Why Are You A Lawyer, And Why Are You Here?

Firms need to figure out why they’re in business.

My four-year-old son is a little lawyer in the making. His arsenal of questions is limited, but he’s relentless. Why can’t I have cake for dinner? Why can’t I fly like Superman? Why this? Why that? All day, every day, it’s why, why, why? It’s a question that most of us need to ask about our work lives more often, something I was reminded of recently when watching a presentation by Simon Sinek.

Sinek is a marketing consultant and professional speaker, and he models marketing, leadership, and any number of related concepts as three nesting parts.

The outermost layer is What. What is your product? What is it that you provide to your customers? Beneath that is How — How do you provide your customers with What you provide them? What methods, systems, or resources do you have that set you apart from the competition?

At the core, however, is Why. Why do you do what you do? Why do customers need to come to you? What larger purpose or vision are you fulfilling by way of your What and How?

Sinek gives the example of Apple, one of the world’s most successful companies despite facing significant competition. There are dozens of phones competing with the iPhone, yet the iPhone owns the plurality of the market. There were hundreds of MP3 players competing with the iPod, many significantly more powerful or better designed, yet none even dented the iPod’s market dominance.

Sinek attributes Apple’s success to its ability to communicate its Why to the larger audience. Apple’s competitors could market What they had — we’ve got a product! They could market How they did it — we’ve got a good supply chain that helps us provide low-cost, high quality goods!

Where Apple broke away from the pack was by focusing not on What or How, but Why. Apple didn’t pitch the iPod as the best MP3 player for the dollar; it pitched itself as the company with a burning drive to make the most intuitive interface and beautiful design possible for its products. Apple was a company made of visionaries, for visionaries, that just so happened to make iPods. People bought into that vision, and bought Apple’s products by the stack.

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Bad companies only know what they do. Average companies know how to do something, then figure out what to do from there. Great companies start with a goal, a Why, and work outward from there. The Why/How/What concept is flexible, maybe even flexible to the point of facile, but Sinek is definitely onto something with his obsessive push for companies to understand their Why.

Lawyers are good at asking other people Why, but not traditionally great at asking that question to themselves. Far, far too many lawyers have no good idea why they’re in law. For many, I fear that the answer would be, “I had a JD and a bunch of student debt, what else was I supposed to do?” Not many people find joy and fulfillment by default.

Many others in Biglaw, I suspect, would say their Why is “to make a pile of cash.” Points for honesty, if that’s you, but that can be a difficult Why to translate into a strong marketing push. “I want your business so I can buy a jet” isn’t the most effective pitch I’ve heard.

If “Why am I a lawyer?” is scary, then “Why am I a part of my law firm?” or “Why does my law firm even exist?” have to be terrifying. Every law firm knows its What — legal services. Most law firms can brag about their How — top-tier attorneys, hard workers, smart workers, real-world experience, efficiency, etc. I’d wager that very, very few law firms can answer Why they’re in business, much less communicate that Why to their clients.

Law firms are institutions like any other, and I’ve written before that the strongest law firms typically have a sense of identity and culture baked in. Firms that don’t have that identity, that can’t tell their attorneys why they all work at the same place, are going to struggle to find and maintain their niche in the market.

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It’s cliché to say, but the practice of law ain’t what it used to be. Law firms used to have a monopoly on attorney hiring, and once an attorney was hired the expectation was that the relationship was for life. Many attorneys now jump from firm to firm, always searching for better work, higher pay, more prestigious clients. And it’s not just other firms that are poaching attorneys any more. It’s in-house gigs, non-traditional legal service providers, and other new sources of competition that are luring firm attorneys away. Good pay or swank offices can only keep attorneys for so long. Attorneys are going to ask their firms why they should stick around, and to answer that, firms need to figure out Why they’re in business at all.

I count myself fortunate to work at a firm that formed over a century ago, back when its home office was a territory, rather than a state. The attorneys at the firm helped build the American West. They drafted some of the first workers’ compensation and water laws. That tradition of building the communities we’re in helps our lawyers feel like we’re part of something bigger than just trying cases or closing deals.

I took an informal poll of some of my partner-level attorney friends at various firms as I wrote this article, asking them why they stay at their firms instead of heading anywhere else. Not a single one told me the answer was money. Instead, to a person, they told me it was their relationships with the other people in the office that brought them into work every day.

Whys come in all shapes and sizes. For some firms, it really is just to make as much money as possible. For others, they might want to improve the world, or be the best in their chosen area of law. There are many answers, but to reach them, you’ve got to start with the question.

And if you need some help asking Why, well, I know a guy.


James Goodnow

James Goodnow is an attorney, commentator, and Above the Law columnist. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management and legal communications categories. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by email at jgoodnow@fclaw.com.