If you have good people who belong in the positions they are in, one of your most important obligations as a manager is to ensure your people are busy with good work.
Now and then, I’m lucky enough to have breakfast with a highly experienced trial lawyer who always provides me great ideas I want to apply, and have applied, to the management of the law firm where I work. A few years ago he shared with me (“directed me” is the better way of putting it), in his Texas drawl, “John, two things you do not want are too much space and too much staff.”
Lawyers like their sense of themselves—and I mean a lot. I doubt there are any professionals outside the law who speak as much about where they went to school, where they started their careers, or which jobs they’ve had (even if they hated those jobs at the times they had them). That deadly sin most common to our profession—vanity—motivates lawyers to make stupid mistakes like overspending on their offices, including, as this trial lawyer noted, getting too much space, without enough people or revenues. The result is that a lawyer may feed his vanity, as well as his stress level, to pay for space he does not need. Such vanity also motivates lawyers to build their firms too quickly sometimes, again resulting in too many people with too little work, and more of that money-related stress and worry.
Beyond the fact that having people without enough work might mean you have to make the terrible choice of laying off people or just being stressed all the time, law firm managers, separate and apart from money concerns, must keep in mind that if the staff they manage are professionals and belong in whatever position they have in a given law office, those staff members want to be busy. I don’t mean working till 10 p.m. every night and all weekend, every weekend busy. I mean that you don’t want your staff sitting around with insufficient deadlines or simply not enough work, such that they in fact generally are busy and motivated for 9, 10 or more hours a day (however many hours are expected in a given law office) every work day.
One of my colleagues frequently remarks later in the day, after 5 or 6 p.m., that “it feels like it’s 11 a.m.” That’s a good sign. She’s busy. She’s interested in the demanding work that simply had to get done and which she enjoys so much—even though the uninteresting obligations or even drudgery can be mixed in there—that she did not notice the time fly.
When managing a law firm you need to keep your people busy with good work. One specific way to do this is to make sure the good work keeps coming in. Managers either need to have input into cases that the law office takes or communicate with those rainmakers who bring in the business. It’s easy for the rainmakers to care only about how much money a case will generate, whether a given matter will advance a non-monetary goal of the law office, or is simply an interesting assignment. However, the rainmakers also need to keep in mind this need to keep the staff busy, too. That may mean taking a case that’s not necessarily in the law office’s sweet spot if it’s work that will challenge the law office staff. To be sure, rainmakers and managers must follow general rules of prudence with new matters: if the case involved someone who will be a bad client (however defined), don’t take the case; if the law firm is not competent to do good work on the matter and cannot learn to become competent, don’t take the matter.
It is, however, perfectly appropriate, and, indeed, responsible to take a matter the firm otherwise wouldn’t normally take to keep staff busy with good work. It’s always a balance, of course—you need to have staff ready to do the work on the matters that come in which are in the law office’s sweet spot. But, going back to my earlier point, if your people actually belong in the positions they have, they will find a way to work together to make sure all the good work gets done.
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There’s a lot of talk about the need for “work-life balance” (a detestable expression since it implies that Marx was right and we view our lives as alienated from our labor, something lawyers should not feel). It is important to remember that we need to balance so that our lives don’t only become about work, but in trying to strike that balance, managers and rainmakers need to keep their staff busy with good work.
John Balestriere is an entrepreneurial trial lawyer who founded his firm after working as a prosecutor and litigator at a small firm. He is a partner at trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at [email protected].