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New report on part-time partners in law firms

Cynthia Calvert, co-director of Project for Attorney Retention (PAR), sent me this new report [pdf] and an announcement about it. The announcement:

Part-Time Law Partners Succeed for Clients, Firms
New Study Shows Reduced Schedules No Bar to Financial Success

 

SAN FRANCISCO, September 23, 2009:  Throw away those preconceived ideas about part-time partners in law firms.  The Project for Attorney Retention (PAR), a leading voice on work-life balance and women’s advancement in the law, releases a ground-breaking study showing that part-time partners are remarkably successful: they are highly responsive to their clients, generate significant revenue, and are active leaders and role models within their firms.  “A decade ago, firms typically took part-time lawyers off partnership track,” said PAR Co-Director Joan C. Williams.  “Now, thanks to the efforts PAR and others to create non-stigmatized part-time programs, these lawyers became partners and this study shows the results: a win-win scenario for partners and their firms.”

“The conventional wisdom is that attorneys who cut back their hours cut back their careers.” said Cynthia Calvert, PAR’s co-director and one of the study’s authors.  “We

Blog Glob: "Lawyers Address Generational Tensions at Law Firms"

Excerpt:

How much time to spend at the office and how to research the law are questions that can cause tensions between different generations of attorneys at big law firms.

But technology and, now, the recession have changed the rules for all generations -- from those trying to establish careers at big firms to those trying to preserve them, said panelists at an event, "Four Generations in the Workplace," hosted by Fish & Richardson last week.

Click to read the rest of "Lawyers Address Generational Tensions at Law Firms" (Fulton County Daily Report).

Blog Glob: Work-Life Balance: So Last August?

Excerpt:

With the economy still in the tank and many law firms still struggling, has the legal profession lost sight of its quest for that elusive prize, work-life balance?

At Adam Smith, Esq., fellow Law.com blogger Bruce MacEwen recently bemoaned its disappearance. "Among the phrases, and phenomena, that now seem so hopelessly 'last August' is that of the fabled Work-Life Balance." Within the legal profession, MacEwen believes, work-life balance "waxes and wanes in synch with demand and supply in the lawyer talent market." More importantly, he suggests, the highest performing firms, the cream of the global crop, will never be lifestyle firms. High performance and work-life balance are simply incompatible, he contends.

Having shown his cards on the question, MacEwen put it to his readers, in the form of a poll. Now he has posted the results of that poll. Out of 170 votes, here is how they tallied on the question, "Work-life balance is":

Click to read the rest of Work-Life Balance: So Last August? (Legal Blog Watch).

Senior associate pens and sings song "Skadden, You Gladden My Heart"

Hear Stacy E. Kray sing her song by clicking here. What's the story behind the song? She wrote it in response to a challenge by Ben Hallman. From "Skadden, You Gladden My Heart" (Am Law Daily):

Hallman came up with the song challenge after writing last week about Skadden's win on behalf of Jon Bon Jovi and other parties who stood accused of stealing someone's song. You can read the full story about the case here and read Hallman's interview with Kray here. Hallman also helpfully shares the full lyrics, which include this gem:

Skadden, don't be angry with my song.
I penned it with time off the clock.

She has a nice voice, don't you agree? I like her song much better than Nixon Peabody's (see notes at that link for the NP song and lyrics).

Blog Glob: "Law firm partners practicing longer can create problems for associates"

Excerpt:

“The law firm paradigm is shifting,” says Andy Branham, manager of the Memphis office of Counsel on Call, a legal services placement firm. “The business model is not holding up that well.”

At the same time, Branham says many of today’s law school graduates are coming out less motivated about becoming partners in firms. They want more flexibility and have different motivations, he says, such as working for themselves, for smaller firms, in corporate jobs or jobs with more flexibility.

Without younger partners to help support and grow practices — combined with senior partners working longer — the resulting effect is a toxic brew with the potential for poisoning the profession.

“It’s very much in flux,” Branham says of the partnership structure industry-wide. “Everything is very dynamic right now.”

Click to read the rest of "Law firm partners practicing longer can create problems for associates" (Memphis Business Journal).

"Law Firm Levity Is Good for Your Health" - Three benefits of humor for lawyers

Here's an article I wrote several years ago for my law school alumni magazine. I begin:

A comic's nightmare is to realize the whole audience is composed of engineers, police, or lawyers. These three professions are reputed to be low on the sense-of-humor scale. Funeral directors are often ranked down there, too. And law firms often have the quiet somberness of a mortuary.—not much merriment goes on in busy law offices.

