In-House Counsel

The Road Not Taken: If I Wanted Management Skills, I Wouldn't Have Gone to Law School

Law firms present a management vacuum. Learn to fill that vacuum on your own.

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If you’re in law school now, congratulations, you already know you are “less able” than those of us who graduated when you were a wee Pokemon champion, at least according to Erica Moeser of the NCBE. 

If you are one of the fewer recent law school graduates who passes the bar and becomes a lawyer, don’t celebrate yet. You still have lots to learn about the profession and how to be a functional human being after you get screamed at by a partner for using a semi-colon instead of the partner’s preferred punctuation mark: the colon. In fact, when it comes to management skills, you aren’t that far behind us old folks. Turns out, for all that time we spend in law school and fulfilling continuing legal education requirements, basic management skills are not part of the legal education curriculum. They aren’t, but they should be.

It doesn’t matter if the management you receive will be bad or merely non-existent. In either case, they take you to the same place. In school, you got a syllabus. You received grades. You had a basic level of management that let you know what was expected of you and your performance meeting those expectations. Many businesses incorporate a formal orientation and integration period for new employees. At law firms, you will be lucky if you receive any orientation or formal training (unless you count time as a summer associate as your orientation). I don’t have any statistics to support this statement, but I believe most lawyers were trained in a sink-or-swim environment and that is how they manage and train their employees today. If they survived it, you should too.

As a lawyer, you probably will not receive immediate feedback unless it is negative feedback (like, “fix this” or “this wasn’t what I asked for”), and that’s if you’re lucky. If you are unlucky, you won’t even receive negative feedback; you just won’t get any more assignments.

How does one manage bad management? This is where soft skills are important. If you are accustomed to always being a star, whether from schools or prior jobs, the arbitrary yardstick of actual legal practice can be confusing. You have to learn how to read other people, the atmosphere of your workplace, and adapt quickly to the expectations. If you have given a supervisor a document that would have certainly garnered an “A” in law school (or praise at a different firm), and that supervisor deems the work product unworthy, for any reason (including if the supervisor failed to give thorough instructions or answer your questions while you were drafting the work product), that news will travel quickly. You have to begin damage control immediately. You do not have the luxury of being indignant at the injustice or nursing hurt feelings. Because there is a management vacuum, you have to step up and manage yourself and those around you. You have to take the emotional hit and get right back up and create a non-emotional opportunity to rectify whatever wrongdoing the supervisor has declared you guilty of.

Law is a tough industry and is only getting tougher. When young lawyers begin practicing, they face a ferocious culture not just against their adversaries but also within their own teams. The internal competition between colleagues can turn toxic quickly without strong leadership. Unfortunately, lawyers are not given the management and leadership skills necessary to run a team successfully.

Your career is your own. Nobody is going to help you with it. Informal mentors can only do so much. Learn to manage your career, and more than that, learn to manage yourself in times of stress, competition, or adversity.

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Law schools may not teach management skills as part of the required curriculum, but you don’t have to be in a classroom to learn how to be a better manager. We’ll talk more about management for lawyers next week.

Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at C.harrisonforst@gmail.com.

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