Lessons from the NFL Draft: What Should Law Firms Be Thinking and Learning About You?

It’s NFL Draft time, the culmination of months or research and often years of watching top player prospects all in the hopes of making the right decision on draft day and assembling the right athletes for a shot at a championship season.

file-cabinet1-300x299It’s NFL Draft time, the culmination of months of research and often years of watching top player prospects all in the hopes of making the right decision on draft day and assembling the right athletes for a shot at a championship season. I’ve been to the NFL combine for three years now, and I have watched position coaches sweat every detail of every on-field drill. Medical tests last hours, and the constant drone of the MRI trailers in the bowels of Lucas Oil Stadium eventually just blends in with the rest of the buzz of the event.

For all of the hype of the televised on-field workout portions of the Combine, the most important parts of the talent assessment happen far away from the cameras. My company, The Right Profile, is part of this process. Over the course of five long days in February, we administer a 95 question psychometric assessment to nearly every player that will be considered in the NFL Draft. Although I have only been at the Combine for the past three years, one of my business partners, Dr. Robert Troutwine, has been part of this process for nearly thirty years and we use a proprietary assessment called the Troutwine Athletic Profile (“TAP”). The TAP data helps form a predictive profile that we can compare to our database of nearly 20,000 past player assessments and, with some sophisticated analytics, help us to project a prospect’s chances for success in the NFL.

Why does any of this matter to law students, attorneys or law firms? The answer is simple: Few organizations use less discipline, structure and intelligence in their hiring process than law firms. Although roughly 80% of the Fortune 500 and 89% of the Fortune 100 companies use psychometric assessments in their hiring process, law firms are loath to modernize their ways. Less than 5% of the Amlaw 250 currently uses assessments during the hiring process, and none uses instruments that are purpose-built for the legal profession. Even structured interviews – following a script of sorts and understanding how an attorney might fit within a firm and its culture in the same way that position coaches use their informal interviews to talk Xs and Os and ‘put a player on the board’ – take place at just a handful of firms nationwide.

You may say that the extra diligence used by NFL teams is necessary because of the high price of talent in the draft. Even a seventh round draft pick is going to make significantly more than a first-year Biglaw associate. An experienced lateral attorney with a decent book of business, however, may be commanding more than some late round draft picks. The importance of talent at law firms cannot be overstated. It is the “supply” of what is “sold” to meet client demands. A firm’s talent is synonymous with the quality and capabilities of a firm. Firms are not selling a product or service that can be produced by a fungible group of people. High law firm turnover (caused in large part by hiring decisions based upon little more than the law school attended, grades in school, a short unstructured interview process and, in the case of lateral attorneys, an uncorroborated book of business) coupled with high recruiting and replacement costs create a staggering annual cost of more than $25 million for a 400 attorney firm. Expand that out a bit and it costs the legal industry roughly $9.1 BILLION annually for the turnover that it produces in just the 400 largest firms in the United States. To put that in perspective, that turnover cost for those 400 firms is more than double the annual salaries of all NFL players combined.

No organization is ever going to be completely error-free in its hiring, even with incredible amounts of process, diligence, understanding of the intangibles required to excel in a certain job role and information to assess those intangibles. The legal industry has a long way to go though, and the firms that start hiring and developing their talent better than their competitors will quickly see their investments pay big dividends. It’s hard to believe that any law firm doesn’t feel the constant pain and cost of attorney attrition rates that average 17% or more, but maybe it’s lost in the day-to-day grind. Most people know when the quarterback makes a mistake, but few people know when Larry the tax lawyer doesn’t follow through with a client.

Mark Levin is a co-founder of The Right Profile, LLC and a former chief business development officer for two midsize Chicago law firms, where he had an up close view of the attorney hiring and development process. The Right Profile works with numerous NFL, MLB and collegiate athletic programs to help them better evaluate, coach and develop athletes. The Right Profile recently started working with law firms across the country to help them with similar goals – better evaluation of potential hires, development of their attorneys and building championship teams that can win more business.

Sponsored