Case study: Consulting on careers

Simmons & Simmons is testing two initiatives designed to offer a more consultative approach to career progression and working patterns.

By Mark Dawkins, managing partner, Simmons & Simmons

The concept of ‘talent management’ is common in many industries and the world’s best run companies have sophisticated talent-management programmes. Law firms, by contrast, have tended to lag behind other business sectors, devoting much of their career development to continuing legal training for their lawyers, but neglecting the development of wider business skills, and often failing to provide lawyers with any real sense of a structure to their careers to fill the ever-growing gap between qualification as a solicitor and partnership.

This is ironic, as most law firms would recognise their principal asset is the knowledge and experience in the heads of their lawyers; and managing this asset should be seen as a business priority. Historically, however, it has been enough for law firms to concentrate on legal training. This has mainly been because the development of a lawyer (and the corresponding increase in the value each lawyer has
for the employing law firm) has depended almost entirely on the accumulation of experience through involvement in client work and the passage of time. Legal training has simply been seen as a way of supplementing the accumulated experience of client work. So long as lawyers were content with this relatively narrow field of development, and clients expected little more from their legal advisors, law firms had no pressing reason to change.

Times have changed though – for two main reasons. The first is the changing nature of client demands. Legal skills are often taken for granted, especially in firms with a strong reputation. Increasingly sophisticated clients are looking for more, although what that ‘more’ actually is also varies a lot. It might be better value; faster service; a more proactive service; a ‘partnering’ relationship; or a deeper understanding of the client’s business on the part of the lawyer. These needs place new demands on a lawyer, requiring the development of a wider set of skills than pure legal training.

The second root cause of change is the principal topic of this article. Although a more recent phenomenon, it has already started to have a significant impact on the attitudes of some law firms, as it stems directly from their principal assets: their people. It seems to be the case that the current generation of lawyers includes an increasing numbers of individuals who have different expectations of their careers and how those careers affect their lives generally. This change in expectations manifests itself in a number of ways, but the most obvious is the trend for growing numbers of lawyers to decide, perhaps three or four years after qualification, either to leave the legal profession completely or to leave private practice and go in-house. The trend is particularly prevalent among the largest law firms, and although the numbers of lawyers following this route are nothing like an exodus, the numbers are high enough for many law firms to start worrying about the loss of talent.

Addressing this question is of course complex, not least because it is an area where generalisations are particularly risky. My firm conducted a survey of its London-based legal staff earlier this year in order to gain some insight into their attitudes towards careers. It was a very valuable exercise. A significant proportion of respondents offered what might be regarded as a ‘conventional’ view. They said they were broadly happy with their lot, and aspired to partnership in the firm by whatever route would get them there quickly. A similar proportion, however, expressed a completely different view. While currently content, if they looked forwards a couple of years they were not sure what they wanted to be doing; and generally doubted whether they would want to be a partner in any law firm in the longer term. Other data indicated that people had a wide range of different expectations. The overall conclusion drawn was that we need to be more sophisticated and adaptable in our approach to the development of careers. A uniform and linear progression across the board will not be good enough in the future, because different lawyers have different expectations of the pace at which they want their careers to develop, as well as different expectations of the way in which work life integrates with private and family life. While it is open to law firms to ignore this, they do so at their peril because the best legal talent will start to gravitate to organisations that try to meet these expectations. We are treating this as a serious business issue, and have formulated a response that falls under two broad headings: the career structure of our lawyers, and the adaptability of those careers.

Career structure

As indicated above, the career path of a lawyer in a UK law firm has typically been linear and simple: a trainee qualifies, accumulates experience over a period of years as an associate, and after a relatively long period of time (perhaps five, ten or 15 years) may eventually cross the next and final threshold of career progression, namely partnership. However, three stages of progression (trainee, associate and partner) is not many in a career that may span 40 years. It might be fine for a young solicitor who is motivated by the prospect of partnership in the long term, but this is not the incentive that it once was.

Many law firms are having to restrict their access to partnership as a result of the pressures of competition and financial performance; and in any event, the pyramid structure of most law firms means that many good young lawyers see partnership as a very remote possibility. In the absence of alternative career paths complemented by a regime that encourages the development of a broad base of skills, they are bound to be thinking of looking elsewhere at some point.

This is something we are introducing. We have therefore developed a set of competencies based directly on the criteria we apply when considering a candidate for partnership. The rationale is that all lawyers should be developed in such a way that they grow the skills and attributes expected of partners (although of course, at different levels of experience we would expect different levels of competence). From an early stage in their careers (in fact as trainees) our lawyers are given guidance about the level of competence we expect from them covering a broad range of skills. These skills go far beyond legal training, however, including matters such as financial and technological acumen; leadership; communication; business awareness etc. Each lawyer is also given guidance on the milestones they should be aiming for and training to supplement that guidance.