Fun and play are often considered unprofessional, yet absence of humor is a problem for the legal profession. Merry barristers are successful lawyers. Humor has many extraordinary benefits for people practicing law—three are briefly described here.

Click to read the rest of "Law Firm Levity Is Good for Your Health" (Santa Clara Law, 2001, winter/spring).

Blog Glob: "Law firms contend with new form of info leakage: Blogs"

Excerpt:

It wasn’t that long ago that law firms would only have to worry about the spread of office gossip when sensitive news was announced internally.

But today, leaked internal documents to blogs such as Above the Law have changed the way law firms disseminate news internally. This strategy has kicked into high gear as law firms have been forced to announce a lot of bad news in the past year.

...

Sites like Above the Law have been airing the profession’s dirt — from layoffs and slashed salaries to more edgy personal information about certain partners.

...

But since the recession hit home for the legal industry last fall, the blog has filled a niche not often served in the large law firm world. It has removed some of the public relations machine from the equation.

...

“About five years ago, we wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the press got a hold of information,” [Topper] Ray said. “But now it’s almost like you are posting a memo directly on the Internet.”

Click to read the rest of "Law firms contend with new form of info leakage: Blogs" (Philadelphia Business Journal).

Is teamwork overrated? Maybe for lawyers

The authors of I Hate People! are not big fans of teams in the workplace. I agree with them to a certain extent and believe teams are often used unwisely, particularly with lawyers, and have written about teams in law firms before. From my post The profession of half-empty glasses: The unique personalities of lawyers and an antidote:

In my article "Team-Building Frenzy Reaches Law Firms," [pdf] I talk about what I learned from Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation (and later from the Highlands Assessment Battery) about the lawyer's need for autonomy, critical approach, and competitiveness.

And now an excerpt from "Troubles in Cubicles," a Wall Street Journal review of I Hate People!:

Littman and Hershon [the authors] insist that contemporary corporate America puts too much emphasis on teamwork. "Four decades ago, Fortune did a study of the most valued characteristics in an employee. The magazine found that teamwork was ranked tenth. . . . Jump forward to 2005, and Fortune's follow-up survey showed that teamwork had climbed to #1."

Teamwork, the authors say, suffocates creativity and has its own limitations. They describe a classic experiment done nearly a century ago by French agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann. He

Hot, cool and cold worms: A contrarian look at work-life balance and so-called "workaholism"

 Positions all along the work-life balance (WLB) continuum can coexist. There will be those who want to work hard and serve the client well and they have the right—and responsibility—to populate their firms with others embracing that same work ethic. Those who want to take life a bit easier will find havens where they can balance their needs with that of the client.

I get exasperated when those in the latter group, the WLB people, want to work in the former firms. I hear some WLBers shouting, "I am different; you change." No wonder the debate is so heated.

In the legal profession, we see lawyers of different temperaments and with varying ideas of what it means to be a member of a service profession. Yes, they can coexist, although maybe not in the same firms. Hot worms and cold worms may not belong in the same pond.

What's this about hot worms? Last year TRIAL magazine contacted me to write an article for their edition on work-life balance. They wanted me to write from the contrarian point of view, putting together some of my thoughts from past blog posts. The article I wrote is called "What we can learn from hot worms, or why it's okay to be a 'workaholic'." I link to it with permission. They asked me to include this:

Reprinted with permission of TRIAL (December 2008). Copyright American Association for Justice, formerly Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA®).

Let me know what you think of the article, please.

Article about a presentation on generational differences: If only it were this simple

I am guessing and hoping that the program described in this article was not as simplistic as it might appear from reading. Nevertheless "In-House Lawyers Discuss Pitfalls of Generation Gaps" (In-House Counsel) reminded me of how easy it can be to fall into mindless stereotypes of the generations.

From the article:

Ben F. Johnson III, the recently retired managing partner of Alston & Bird who has been with the firm for 37 years, didn't buy all of the talk about generational diversity. He took exception to being lumped into a category with everyone born between 1900 and 1945. "What do Dick Cheney, Jane Fonda and Joan Baez have in common?" he asked. "Well, they were all in the '60s."

While stereotypes can sometimes be helpful, it is very important to be alert to triggering confirmation bias, that is observing only that which confirms what we already believe. And part of avoiding confirmation bias is to examine our stereotypes on a regular basis. What do you believe about each of the generations now in the legal workplace?