The Haves And The Have Nots

Business professionals and staff are more valuable than ever, so why do so many law firms treat them like second-class citizens?

bully in office workplace bullyingIt’s no secret that lawyers tend to have high opinions of themselves. There are many reasons for this attitude. As a group, lawyers have reached at least some level of academic achievement, are trained to discredit the ideas of others, have passed a test to become members of an exclusive club, and have a certain status that comes along with being in a highly compensated profession.

Lawyers’ inflated sense of self-worth can wreak havoc on many parts of life. It’s part of the reason many lawyers find healthy, nonadversarial relationships elusive. It’s also why we’re the butt of countless jokes. Heck, it’s the widespread disdain for lawyers that undoubtedly caused Steven Spielberg to make the scene where the T. rex gobbled up the lawyer in “Jurassic Park” the moment of the film’s comedic relief. He wouldn’t have gotten the same crowd-pleasing reaction if that dino’s dinner had been a software developer.

The halos lawyers see around their own heads are also problematic when it comes to running a law firm. One area where this is particularly evident in the way lawyers dismiss the contributions of law firm professionals without JDs.

Lawyers, Lawyers Everywhere

The problem is deeper than mindset; it’s structural. The basic makeup of law firms differs from that of most other businesses in ways that often cause us to systematically overvalue the importance of attorneys and undervalue the business professionals and staff that keep the firm’s engine humming.

Most of the large, nonlegal businesses we’re used to thinking about, talking about, or advising are made up of discrete departments focused on specific tasks. By working together, administrators, sales departments, recruiters, and managers collectively power the entire company. The owners, hoping to keep the profits coming in, pass some of those benefits back to these key team members who made it all happen.

What makes law firms unique, however, is that practicing lawyers are in many key firm positions. Lawyers are often a company’s management, sales team, recruiters, and product all rolled into one. And on top of that, they usually own the company itself. In structure, law firms are less like a Fortune 500 outfit and much more like a collective of plumbers or carpenters. For all the marble in our offices, we’re tradespeople at heart, working not in steel or wood, but in PDFs and privilege logs.

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Who Matters?

The challenge with this concentration of roles and power within law firms is that it often systematically leads to firm leadership thinking in terms of there being two types of people they work with: attorneys and everyone else. The haves and the have nots. And that two-tiered thinking leads to two-tiered treatment.

The attorneys, who own the firm, run it. They directly generate most of its revenue, have all the leverage and incentive needed to grant themselves large pay packages, ample benefits and perks, and expansive freedom to manage their business lives how they see fit. Few nonattorney staff members get those same luxuries. Consider how many firms offer unlimited vacation time and flexible working arrangements for attorneys, but require their staff to spend mandatory time in-office and strictly measure and cap their days off.

And those are just the objective ways that attorneys and nonattorneys are treated differently. A firm’s overall tone and atmosphere can also convey that the opinions and treatment of lawyers are vastly more important than those of staff. I’m sure plenty of law firm team members without JDs have had the experience of coming up with good ideas to improve their workplace, only to be stonewalled on implementing those ideas unless they can convince an attorney to take up the cause and advocate for it. In some firms, attorneys are allowed to get away with unprofessional or abusive behavior that would get a nonattorney terminated immediately. At worst, this two-tiered system can cause firms to give off a downright dystopic, “Hunger Games”-y vibe.

Every time we reinforce the perception that attorneys run on a different system of rules and accountability than everyone else, we push our nonattorney colleagues a little closer to the door.

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Driving People Away When We Need Them Most

Nonattorney business professionals such as those in marketing, HR, finance, or IT are often at particular risk of feeling undervalued and minimized in law firm spaces. We expect these professionals to work side by side with us on problems that are fundamental to the firm’s success and growth, yet often minimize their contributions and fail to give their advice its proper weight. Sometimes that can contribute to professionals seeking out another firm that will value them more highly, such as the entire marketing team that just jumped ship from Cooley to Fried Frank. But other times it may drive them out of the legal sector altogether, in favor of industries that are less captured by a single segment of the company’s headcount.

For once, the business professionals actually have some leverage. Hiring to fill positions remains difficult even in the face of other economic indicators, which means competition for talent is fierce. Though many lawyers are slow to acknowledge it, our business professionals and administrative team members are talented, and they’re needed to keep our firms alive in an increasingly competitive marketplace. If we don’t value them, the Big Four accounting firms and Alternative Legal Service Provider companies that are steadily eroding law firms’ market share sure will.

This is not a tenable situation. For as confident as we attorneys may be in our abilities to master whatever challenges we face, lawyers should not be dabbling part time in the management of major organizations involving hundreds or thousands of people and potentially billions of dollars of annual revenue. We need dedicated, experienced people running our complex businesses on a full-time basis. To get those people, and retain them, firms need to treat them better than second-class citizens.

Show, Don’t Tell

The best way to start correcting bad patterns of behavior within an organization is for leadership to demonstrate the right way of acting. At my firm, we’re working hard to demonstrate how much we value our business professionals from the top down. We regularly invite our business professionals to meetings, including having them present regularly. We actively solicit their input on firm decisions, and our management team tries to show that they have our trust and confidence.

This shouldn’t be unusual. It shouldn’t be a surprise that people who have dedicated their careers to marketing, HR, business management, accounting, or the myriad other aspects of running a large business are going to have better ideas about it than a bunch of dilettantes with a JD. We may own our firms, and we may be the product that drives the revenue, but a large law firm cannot survive on lawyers alone in today’s environment. We need our business professionals, and these days we often need them more than they need us.

One of the major themes of the practice of law in the 21st century has been the maturation of the large law firm model. It used to make sense to run our firms like a collection of jumped-up white-collar tradespeople, but today’s complex legal market requires thinking more like a traditional business enterprise.

That requires us lawyers, who enjoy outsized representation and influence within our firms, to recognize that outsized influence does not equal outsized competence. We have roles to fill within our firms, but we cannot be the only people the firm listens to or is concerned with serving. We have colleagues who bring brilliant ideas and valuable experiences to the table. We ignore or undervalue them at our peril. So why not check that ego, let go of the reins a bit, and try listening to the people who are full-time using their talents to make your firm as strong as it can be? It never hurts to treat people with respect, and that small change could make all the difference for your firm.


GoodnowJames Goodnow is the CEO and managing partner of NLJ 250 firm Fennemore. At age 36, he became the youngest known chief executive of a large law firm in the U.S. He earned his JD at Harvard Law School and attended Cambridge Business School (UK), where he wrote his master’s thesis on how to use entrepreneurial strategies to infuse innovation in law firms and established businesses. James is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management new release category. You can connect with James on LinkedIn, Twitter, or by emailing him at jgoodnow@fennemorelaw.com.