COVID has emphasised a law firm’s most valuable asset is its people. It’s not something law firms are traditionally known for – being people-first organisations. Nope, metrics, billable hours (often ridiculous hours), tend to be the prevailing view, particularly at the big end of town.
And yet, the shared experience of the adversity and uncertainty of COVID and having to interact online, with kids and pets scurrying around in the background or interrupting meetings, has been a real leveller.
To talk of silver linings might be a little premature or possibly glib, but there has been something quite heartening about the new emphasis on the welfare of people, both physical and mental, which has always been a challenge for law firms.
In the last year I’ve never had so many conversations with lawyers about the welfare of team members and how to support and encourage resilience. And real resilience conversations that seek to provide help and assistance, not the sort of conversation that gets an awkward silence or is outsourced to HR.
Or worse, resilience used as a fix-it to help team members deal with toxic leadership; the implication being: you’re the problem, not the leader. You need to be more resilient.
Adversity and necessity provide a nice catalyst for change. Leadership styles have had to adapt. The key is finding a way to cement these changes, and to place a greater emphasis on employee engagement and welfare.
You could argue this is largely cultural; it’s the culture that needs to change, but it’s important not to ignore the partnership structure of law firms and its metrics as a driver of certain behaviours.
Metrics like billable hours, utilisation, self-originated fees, etc. These metrics can be measured, so they are. But do they reflect what lawyers value or simply what can be measured? Are they even the best measure of high performance?
There is a cognitive dissonance when it comes to metrics: on the one hand we tend to measure what we value. And yet it is also true we measure what we can, not necessarily what we value most. It’s not too hard to find a toxic partner hitting all the metrics and getting the financial rewards. Yet, most of the lawyers I come across like to work with people they respect and admire; they don’t want to be the toxic partner or work with the toxic partner.
Much has been done to eradicate the extremes of this dissonance, but the significance given to financial metrics remains. It’s how profit is determined, it’s the ultimate judge. Yet while most of my clients are smashing the metrics, some with utilisation figures that have me scrambling to work out if there are actually that many hours in a month; dig a little, delve a little and the drivers, the things that get them out of bed, that give them joy, that they value most almost never touch on metrics.
Metrics are a necessary evil. A measure of aspects of their work. We should treat them with little more suspicion.
Or maybe it’s about the sort of metrics being used. Give a little more focus to the other measures like employee engagement, mental wellbeing, job satisfaction.
You show what you really value as a firm in what you measure for promotion and for leadership positions. This can stand in stark contrast to the aspirational values of diversity and inclusion, or wellbeing and talk of culture.
Promote to a leadership position the partner who is the biggest fee earner, and you send the message loud and clear. This is what counts. Or put on the partnership promotion panel the partner with a reputation of churning through the senior associates and you show what you value. Actions speak much louder than words.
This is the challenge for law firms: backing up the PR on employee engagement, connectedness and wellbeing with reality; and that isn’t a cynical view, all change has to start somewhere, and until you get a groundswell of change you get some inevitable virtue signalling.
The fact is not all the things that bring value can be directly measured, those things like quality conversations, relationships and good hands-on leadership, much of which are too often still called, the “soft skills”.
It is through the prism of the COVID experience that law firm leaders can better view their traditional metrics. In short, placing a greater emphasis on valuing people because they are people, not a commodity that can be squeezed into a metric and rated.