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

A couple of months ago I wrote an article entitled How To Train Associates. It got more pageviews than any other article I have written. Apparently this is something people are really focusing on – whether they are trainors or trainees. I thought I had made some great points but I just realized I missed two big things. Let me explain.

In my prior article, I wrote that there are three key ingredients:

1. Learning how to be a great lawyer (through on the job training, etc.) and, especially, teaching the associate to become “intellectually fearless” through a variation of difficult assignments.

2. Learning how to WOW clients, and espousing the view that that is a lot more important than just going through the motions of a “good job.”

3. Learning how to market, which is a critical aspect of a successful lawyer’s career, yet, strangely, it is often not taught at law firms.

And yes these three are critical; however, there are two additional ingredients that are necessary to produce a great lawyer that I omitted in my prior article. They are as follows:

1. The associate has to want to be trained.

2. There has to be cutting-edge work available on which to be trained.

Without these two ingredients, I think there is a major problem.

Let me discuss for a moment how I was trained in the deeps of time. I don’t remember everything as it was 30-plus years ago, but I do remember:

One partner screamed and cursed and yelled at me and threw objects at me. If I made a typo or a mistake there was an explosion. I swear I am not exaggerating even a little bit. In case you are wondering, I didn’t like being screamed, cursed and yelled at (or dodging flying objects). I didn’t like it one bit. Avoiding those results became a goal.

Another partner pretended to be on the phone every time I came to his office to ask for guidance and instruction. I don’t know if I ever spoke to him. Needless to say, as a junior associate it did accelerate my learning curve for obvious reasons (i.e., there is nothing like a panicked feeling that you have to figure it out for yourself to stimulate learning).

Another partner really had no idea what was going on. I am not exaggerating. He had no idea what was happening. As a first-year lawyer I had to coach him, sort of like Tom Cruise in The Firm (although as you can tell from my picture, I am much better-looking).

Another partner would invite me into his office to discuss the deal, but would stop his sentences halfway through. I would come out from his office with a puzzled look on my face. On the first deal he gave me he gave me the name of the client and said I had to buy a condominium for him. I didn’t know what a condominium was – I had never heard the word before. It was a rough day that I still remember.

There were other partners too. Some would sit down with me to go over things. Some wouldn’t. Some seemed to care about me and others did not. Deals were just assigned to associates seemingly at random. It was haphazard.

So how did I get so well-trained? Sorry to be un-humble, but I became a first-class real estate lawyer because I had two things going for me:

First, I wanted to be a great lawyer more than anything in the world. I had an almost insane drive. No matter what roadblocks were put up by the foregoing partners, nothing was going to stop me. I did what I had to do in order to get the job done correctly for the client. For example, I didn’t know what a condominium was at the beginning of that deal I mentioned above; however, by the end (after driving everyone within earshot crazy), a first-class job was done for that client. And after that one traumatic experience, I kind of knew what a real estate deal was and how it generally worked.

Second, I was blessed with incredibly interesting, diverse, and cutting-edge real estate legal work to do. I got to work on everything from acquisitions, to leases, to financings from both the borrower and the lender side, to co-ventures, to mega-deals, to small deals, and pretty much everything else. I am not sure it is impossible to get great training without cutting-edge deal flow, but it is certainly very difficult. There is no substitute for the experience you get when you are handling a major transaction that you have worked on for months, and the whole deal structure changes in the middle of the night before the closing. A mixture of brilliance, experience and adrenaline takes over and you do your best work, sometimes so well that you simply can’t believe you pulled it off.

Now I will mention something that I probably shouldn’t put in an article but I will do it anyway. My wife asked me when we were discussing this, she asked, “Which of the foregoing partners was the most effective in training you?”

I answered without even thinking that there was no question. The guy who screamed and yelled at me was the most effective in training me. It took me a while to even remember the others. Sadly, fear is a great motivator. I would do almost anything to avoid being shouted and cursed at and it impelled me to do my finest work.

It also taught me to stand up for myself. When I, even as a junior associate, ran into bullies or other rough-and-tumble adversaries, they were rarely (if ever) as bad as the guy I worked for. I was fearless in battle because I had been battle-tested ahead of time.

Now we can’t – and don’t – do that kind of training any more. People would quit. Instead, we sit down with people to nurture them and train them. But I do wonder how my nurtured associate would do when she goes out opposite that partner who screams and yells. Will she confidently shout back and kick his a**? Or will she fold like a tent? By not giving rough training to my associates, am I being “nice” but not equipping them for the battles that negotiations sometimes turn into?

I think there are very few truisms in the legal world; however, one of the few that I believe is universal is this:

“No one wants a wimp for a lawyer.”

Somehow we who are training the next generation can’t let that happen. In my next article, I will give some more in-depth thoughts about how to do this, i.e., how can we train a tough, battle-tested, amazing lawyer without being a mean, nasty S.O.B.

Earlier: Reinventing The Law Business: How To Train Associates

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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 [email protected].