Digital delivery from the daily grind for younger lawyers

North American law firms have had an extraordinary pandemic. Most of the top commercial firms have experienced rocketing client demand, higher productivity, and record revenues and profitability.

But it has not all been rosy. Competition for talented lawyers has, according to many firms, become a war.

Talent strategies are at the forefront of most managing partners’ minds. While the campaign to attract and retain talent is being fought on the battlefields of associate remuneration, there is an increasing realisation that the war will be won elsewhere.

“We don’t say the ‘war for talent’, we say the ‘love for talent’,” says Ira Coleman, chair of McDermott Will & Emery. “And the most talented gravitate to this model.”

The firm ranked top in recent independent industry surveys of associate satisfaction by legal publications Vault, Chambers and The American Lawyer. Its strategy is to be as transparent as possible, to focus on better feedback systems, and constantly to assess the happiness — or otherwise — of associates, by means of monthly surveys.

You don’t measure success by how many hours you spend away from your family

“We are seeking . . . to really care about what [our people] want to do next in their lives,” says Coleman. “That’s something different to what other law firms are doing. We’re asking our partners to leave the place better than they found it.”

This approach is paying off in financial terms. The firm, which ranks 24th in The American Lawyer’s Am Law 200 list by revenues, has posted double-digit growth in revenues and profitability for the past three years.

Innovation is linked to mindset, says Coleman. Unlike McDermott Will & Emery’s peers, he says, “we use the words ‘fun’ and ‘happiness’. We want it to be that, if you pulled an all-nighter, you had as much fun as you could, because you have autonomy.” His view is that everyday work is enjoyable because of the collegial ties, autonomy and independence.

Other law firm leaders also stress the importance of an organisation’s traits.

“The past two years have been a wake-up call on culture,” says Kim Koopersmith, chair of Akin Gump. She is proud that her firm had already prioritised talent and culture in its business strategy before the pandemic struck. But she regards it as an opportunity to take stock of what to do differently, and what to retain.

Akin Gump had already instituted a work-from-home policy but, now, there is even more emphasis on making sure that associates are interested and fulfilled. “For me, part of the war for talent will be fought on money and making sure people aren’t burnt out,” Koopersmith says. “But at its core, it is how you treat people and whether they feel good about how they’re developing.”

Miguel Zaldivar, global chief executive of Hogan Lovells, echoes this. “We try to pay our people at levels [that] will keep them respected and appreciated, but they stay because of the culture,” he says. “We put a lot of time into keeping our culture.” A relative newcomer to the leadership role — he started in the job 18 months ago — Zaldivar says the new management team placed culture and purpose at the same level as profitability.

However, with Cravath, Swaine & Moore announcing increased bonuses in November across every level of associate — up to $115,000 for those with seven years’ experience — and other firms issuing “special” bonuses on top of regular payouts, the attractiveness of law firms’ culture will be tested to the limit.

Organisational culture is hard to define and maintain. But law firm leaders looking for ways to help retain associates appear to be focusing on better use of data and technology.

A profound shift in the way the top firms approach the digitisation of their services emerged from the law firm submissions to the FT Innovative Lawyers report for North America this year.

For overworked associates putting in, say, 80 hours a week, a move to greater digitisation of processes and interactions with clients can release some of the grind.

Even one of the more venerable firms, Shearman & Sterling, has instituted an entirely new data strategy and created a client-facing technology team to streamline how it delivers services, and to improve the legal advice it offers.

Few global law firms have taken such a root-and-branch approach to overhauling their collection, governance and analysis of data. Shearman & Sterling set up a new unit, Shearman Analytics, to provide data insights to complement the advice of the firm’s lawyers. The firm also improved the way it prices work and has become more efficient in managing operations and non-client facing activity.

“The pandemic brought home the benefits of technology. Law firms have to give up their past,” says David Beveridge, managing partner at Shearman & Sterling.

The benefit of active digitisation, he reflects, is that lawyers will become more like business consultants who solve legally based challenges.

“When you can do document review in an hour, as opposed to having 20 lawyers reading every document, it changes the business model [of a law firm],” says Beveridge.

“Older partners will believe that if you don’t suffer, you are not doing your job. But you don’t measure success by how many hours you spend away from your family.”