my entire firm, including associates at all levels and partners at all levels and I give them the credit for the insights in this article. These are my conclusions:

First – I am very confident that there is no one-size-fits-all game plan that definitely works. Each teacher and each student is different. Some people thrive in sink-or-swim environments and others just sink. Some teachers naturally nurture and guide and some just try to get good legal work produced and the associates learn by watching and being in the trenches. Probably the best training for an associate is to be paired with a hodgepodge of different partners over time with different styles and goals and hopefully with different types of matters. This promotes flexible and creative thinking and also teaches the fact that, just like each partner may be different in training demands, each client may also have different requirements in how it desires to be serviced.

To this end there are all sorts of different concepts we have worked with at Duval & Stachenfeld. This has included mentoring – apprenticeships – DSU (i.e., Duval & Stachenfeld University) classes, which are mostly interactive in nature – learning through work on deals and litigation matters – so-called “inconvenient training” (where associates are deliberately not given the same thing to do again and again, but instead are spread out over different types of matters, in order to promote what we call “intellectual fearlessness”) – and quite a few other ideas.

Second – gratuitous abuse and inducement of fear can have an immediate positive and accelerated learning effect, which of course is true because fear is a great motivator. However, it is not a long-term solution. People who are abused will perhaps put up with it for a while (because they are learning); however, they will at some point take the weapons they have been trained to use and turn them on their trainers. In the army this might result in someone being “fragged”; however, in the legal world this would mean that the highly trained associates will take the training, quit and give the benefit of their training to another (competing) law firm or, worse yet, try to take the client along as well.

Third – embellishing on the foregoing point, gratuitous abuse brings down the harmony, integrity and honor of the institution in which it is permitted to flourish. Not only is the abused associate unhappy and miserable (or even in therapy), the rest of the organization is brought down too, since everyone realizes that this is the way things are expected to be and a negative cycle ensues. I have seen examples where businesses can succeed economically with such a culture in some perverse and strange way – i.e. nasty people are nasty to each other and somehow the company succeeds through mutually reinforced paranoia – however I don’t advocate it as a strategy. I also think that abusive and negative training was possibly industry-standard about twenty years ago – partners were just mean to associates as a matter of course (maybe because that is how they were trained, and patterns tend to repeat).

Fourth – nurturing, reinforcement of good behavior, constructive criticism, respectful behavior and other positive attributes of training can certainly create a first class lawyer; however, it must be coupled with a demand for excellence. Pure nurturing can easily turn into mollycoddling or the overlooking of mistakes and poor work quality. And that can be disastrous for the associate being trained, as well as the firm in which the associate is being trained.

Fifth – good training will at some point (either early or not so early) involve putting people in over their heads. This should not be done to be mean-spirited, but it is just part of necessary training. A great lawyer should not always “ask her supervisor for the answer” but at some point needs to learn how to figure things out independently. Indeed, great lawyers are called on to do deals and handle litigation matters that no one else has ever done before. By its nature, this type of lawyer has to be trained on how to think as well as how to execute what they are told.

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Sixth – I believe that the highest level training that will work best for the most people and the most situations, is a combination of caring and insistence on high-quality performance. We have all seen this with great coaches. The great coach pushes his team to the absolute limit – and even beyond that – and the team members give their all for this coach. However, at the same time, the team members know that the coach loves them and that the coach would cut off his right arm for each of the people he is training. The coach has the team members’ backs and the team members give their highest effort. Somehow great institutions in the legal world are able to replicate this. This could be within an individual one-on-one mentor/mentee situation, within a group situation or within an entire law firm.

Seventh – I think there is still a necessity that at some point along the way, the supervisor make sure that the associate learns how to do excellent legal work, including drafting and other accoutrements of high-quality lawyering. Hopefully frequently – the partner will “sit down with the associate” and give specific guidance on the nuts and bolts of what it takes to produce high-quality legal work. Some of the partners I worked for over the years would do this. We would sit down and “work through” the documents to achieve perfection. I learned a great deal from this and many of my partners, whom I surveyed for this article, reported having this exact experience. I think it is necessary in a classic master/apprentice setting.

Eighth – training is not all about the trainer. It is about the trainee too. I succeeded despite my bosses probably because I was absolutely insistent on getting trained and knowledgeable. Nothing was going to stop me. Somehow this two-way street has to be acknowledged. As my boxing trainer told me once, “the trainer can’t want it more than the fighter.” As an aside, there is an amazing story by Isaac Asimov, a famous science fiction writer, called “Profession” that really exemplifies this.

Turning to our firm for a moment, I note that our mission is a simple one: “Attract, Train and Retain Talent.” For a while, when we were too busy or too distracted, we neglected the “training” component, with predictable results, i.e., the associates weren’t trained that well and the partners basically had to do all the work. For the past four-ish years training has become front and center as a major and huge initiative and at this point I believe we are second to none in our training programs. Now I am proud to say our associates are awesome. They do great work and clients love working with them. The partners still work hard here, but they have great associate support.

Also, I take a moment to note another point about D&S. If you read my prior article you will see that I was trained in a rough and unpleasant manner. Most of the time it made me miserable. When I formed D&S my primary goal was to NOT do that. I never wanted my name on the door of a place where people in charge abused those not in charge. I am saying this here as I didn’t want an implication from my prior article that because I was trained in this manner, and somehow I succeeded with it (or maybe despite it), I was advocating such training.

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Finally, I conclude with an admonition to all of us lawyers and law firms, which is this: whether we lawyers like it or not, clients will simply not tolerate substandard service or work product. They will feel absolutely free to go elsewhere if they are not serviced by superbly trained associates and partners. There is no choice here. Law firms that devote themselves to training superstar lawyers – however they do it – will in the long run outperform law firms that neglect this.

In my view, training has to be an important initiative of a successful law firm; however, the problem is that in some law firms the partners are not compensated or rewarded for training people so, of course, they don’t devote much time or effort to it. And in some other law firms there is an expectation that the associates will leave within a few years so, again, there is no real point in training them. Of course other law firms really put their heart and soul into training their people, with great results. I do believe that over time the law firms that make training a critical component of their DNA will do much better than those that do not.

Earlier: Reinventing the Law Business: How to Train Associates — 2 Missing Ingredients

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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