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What Can You Learn About A Law Firm From Glassdoor?

Firms are ignoring this website at their peril.

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Glassdoor can tell you a lot about an employer and a lot of what it can tell you is borderline believable gossip from disgruntled employees. But is there anything valuable to be gleaned from the venerable workplace rating site?

The folks at Legal Evolution decided to dig into Glassdoor’s data and highlight some lessons from the website. Recognizing the ever-accelerating trend toward transparency — or, frankly, “TMI” — the Legal Evolution report begins by making the case that Glassdoor is a labor market reality and there’s not really any use in continuing to complain about it. People clearly use it, and firms need to accept it. Satisfied employees translate to a better organization according to study after study and Glassdoor seems to provide decent indicia of employee satisfaction.

So what can we gather? Taking ratings from the Am Law 200, as well as the Fortune 1000, the top 100 accounting firms (there’s more than 4!) and the top 50 consulting firms, we can see that the categorical scores that make up a firm’s overall Glassdoor rating vary quite a bit. Employees are generally happier with their compensation than they are with senior management or their actual career prospects:

Congratulations, you’ve achieved late-stage capitalism!

But where the Legal Evolution report adds to firm management is by breaking down the correlations between these ratings and working out where improvements would provide the biggest impact to the overall score. In other words, if a company is looking to improve its street cred, what factor would it want to focus on first.

As it turns out, money doesn’t buy everything. By leaps and bounds, figuring out what improves the “culture and values” score adds the most to the law firm’s overall rep. And, bad news for attorneys, improving the “work/life balance” provides the least oomph to the final tally.

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Too bad law firms aren’t using Glassdoor as much as they should. Over 60 percent of the Am Law 200 isn’t an “engaged” Glassdoor company. No other segment they studied tops 40 percent on that score.

And that’s a missed opportunity because the firms that do the most to earn high overall Glassdoor scores also happen to be the most profitable.

For firm leadership, there’s a temptation to put the cart in front of the horse and assume that “firms that perform well will yield satisfied workers,” but with a hopping lateral market and growing transparency, it’s very much the other way around. As Legal Evolution put it:

Here’s our conclusion: The legal market circa 2019 is in the early days of lawyers discovering, learning, and mastering principles of professional management, including sophisticated notions of leadership and employee/team development. This is going to happen because we are far along the pathway of several hundred high-quality regional law firms converging into a single national and global market. See Post 082(discussing progression over a period of decades).  If Firm A resists the principles of professional management, it will be vanquished by Firm B.

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The old saw is that lawyers are terrible at business, but if that was ever true, the era of firms that fail to grasp the lessons of business management is over.

Check out the whole series of observations over at Legal Evolution — it’s really a treasure trove of what firms can learn from Glassdoor. Even if the report doesn’t touch on how much you can learn about brewing sex scandals from the comments!

Workplace transparency, Part I: Is it time to take Glassdoor seriously? (094) [Legal Evolution]
Workplace transparency, Part II: A roadmap for law firms (095) [Legal Evolution]

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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