Ways to avoid the meaning of being lonely

by David J Bilinsky

Life goes on as it never ends
Eyes of stone observe the trends
They never say, forever gaze...

Words and music by M Martin and H Crichlow
Recorded by The Backstreet Boys

You walk into the office, grab a coffee and decide to scan the newspaper as your introduction to the day. Let’s see – here is an article that says associate lawyer salaries have reached levels of $125,000 plus in Canada, $165,000 in the US. Interesting…here is another – law firms are hiring marketing directors at salaries of $150-400,000 per year – and that the demand exceeds the supply. Wait – here is a third – Chief Information Officers at law firms are paid $500,000 or more per year. There is one further article that catches your eye – an interview with someone who left a law firm to go into private industry. The interviewee commented on their frustration with lawyers and law firms to purchase, adopt and use current technology combined with attitudes that lawyers were qualified to make better business decisions than law firm’s Executive Directors and other non-legal professional staff. They felt stymied that the partners were willing to let them design marketing brochures and the like – but completely unwilling to let them have a voice in planning the strategic direction and resource application of the firm.

Increasingly today lawyers and law firms are being faced, often times abruptly, with the brave new world. Unless a lawyer has just emerged from practising on Venus, most of us could not have failed to notice that the practice of law has undergone remarkable changes in the last few years. Moreover, these changes, I believe, are just the tip of the iceberg relative to what lies ahead. Let us explore some of these changes relative to our practices today.

Talent
This is not just a big law firm problem. There is, and will continue to be, competition for talent for all sizes of firms, and for all types of jobs. Associates? Hard to hang onto when they are being wooed by New York, San Francisco and Toronto and the local (empty) firms come looking for replacements. Information technology people? Even harder – notwithstanding that the .com fever has cooled, there is still a huge demand for skilled IT people. Marketing types? Again, with a large demand in other industries, law firms are going to find it difficult to find and even more difficult to hang onto seasoned people.

Global
Law firms used to be distinct, at least in the skills and talent area. However, with the globalization of business, a marketing person can move from industry to a law firm or vice versa quite easily – especially so if they have acquired a fair bit of experience along the way. Playing in a global marketplace means learning that the sandbox rules have changed – not just in the competition for business but also for the competition for talent.

Value
Law firms have learned to search out and rely on experts from other professions when it comes to bringing forth the best evidence for our client before a court. Now as lawyers we have to learn that if we are going to continue to grow our businesses – then we are going to necessarily have to loosen up our control of our firms – and rely on marketing people, MBA’s and professional administrators to exercise their expert judgment in the running of our firms. To many this will be heresy, after all, as lawyers don’t we know what is best? The sad answer is no. We are skilled in the practice of law and we should follow the advice we give to our experts – not to stray outside of the area of our expertise. This will necessarily cause some consternation in legal boardrooms – but, let’s face it, we are much better off from an efficiency and effectiveness standpoint to do what we have been trained – and to value other professionals to follow their training – and let them assume at least an equal role in the running of our business. After all, that is what they do best, too.

Adapt
As many have said, the practice of law is no longer quite so much of a profession as it is a business. Our traditional partnership approach is to appoint lawyers to marketing committees, to management committees, to selection committees etc., and to force lawyers to split their time between committee duties and client responsibilities (with often no compensation for time spent on firm committee duties). Why? As Abbie Hoffman once said: “Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger”. How about a change in approach: incorporate the firm with a board of directors, hire an Executive Director (who is not a practicing lawyer) with appropriate professional management staff. Smaller firms can adapt as well. Convert the firm to the same structure as we advocate for our clients, namely the separation of ownership from management and from staff. Let lawyers sit on the board of directors and stop them from micro-managing the firm. The age of the beneficial despot is long past.

Spend Money
It is commonly known within the legal vendor community that lawyers are one of the hardest markets to get to invest in new technology, talent or ideas. To put it another way, we are known as being cheap. We expect our clients to pay for our talent (at rates that clients see as being outrageous) – yet we are very reluctant to spend our money on advice from others. There is certainly nothing wrong with trying to get as much out of an investment as possible – except where such thinking blinds us from appreciating the gains that can be achieved from new approaches, new technology and new ideas. When was the last time you considered bringing in new software such as case management, evidence analysis or document assembly? How about outsourcing the payroll? How could you gain an advantage or free up resources by doing so? For your reflection: Proctor and Gamble just outlined their 2000 Action Plan for Growth. What was #2 on that list? “Invest in Innovation”. What was #1 you ask? “Build Big Brands”. “Build”, “Invest” – not “Amortize our investment for maximum gains…..”

Develop Vision
Why are we in business? The usual answer is “To make money, of course!” Wrong answer. Purpose is the fundamental reason for a business’ existence beyond just making money. To have a purpose we need a vision – of not only what we are but of what we can become. Henry Ford in 1916 had more orders than he could fill and could have raised prices, but even in the face of a shareholder suit he kept reducing them. He also raised the pay rate for his workers to twice the standard rate. He was accused of “economic blunders if not crimes” by the Wall Street Journal. Yet he had a vision of allowing his workers to be able to buy his cars and he doggedly pursued this vision. Along the way he of course, made his fortune. But he also had a reason for coming into the office that was not centered on maximizing the bottom line. We should be asking ourselves why we are getting out of bed and into the office each day – do we have a higher goal in mind?

We need to seize the opportunities that are presenting themselves and rethink and rework the ways that we practice in light of our new vision for the practice of law – otherwise we will be shown the meaning of being lonely.

David J Bilinsky is the Practice Management Advisor at the Law Society of BC. Email: daveb@lsbc.org. The views expressed herein are strictly those of the author and may not be shared by the author’s employer, the Law Society of BC.

This article originally appeared in the October 2000 issue of BarTalk and is reproduced here with permission of both the author and the Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia Branch.