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The Law Firm Of The Future – What A Law Firm Should Be: What Is A Law Firm?

It is a scary time for anyone trying to hold a law firm together, for sure.

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Welcome to my new column for Above the Law. I have written two columns in the past for ATL. The first was entitled “Reinventing the Law Business,“ and the second was entitled “Power Niche Marketing.“

Now I think I have some thoughts that will be very useful to anyone running a law firm or working in a law firm, so here goes.

My new column is called, “The Law Firm of the Future — What a Law Firm Should Be,” and the purpose is quite simple; namely, to help us lawyers figure out what we are supposed to do in order to:

  • Find fulfillment, meaning, and excitement in what we do
  • Be well paid for our work, and
  • Do good things for the world

If we can hit these three goals, I think it is quite clear that we lawyers work in by far the most exciting and thrilling profession in the world. Yet strangely enough, even though we lawyers have access to the foregoing goals (designed to please almost anyone), many of us are kind of miserable and depressed. Hopefully, my column will redirect that thinking from Mope to Hope!

I will start by asking the question, what is a law firm?

When you get right down to it, a law firm is (mostly) just a collection of lawyers who are together because they wish to be together. If they stop wishing to be together, then they leave, and the law firm ends. That end can come quickly (with, say, a dissolution) or slowly (with lawyers gradually departing until the law firm can no longer sustain itself).

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Therefore, the leadership of a law firm should have front and center the realization that all of their assets go down the elevator every single night, and the heart of their job is to make sure that those assets return in the morning.

Thus, the primary function of law firm governance should center around keeping the lawyers engaged and feeling like those goals stated above are being achieved, without which they will likely leave their current law firm for another law firm.  Notably, there are no noncompetes ethically permitted to pen lawyers into a particular law firm, so the door is always open. And in today’s world, every lawyer is getting almost daily calls from headhunters. It is a scary time for anyone trying to hold a law firm together, for sure.

As you read this — and if you are not in firm leadership — you might be tempted to conclude that firm leadership had better make you happy, or you will jump ship — and that is a perfectly natural view to have — but it is totally wrongheaded!

To paraphrase JFK, I would say this:

Ask not what your law firm can do for you, but instead ask what you can do for your law firm.

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Any law firm that relies upon its managing partner, or firm leadership, to keep everyone happy doesn’t have a chance of succeeding. It has to be a lot deeper than that. If everyone — or at least most of the lawyers — doesn’t believe in the firm and step up to take the role that it is everyone’s job to look out for everyone else, the firm will fail. Top down alone won’t do it.

Okay, so the culture plays a role — as we know.  So you might then conclude that what is needed are espresso bars — flexible work — and all those touchy-feely things that make people happy. Admittedly, those are great things, but if you think that will do it, then once again, you would be totally wrongheaded!

Very few people of high talent will stay at a law firm on a long-term basis solely because the culture is friendly and warm. Of course, an unfriendly place will drive people away, but niceness isn’t enough. So what else is needed?

Okay, it must be the money then, right? Well, that would make it easy, wouldn’t it? But no, that won’t do it either. If all that there is holding a firm together is money, then they are just sharing offices until someone gets a better job offer — and then off they will go. Don’t get me wrong here either — money matters — a lot! But alone, it doesn’t do it either.

So what would do it then?

I spent a lot of time thinking about this and have concluded that a law firm, in order to have a long-term chance of success, needs to stand for something. There needs to be a mission or a plan or a goal or a purpose.

It has to be more than a nurturing managing partner, a friendly, welcoming culture, and good compensation. Those are all quite necessary ingredients, without which failure is indeed quite likely, but without a purpose, I think long-term failure is a very likely conclusion.

There was a book I read that opened my eyes to this a few years ago. It was from a Marine guy — Pete Blaber — who wrote a book called, “The Mission, the Men, and Me.”

I started reading it thinking he would put the team first, then the mission, and finally himself, but he didn’t. Instead, he put the mission first. I was intrigued as it seemed, well, wrong to me, but as I read it, I realized he had a point.

This didn’t mean he didn’t love his men dearly. He did — and he put them ahead of himself even to the point of risking his life for them. But he realized that what energized his men and made them want to outperform was having a mission — a goal — that was even more important than anything else.

That is the spice. That is what makes coming to work an adventure rather than a job. The fact that the organization you work for has a purpose and a plan to do something. Hopefully, something cool and interesting and thrilling and exciting, so that at the end of the day you can’t wait to tell your spouse, your parents, your buddies, what happened that day “at the firm.”

I think you will see this more and more as a separation of the firms that have long-term viability from those that flame out over time.

In future articles, I will be writing about what a law firm might stand for to create the necessary spice.

Bruce Stachenfeld is the chairman of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, an approximately 50-lawyer law firm based in midtown Manhattan. The firm is known as “The Pure Play in Real Estate Law” because all of its practice areas are focused around real estate. With almost 50 full-time real estate lawyers, the firm is one of the largest real estate law practices in New York City. You can contact Bruce by email at bstachenfeld@dsllp.com. Bruce also writes The Real Estate Philosopher™, which contains applications of Bruce’s eclectic, insightful, and outside-the-box thinking to the real estate world. If you would like to read previous articles or subscribe, please click here.

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