Building upon the innovations of yesterday’s and today’s law firm
February 29, 2008
Managing the firm
When Katz started practicing law, the biggest Chicago law firms had between 100 and 150 lawyers.
Today, Mayer Brown, for example, has over 500 lawyers in its Chicago office and about 1,800 around the world, he said.
Lawyers in today’s large law firms commonly work with colleagues in firm offices around the country or world.
“The idea of a law firm with several lawyers getting together and practicing in this small collegial way has ceased to exist,” Katz said. “Law firms are big businesses. We have people who are full-time managers.
“The concept of a billion-dollar-plus business run by people with other jobs who get together once in a while, doesn’t make sense.”
Landow-Esser, from Quarles & Brady, said partners were typically not questioned about how much money they spent on bringing in new business. And decisions often benefited an individual versus the firm as a group, she said.
“[Law firms] now recognize that they have to be centralized,” she said. “They need to have more controls over how law is practiced, who is staffing what cases, and how we are marketing to clients to showcase the full range of talents instead of one individual.”
Building networks used to be easier when firms were smaller, said Fontaine, from Mayer Brown. Networking must now be institutionalized because firms have grown.
Marketing a practice used to be an individual endeavor, but law firms have learned that “you hunt more successfully as a pack,” she said. Clients expect lawyers to coordinate with each other and bring the best talent to the table.
“[Law firms] used to be like a clubby fraternity. It’s more like a business now,” Fontaine said. “I think that is a good thing, because I’m not the kind of person who would have made it into the club.
“The challenge is for law firms to organize around principles other than who had the best year last year. Pay attention to the longer-term strategy, and retain talent over the long term,” she said. “What keeps me in the firm is, I feel like there is a good platform. I also feel very connected to the people I’ve been working with all these years.”
Greater size and more locations require firms to bring in more management expertise, said Bricker, from Jenner & Block.
When he started practicing law, there weren’t the range of considerations that there probably should have been about areas like diversity, he said. But many law firms today take a leadership role in these areas.
Firm managers place greater emphasis on lawyers’ public responsibility to give back to the community, Bricker said. More need exists today for lawyers to help those who are disadvantaged and who cannot afford legal help.
Ropski, from Brinks, said law firms mostly consisted of lawyers - except for accountants and secretaries. Today, firms also employ non-lawyers like chief financial officers, chief technology officers, and chief marketing officers.
“You had lawyers running the firm,” Ropski said. “A lawyer maybe became chief administrative partner and that lawyer would handle the hiring and firing issues, the human relations issues and oversee financial issues. That lawyer could do that in addition to his full-time practice because those issues weren’t as complex as they are today.”
Many large firms have adopted an “eat what you kill approach,” and encourage their lawyers to compete against each other, said Kohn, from Goldberg Kohn.
“In many firms this business approach has overshadowed, in many cases, the collegiality and partnership approach that used to exist or that was much more prevalent when I started practicing law,” he said. “Fortunately our firm takes the old-fashioned approach of not counting business.”
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