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Reinventing The Law Business: Training Tragedies – How NOT To Be Trained As A Lawyer!

If you're an associate and your law firm isn't training you in sales and marketing, your career is likely at severe risk.

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Bruce Stachenfeld

Bruce Stachenfeld

When you start your career, you are told you have to do great legal work, or words to that effect. This means consistent delivery to your supervisors of the following (which I will refer to as “Technical Legal Skills”):

  • No typos in documentation
  • Make coherent arguments in briefs, memoranda, and other litigation documents
  • Do excellent drafting where there is a coherent flow of subject matter, consistent defined terms, and documents that mesh correctly with each other
  • Work super-hard – sometimes into the late evening, weekends, etc.
  • Develop client management skills, including how to handle concerns, keep clients happy,
  • Move each transaction along effectively and efficiently
  • Be prepared to argue a motion, take a deposition, or even run a trial
  • And much more

At very few places does the managing partner call you into her office on your first day of work and say to you:

“Toby – as you know, we have a strict rule here. If you haven’t brought a client into the office within your first twelve months at the firm, then no matter how well you have done at developing Technical Legal Skills, we will still have to terminate your employment. Of course, I hope that won’t happen. Good luck Toby!  We are here to help if you need us…..”

Boy that sounds harsh – and it is harsh – and I am confident that it is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. But think for a moment what happens if the managing partner doesn’t do that?

One of the most critical issues in any culture is how people “define their jobs.” What does “doing a good job” mean?  This (little) issue is overlooked virtually all the time, but hardly anything is more important, especially at the outset of a career.

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Consider how the young associate I referred to above, Toby, starts his career. He is hardworking – maybe even super-hardworking. He probably was the star of some sports team, or first violinist in his high school orchestra, or can be credited with some other over-achievement. And why is that?  Because he has programmed himself from early childhood to “do a good job” and if possible “do a great job” at whatever he sets his mind to. It is in his DNA, and this is a good – great – thing to have in an employee, and in a person at well. It means your employee will exercise great efforts to do a good/great job.

But then, for a moment, go back and examine what the definition of a “good job” is so early in Toby’s career. The definition is to “do a good job” at developing Technical Legal Skills.

At the start of a legal career, a “good job” typically does not take into consideration developing skills in sales, marketing, client development, and similar items (which I will refer to as “Sales/Marketing Skills”). Yet – if you think about it – once Toby hits somewhere between fifth to eighth year out of school, the Technical Legal Skills are largely presumed or even taken for granted, and gradually Sales/Marketing Skills become the primary consideration for advancement.

And here is the conundrum. Toby has defined a good job as developing Technical Legal Skills when – with the flip of a switch – at a certain point in his career this means very little, and Sales/Marketing Skills assume primary importance. But Toby not only is not trained for this, but, worse yet, simply does not consider Sales/Marketing Skills to be a part of his job definition.

Despite management – and Toby doing everything right – the training is not only wrong, but terribly wrong. Toby is crippled not only by being untrained but, worse yet, has his head filled with the wrong definition of what he is “supposed to do”. You can fix the training problem relatively easily – you just train Toby in Sales/Marketing Skills – but how do you untrain Toby’s mind, which has been effectively warped by the feeling of what is “really” important. It is awfully hard to do.

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So – no – I don’t advocate the managing partner telling Toby he has twelve months to land a client or he will be fired. But if the managing partner did that it would be an awfully good thing for Toby’s career, wouldn’t it?

Ultimately, if you are an associate and your law firm isn’t training the heck out of you in sales and marketing generally from the start of your career, then your firm is letting you down in a major way. If this is the case you have to train yourself in sales and marketing, push your firm or its partners to do so, or go to a place where you will get this training. Otherwise your career is likely at severe risk.

Bruce Stachenfeld is the managing partner of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, 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 more than 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. Bruce also writes The Real Estate Philosopher™, which contains applications of Bruce’s eclectic, insightful, and outside-the-box thinking to the real estate world. If you would like to read previous articles or subscribe, please click here.

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