Jennifer Bluestein is the Chief Talent Officer at Perkins Coie LLP, and author of two books published by the Practicing Law Institute: “An Associate’s First Year” and “Stepping It Up.”
Early in her career, she was an employment and litigation attorney, before progressing into her present position managing all talent strategy and human resources functions at one of the world’s top international law firms.
In this Q&A, she discusses the unique research leading her to reevaluate the place of top-tier law schools, along with what inspired her to write books for new and mid-level attorneys. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
You’re currently the Chief Talent Officer at one of the country’s biggest firms. Do you view this role as sort of being in-house within a law firm, in a way, overseeing the internal operations?
My responsibilities include learning, development, recruiting, staff recruiting and development and retention, compensation, benefits, all of that for a leading Am Law 50 firm. It’s a lot.
But my responsibilities do not include the legal advising. We still have in-house counsel. Most large firms either have somebody 100 percent, or multiple people, as an in-house counsel department.
You have previously mentioned something interesting about always wanting a new challenge. Do you see that in the people you’re bringing on, and trying to retain? Is that a personal quality, or is it somewhat universal, something that you have to repeatedly address?
I think it’s both.
I think there are some people, especially those who are in something highly technical, like, for example, an electrical engineer who becomes a patent lawyer, for whom there is new technology coming up, and there is always that learning.
I don’t know that it applies to them necessarily.
But for me, and for some of the positions in my team, we do see people who need to move departments and to new challenges.
I just took somebody from our learning and development team and we created these new positions called “talent advisors” where they’re embedded in a department. We went to her and said we had this new position, we think you’d be great for it. She moved over.
I don’t hold it against somebody if they want to be an expert and manage the same position for 15 years. However, I think it can be a little harder to continue being challenged in some of the more strategic positions.
For the record, though — this job is challenging me for a long time. Really there’s a lot.
Especially in what I’m reading on Above the Law, there’s a hot legal market right now. Why don’t we talk about that a little bit?
The quote that I saw from you was along the lines of looking at some of the people who accepted scholarships at law schools outside of the top tier and chose to go without debt or with very little debt, as opposed to going to a top-ranked school.
Tell me about that. Where’d you come up with that mindset? How do you see that playing out?
Actually, part of the way I came up with the mindset is just personal experience.
For one thing, I went to Northwestern, no scholarship. But I had almost a full ride at a lower-ranked law school.
In part because of geographically where I wanted to be, and in part because of the reputation of the school, I ended up deciding I was going to go to Northwestern. Which was much more expensive. And I think that has really helped me.
People look at my resume and are more likely to interview me because I went to a higher ranked law school. But I’d be the same person, with the same brain, and the same capabilities, had I taken that law school scholarship.
And I have a really good friend who took a full ride to Notre Dame, which is still a good law school, but had gotten in everywhere she applied. She opted to go for a full ride — in part because it was closer to her family, too, there were other factors.
She was able to graduate from law school with close to no debt. She didn’t necessarily have the brand behind her. It’s hard to say what the difference is in legal education. A smart person is going to do well. The Socratic method doesn’t differ that much.
Right.
If you pass the bar, you pass the bar. You still have to pass the bar regardless of which law school you went to.
This is my opinion: Unless you’re really getting into some of the for-profit schools and stuff — well, don’t go there — but at even the top 100, the differences in the actual education I think are very marginal.
So, here’s the thing that I did. At my old firm I did an analysis. And I’m not a statistician, but I did actually consult with a friend who is a statistician. I looked at, I forget if it was five-year or 10-year, but I did a study of our attorneys, and the test was how many stay five years or more.
Because you’ve got to be good if you’re there five years, right? Even if you’re not great, something will weed you out if you’re not good.
Yup. Something will come up that will weed you out.
I looked at the law school ranking. I looked at whether they came in as a summer associate or a lateral. And I looked at — it might have been law review. I wanted to know what schools had the best likelihood of us keeping them five years or more. Because for me that was the most important measure of success. And we looked at whether they made partner.
The two top schools for that firm, they were not T-14 schools. It’s not scientific, but I actually did a study. All myself, pulled the data myself, looked up the U.S. News and World Report rankings.
We had some practice groups that were like, “No, they have to go to a T-14 school.” And then others were like, “We don’t care, we want to look at their job experience, and if we like them, and if they seem curious.”
So, for me that was part of it. That study really verified everything that I thought. And then the other piece of it, too, was if you have people who are first-generation graduate school or undergrad, they’re more likely to weigh a scholarship more heavily.
