Why Can't I Tell Who's Good Anymore?

Why is it so much harder to evaluate the quality of your colleagues when you work in-house instead of at a law firm?

When I worked at a law firm, I knew who was good.

As an associate, I knew which litigation partners could think, speak, and write. And I knew which ones could not.

As a partner, I knew which litigation associates had potential, and I knew which ones to excise from my life.

This was easy: There were pools of associates and no specified bosses. This meant that I worked with many different people, up close and personal, on similar tasks. If an associate and I were both thinking about the same issue, I could typically tell whether the associate was behind me, staying even with me, or way ahead of me. I discarded the bad ones, gave the ones with potential another chance or two, and held the good ones close. Over the course of a few years, I typically worked with scores (or more) of associates, which gave me a lot of information about the quality of the firm as a whole.

That’s the law firm tournament: You take many new lawyers, beat the living daylights out of them, expose them to many different issues, tasks, and people, and see who survives. That may not be a pleasant tournament, but it’s the name of the game — and it means that folks who inhabit law firms know which of their colleagues are good.

But now I’ve moved in-house, and I can’t tell who’s good anymore.

There’s no pool of junior people moving from boss to boss over time, so I see — up close and personal — the work of only a very few people. I can tell which of those few people are good, but that’s only a tiny slice of the vast enterprise in which I work. (And, of course, corporations don’t permit bosses to be as ruthless as partners are at law firms. At a firm, if you work with an associate and realize that he’s ineducable, you never give that person any more work. That’s it; problem solved. You didn’t have to fire the associate; you just plucked him out of your life, which fixed the thing that disturbed you. At a corporation, if one of your direct reports appears to be ineducable (happily, this has never happened to me; my folks are great!), there’s no easy answer. You can’t just stop assigning work to the person. Instead, you “coach” and “train” and cajole and beg, and you finally put the person on a performance improvement plan, and then, over the course of another six months to a year, you “manage” him out of the place. So that you can hire a replacement. Who’s also no good.

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Maybe corporations could use tournaments, to let the joints quickly and ruthlessly distinguish the good from the bad and weed out the ones not worth keeping. Or maybe that would make corporations more closely resemble law firms — heaven help us.

But I digress.)

Even within our law department (which consists of a couple hundred lawyers), I see only fleetingly the work of people with other legal specialties. The M&A lawyers do whatever they do; when they discuss a deal with me, the lawyers seem articulate. Maybe the lawyers are good and maybe they’re not; who knows? So, too, for the real estate lawyers, and the folks drafting contracts, and the immigration people, and the ones who inhabit corporate secretarial (whatever that is).

They might be good; they might not be good. I really don’t know.

And that’s just within the law department.

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Is the guy in IT (who spews incomprehensible jargon and creates impenetrable PowerPoint slides) any good? I know that he can’t communicate, but maybe he’s God’s gift to IT. I sure don’t know.

So, too, in finance. I, of course, can’t evaluate the quality of our people in the controller’s office, or tax, or internal audit, or “financial planning and analysis.” Even if I worked with those folks closely, I don’t know enough about their fields to evaluate the quality of their work.

And it’s not just my limited knowledge that keeps me from distinguishing the good folks from the bad. Even the folks in finance can’t evaluate each other: The tasks (and skill sets) of those in “internal audit” and “financial planning and analysis” are entirely different. And those groups work together only sporadically. Someone in IA wouldn’t be able to evaluate someone in FP&A (or vice versa), except to know that any idiot who uses IA and FP&A in a single sentence should promptly get the ax.

My colleagues who formerly worked in other professional services firms — investment banks, management consulting, and the like — tell me that they feel the same way. In their old environments — firms that hired masses of young professionals and exposed them to assorted people and tasks — you had a sense of the quality of your co-workers and your institution as a whole. Once you move to a corporation, you lose that insight. You may hear rumors about who’s a superstar in her field and who isn’t, but you don’t know — deep in your heart — who’s good and who’s bad.

I’m not complaining, mind you. I’m just observing.

And trying to answer a question that’s been nagging at me: Why can’t I tell who’s good anymore?


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.