legal sanity

In preparing for an upcoming Harvard Law School program, I was reminded that today’s students are much more discerning consumers of information and ideas than they were back in my day. They take nothing at face value. And, thanks to the era of instant gratification, you must be prepared to capture their attention in just a few sound bites. If you don’t capture it, or if you otherwise fail to meet their consumer needs and expectations, they’ll check out on you, figuratively and, often, literally.

Although I enjoy engaging the energy brought by this new generation of lawyers, my guess is that it will present big issues for law firms built on a be quiet and pay your dues model of employee retention. I’ve previously discussed how the pay more, bleed more approach to law firm management and sustainability is flawed because fewer and fewer incoming lawyers will be willing to sacrifice the quality of their present lives for the possibility of a future partnership (especially when they can so readily see the personal toll that the partnership track takes on many firm leaders).

Penelope Trunk echoes this point in a post called Paying dues is so old school. She writes that, while people in leadership positions think that it’s important, “[p]aying one’s due is an antiquated idea in a workplace where few people aspire to climb the same corporate ladder for 45 [or, as in the law, even eight or nine] years. There’s simply no incentive to stick around and toil away in the hopes of one day attaining a life that seems rather lifeless.

Just as the up-and-coming generation of lawyers will likely shun dues paying as a viable business tenet, they’ll also refuse to tolerate any jerks they encounter in their law firms. Back in October, I wrote about Robert Sutton’s much-discussed book, The No Asshole Rule. Bruce MacEwen continues the conversation with a terrific post called The Care & Feeding of 800 Pound Gorillas. In it, he points out that, to date, the legal profession has largely tolerated “the jerks and a**holes in our firms” despite the morale sapped, loyalty eroded and careers derailed as a direct result. He also aptly notes that, while being a jerk may be contagious, each of us has the power and opportunity to stem the spread of this disease.

I agree with MacEwen. And I venture that, as the new generation of lawyers takes its foothold in the profession, the jerks and worse among us – and the firms that harbor them - will find themselves losing out due to natural selection.