This programme of development is linked to our existing appraisal framework, and lawyers therefore have continual feedback as to the progress they are making. When each lawyer reaches a certain stage of development (currently set at about four years post-qualification), he or she is invited to our Career Development Centre: an off-site event held for three days, during which each lawyer participates in a series of assessment, training and coaching sessions. The purpose of the centre is to conduct a thorough, collaborative review of the lawyers’ development and assist in producing a personal-development plan. This plan would typically chart the next two to three years of development; identify types of experience and competence that the individual wishes to acquire; and indicate how it will be acquired. With lawyers at this more advanced stage of development, we often find personal coaching in discrete areas is more valuable than training. Where it is needed we will therefore provide the individual with a coach.

The project is in its early stages, but we hope that as lawyers become more familiar with the system, they will gain a real sense of personal development in a broad range of skills for each year of their career, and that this will therefore go some way to filling the large void between qualification and partnership.

Career adaptability

The second broad area we are tackling is the adaptability of lawyers’ career paths. Many firms have operated flexible-working policies for some years, often allowing individuals to adopt different working patterns such as a four-day week or a nine-day fortnight. While these are important, there are signs many lawyers would welcome a broader range of less conventional options. As indicated earlier, our own research tells us ‘one size fits all’ careers may no longer be appropriate, and by the same token uniform patterns of flexibility are unlikely to be enough. Some lawyers have family commitments that might point to part-time working, fixed-hour working, or possibly term-time only working; and what they are looking for is likely to evolve as their children grow older. Other lawyers simply want to regain some control over their lives: they may work very hard, for long periods of time, under relentless pressure. Such lawyers may want the ability, for instance, to take what some refer to as ‘beach time’ between large deals. Others again may feel stale after three or four years of conventional working and decide they need a sabbatical.

It is clearly difficult for a law firm to respond to all these different needs and expectations. A law firm is there to serve its clients, and clients typically want the certainty of knowing that their established lawyer, or team of lawyers, will be available for the duration of a transaction. There is also good reason for this. The work that lawyers do is often complex, and the efficiency of a lawyer depends heavily on the accumulated knowledge an individual has acquired of a transaction or a client’s affairs over a period of time. Thus, a corporate lawyer, working on a set of listing particulars due for publication the next day, is unlikely to endear himself to a client by going home at 5pm just because that is what his working pattern permits him to do. Similarly, a commercial-litigation lawyer who exercises a right to take a three-month sabbatical two-thirds of the way through a long-running litigation case may well cause havoc with a client relationship.

In other words, the nature of the work many lawyers do is such that they are not easily interchangeable. To some extent this is changing, as law firms increasingly embrace the reality that parts of their practices are becoming commoditised and that the process of commoditisation is accelerated by technology. Where technology can be used to capture, manipulate and disseminate information, there are greater opportunities for firms to treat individual lawyers on a particular transaction as interchangeable, relying instead on technology and work-flow processes to provide clients with the continuity of service they expect. However, many law firms, including mine, are justly proud of the personal service provided. Technology and process are therefore not complete answers, although they may help to provide more scope for law firms to offer more adaptable working patterns to lawyers, and indeed all staff.

At this firm we are exploring these possibilities by piloting a concept we are calling ‘working time preferencing’. The concept is that, when an individual lawyer reaches a certain level of competence (say after three to four years of good experience) we will engage him or her in a candid dialogue about his/her plans and expectations over the next 12-month period. For many individual lawyers, nothing may change as a result of that dialogue. But a number of lawyers may indicate they have a desire, over the next 12-month period, to adopt a significantly different working pattern, such as term-time working, a sabbatical, working on a given number of deals, or another idea. This process of dialogue will be managed through practice groups with the responsible partners having conversations with each eligible lawyer at the beginning of a given year. The partners in the practice group will then make an assessment as to whether or not the firm can agree to none, some or all of the requests. At the end of the period the conversation will be repeated, and so it goes on.

From the point of view of the business, protection is afforded in two main respects. First, lawyers only become eligible for the ‘privilege’ when they have reached a certain level of experience and competence. Thus, there will always be a large pool of lawyers who are working conventional patterns. Second, the firm is not obliged to accede to any individual request; and if it does not do so, it should be in circumstances where the business reasons will be understood.

From the individual lawyer’s point of view, the obvious benefit is that he or she has the ability, at a certain stage of development, to adopt a radically different working pattern if that is what is wanted or needed; and then to revert to more conventional working patterns if and when personal circumstances change.

The thinking on this project has now reached a stage where the firm is launching a pilot in one large business group. Under this pilot we will set concrete milestones and objectives in terms of the lessons we want to learn. Of course it is possible we will decide such a scheme is not workable, or that there is not enough demand to make it worthwhile. I hope this is not the conclusion, however, as if successful it should set a new standard for the way in which the careers of lawyers can be structured.

Mark Dawkins is managing partner of Simmons & Simmons. He can be contacted at mark.dawkins@simmons-simmons.com