Biglaw

Blinded By The Benjamins?

Keeping Biglaw lawyers happy takes more than money.

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Law firm managers, take note: yet another study has come out telling us that compensation can’t be the only measure of workplace happiness.

In this instance, Facebook published the results of hundreds of thousands of answers to its semi-annual workplace survey, where all hands are asked to tell the company what they value most. The answers generally broke down into three buckets: Career, Cause, and Community.

Career is pretty self-explanatory. People love autonomy, and the feeling of being challenged, growing their skills, and driving their own professional development. And, yes, salaries and bonuses are part of that career satisfaction.

Cause is the sense of purpose behind a company. It’s what I’ve talked about in this column as the “why” of a firm. People want to have a reason for coming to work, a reason why their company exists at all. Clients want to know their work is in the hands of people who have a vision beyond generating accounts receivable.

Community is that sense of belonging, of being respected and valued. It’s that law firm culture that’s so hard to create, but so invaluable to any firm that pulls it off.

Facebook asked its employees to weight the importance of all sorts of various wants and desires, and those three buckets all ended up at the top of the list. Career had a slight edge, but not enough that either of the other two categories of needs could be ignored. Career, Cause, and Community, it turns out, are a three-legged stool. Take one away, and the whole thing collapses.

Law firms are pretty good at providing their attorneys the Career leg, but let’s face it, the industry struggles mightily at providing the other two. Far too many firms have a true sense of Cause beyond making money for the partnership, which is a lousy tool for either marketing to new clients or wooing potential incoming attorneys. Some firms fare a little better at the Community-building aspect of employee retention, but too many firms’ cultures still fall in the range of non-existent to stifling.

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As an industry, we are failing to consistently develop Causes and Community within our firms. Instead, too many firms focus entirely on the Career bucket, which results in either burned-out associates fantasizing about abandoning the industry to sell fad food, or the development and promotion of billing- and business-generating tinmen and women, devoid of heart. I like Huey Lewis as much as the next guy, but do we really want an industry staffed entirely by Patrick Batemans?

I love numbers. I use data in my practice constantly, to refine marketing, to understand our cases better, and to generally make good decisions. Depending on what think piece you’re reading, we’re either entering, in the midst of, or leaving the era of Big Data. Data analytics are helping lawyers make better decisions, and that’s a good thing. Despite all the good that data-driven law has cultivated, though, it pains me to say that I believe a big part of the problem is that our notoriously math-averse profession has come to love numbers too much.

The problem is that we’ve become too used to using numbers as a substitute for thinking about what being at a firm means. Numbers are too easy to find, and too simple to think about. When first-years are comparing their job offers, the first thing they’re going to think about is how the salaries and billable-hour minimums match up. Laterals look at overhead figures, guaranteed salary, and bonus structures. When legal periodicals write about the major Biglaw players, we write about gross revenues, profits-per-partner, salaries, locksteps, bonuses, etc. I do it myself in this very column, since facts and figures are useful jumping-off points for discussions. Law firms are complex beasts, and the experience of being a lawyer in any particular firm is hard to describe. The default to comparing and contrasting numbers is entirely understandable. In too many cases, however, we make that both the beginning and the end of the inquiry.

I can’t count the number of times I’m spoken to senior lawyers in firms across the country the past few years who’ve lamented the shift from a people-focused industry to a numbers-focused one. Whatever the reasons behind it, an obsessive focus on billable requirements, receivables, dollars collected, and other concrete metrics can make other intangible, people-centered virtues get overlooked or affirmatively ignored.

When firms focus exclusively on the bottom line, they run the risk that lawyers will sacrifice relationships and community at the altar of money. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been guilty of falling into the all-about-the-Benjamins trap many times myself. It’s a place that’s easy to find yourself given the availability of market financial data and dearth of data about how firms stack up when it comes to the intangibles. Compensation and cash obviously matter, and all other things being equal, attorneys are happier and more likely to stick around with higher salaries than with lower. But if cash is the only lens you use to view the world, you push further down a path toward the Gordon Gekko model of law, where greed is good, and anything else is just a distraction.

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But here’s the dirty little secret of Gordon Gekko: Greed isn’t good. Greed isn’t even all that smart. Greed is an abdication of responsibility, a philosophy of deliberate tunnel vision. And as we see time and again, most recently in the Facebook study, is that pure greed doesn’t work in the long term.

Law firms are collaborations, and there’s no collaboration that can survive if key collaborators are all leaving. We need to retain critical attorneys and staff, and the only way to do that is to provide them something more than money. We need to keep developing our firm cultures, creating pockets of social trust and investment that both entice people to stay and encourage them to develop into better versions of themselves. We need to figure out reasons for our firms to exist beyond racking up billable hours.

Not many of us got into law to be the next Gordon Gekko or Patrick Bateman. I imagine most of us got our start thinking about becoming the next Atticus Finch or Erin Brockovich. At its best, law the profession does more than any other to advance justice, to cultivate relationships, to build new projects that make the world better for everyone. We’re not all going to end up doing social justice work, but we abandon that sense of purpose at our peril.

Believe it or not, lawyers are people too, and we need more than money thrown at us to keep us happy. Now, more than ever, we need to ask ourselves where our industry is going, and where we want it to actually end up.

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.

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