I mean, I was fortunate in that I was willing to take the risk. I did have debt when I graduated from law school. But I didn’t have as much debt because of my financial situation.
But if your parents didn’t go to college — my in-laws didn’t go to college — maybe they didn’t have any ability to help, and maybe you took everything on in terms of debt-load.
Right.
If that’s your reason for going to a lower-ranked school, again, if anything, you might be more motivated to work hard, because you don’t have any family money or support to fall back on.
Well, it’s almost like you know me better than I know myself. My old man was a janitor. That’s exactly why I was like, “I’m not going hundreds of grand into debt.”
Right! You look at all those factors, and you say, “Are we going to continue to be exclusionary?”
And then also, Perkins Coie started focusing on whether we were doing a good job recruiting from the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. HBCUs give very good educations. If you want to enhance your diversity, you have to expand the pool.
We all feel really strongly we are better for our clients — we’re not just doing it because it’s a public policy thing — it’s better service for our clients the more diverse we are and the more we reflect our client base and the local communities where we work and live.
If we’re only pulling from these top-tier, super-expensive schools that really give very, very few scholarships, we’re doing everybody a disservice.
Frankly, I know it wasn’t a scientifically controlled study, but what you did was just as good as much of what is out there. Maybe you should do something like that again and actually get it published. Do you want to talk about your books a little bit?
OK, so what can I tell you about? I have one here. Oh, I have two [holds up books]! Color chosen by my daughter. This is the first one.
So what are the premises?
The first one [“An Associate’s First Year”], there were not a lot of books out there that were really practical, and with different viewpoints, about what it’s like to be a first-year at a large law firm these days. The idea was that I had different contributors to get different perspectives.
It’s: “What are the expectations of a first-year? How do you set the right tone the first six months? How do you deal with time-management issues? How do you foster inclusion?”
Good.
The reception was so positive. What law firms did is they bought a book for every first year. There are a couple firms that actually created their whole first-year curriculum around it, which I took as a huge compliment. A large law firm would buy like a hundred copies.
So PLI came back and was like, “This is doing so well, what else is a need?” I said, “The biggest need, I think, is mid-levels.” Mid-level associates are A) expected to step it up, and B) don’t know what that means.
As soon as we started talking about it, I said I already had the title, it’s “Stepping It Up.”
Because when I was creating core competencies for expectations within specific practice groups for associates, I would say, “You’re a corporate lawyer, what are you expecting around drafting, or client relationship management?” and the partners would be like, “I just want them to ‘step it up’ from being a junior.”
Well, they don’t know what that means, so let’s break that down.
What’s the difference between drafting an ancillary agreement when you’re a first-year versus being a fourth-year? I had to really pull it out of them.
And they said, “Well a first-year, I can edit it and get it in shape, but they don’t really understand the strategy of the deal and how that translates into different parts of the agreement.”
And I’d go, “OK, but a mid-level,” and they would kind of finish my sentence, “Well the mid-level understands how you tie in the goal of the deal and then how you draft it and whether you even need this clause at all, and when they give it to me it really should be done and need almost no editing.”
And I’m like, “OK, that’s what we put in then.”
So that was the goal of this book. I did more of the chapters myself, because I had done so much around the core competencies stuff and I had had so many interviews over a period of time.
There’s a lot on marketing, and doing your own client development plan, how to show you’re a future leader. There’s a lot on delegation, managing up, managing down at the same time.
We have a chapter on well-being. The goal here is really if we can help people get over that hump of being a mid-level, we’ll retain them longer.
Because this is when people leave.
Mid-level is when associates say, “I don’t know if I want this.”
I think with our typical focus on first-years, we forget mid-levels. The law firms that have looked at the book and said we’re going to get this for all our mid-levels, that’s pretty savvy to invest just this small amount of money in every mid-level.
I’ve talked to a couple firms that are doing the same thing where they’ve actually decided to do a mid-level series based on the chapters in the book.
Well, I appreciate you talking to me today. I think this is going to be a really good piece for the readers at ATL.
Excellent. There’s one more thing I’ll just add, which is I’ve been at Perkins Coie two years. I came less than a year before the pandemic. People often say to me that that was a bad time to move, having to deal with all this new work in a pandemic. But I moved because I really wanted to work at a top employer where they really, really valued their employees and attorneys.
Perkins had been on the Fortune best workplaces list for 19 straight years and it’s no accident. It was one of the very few firms that was on it. So that’s been a real point of dedication. And this year we were the No. 1 professional and consulting services firm. I think that goes to the point of really trying to be a good employer, and committing to your attorneys and employees.
That’s a big part of why I became an employment lawyer all those years ago.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].