The New Law Firm: Old Blood, New Blood, And Robot Blood?
Law schools continue to crank out graduates into an uncertain future. Law school graduates have debt; robots don’t.
It’s always been a dilemma: do you home grow your own talent so that people who work for you think there’s upward mobility or do you go outside the confines of your own firm or your own law department to pluck who has the desired experience? I don’t think that there’s one right answer — falling back on my two most favorite words, “It depends” — but Wells Fargo’s situation is instructive for both firms and corporate law departments.
Do you get rid of the old blood and get infused with new? Do you try to keep a mix of old and new? The old for, among other things, the institutional memory that has value and the new for, as everyone says, new ideas, new ways of doing things, and for the law firms, new business opportunities. Do you run afoul of age discrimination? It’s not necessarily “new blood” in the traditional sense, but “different blood” in efforts to right a listing ship. Or is that a distinction without a difference?
Granted that Wells’s situation is different because of the omnipresent federal and state regulators involved in its rehab, but I think the issue is no different for our profession. Law firm mergers and acquisitions try to make the bottom line more profitable, make better rain, make succession plans, any one of a number of reasons. Lawyers moving firms is nothing new.
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What happens when lots of “different blood” arrives either through the deal or through hiring?
I worked for a financial institution that was both acquiree and acquirer (not at the same time, thank goodness). I think anyone and everyone who ever worked for an acquiree, assuming not whacked at the time of acquisition, would say that it’s not a pleasant experience. Dreams of upward mobility either within the firm or legal department are usually dashed, and those who survive often become SMEs, that is, subject matter experts with no authority, no direct or even indirect reports, and who often find themselves out of the loop and in the silo, being the very last peeps to know what’s going on, if they ever do know. Silos are suffocating.
Oftentimes, lawyers become managers without the slightest bit of training or education about what is involved in being a manager. We lawyers, who think we are the smartest people in the room, don’t make the best managers of people and finances. Our tech savvy is not what it should be, regardless of what we think it is. You have only to read about some of the pickles that we get ourselves to make the case for those points.
Exhibit 1: How many managing partners and/or legal department managing counsel don’t know what an income statement is? Apparently at least one and probably many more are in the same boat. We get out of law school without any accounting knowledge at all, and for many of us, looking at balance sheets, P&L statements (that’s profit and loss statements), cash v. accrual, and other basic concepts will become a part of what we do to a greater or lesser degree. There’s a lot of valuable information in financial statements if you know what to look for.
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I took a basic accounting class while awaiting bar results. If you want something to do while looking for that first job, you could do worse than to take a basic online course about accounting for lawyers. It couldn’t hurt and might even spruce up that resume and impress prospective interviewers. I’m just saying.
Exhibit 2: How many managing partners and/or legal department managing counsel have any real understanding of the minefield that is employee relations? Yes, law firms and good sized legal departments usually have employee relations people, but oftentimes, they’re only brought in to clean up the mess (“Whoops, I guess I shouldn’t have terminated that employee who just filed a whistleblower claim.”) rather than being brought in at the start. We aren’t brilliant at interpersonal relations, let alone employee relations, and we can’t handle everything that comes our way. And this firm has an NLRB practice.
Exhibit 3: You have to keep up with technology. That doesn’t mean that you can ignore emails. I don’t think that anyone can these days with smartphones and tablets, but this town justice did so for three years.
However, if you need any refresher on the limits of technology, you have only to follow this link to learn that a female Colorado state court judge resigned after a man claiming to be her former lover (no comment) released some disparaging emails that the judge had written.
Doesn’t anyone use the phone anymore? (Cue my plaintive tone here.) I guess not.
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The latest iteration in technology: the robots are not only coming, they’re already here. Joe Patrice notes that junior lawyers should be afraid, very afraid, of robots, since they can do and already do a lot of the work that junior lawyers cut their teeth on, but how else do you learn?
This is not a situation of old blood v. new blood v. different blood. This is a case of no blood at all. There is no upward mobility in this situation, in fact, no mobility at all for the lawyers, and law schools continue to crank out graduates into an even more uncertain future. Law school graduates have debt; robots don’t.
Finally, in the never-ending saga of dinosaurs v. millennials, this time with a Super Bowl spin on it, people are pointing out age differences between the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams. The Pats have a 41-year-old QB and a 66-year-old coach. The Rams have a 24-year-old QB and a 32-year-old coach. As a dinosaur lawyer living in SoCal, my loyalties are divided, bur guess which team I’ll be rooting for?
Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.
