The Complete Lawyer

In early October, I watched Charlie Rose interview Warren Buffett. When the richest man in the world speaks about the US economy, it’s worth listening. Clearly, the stock market is not only down but hasn’t yet hit bottom. Attorneys, like most all other business people and workers, must take care. They need to value their human capital as well as themselves to both survive and thrive.

Victoria Pynchon: I Remember Five Principles During Tough Economic Times

These are hard times and none of us is immune. I’ve been here before. In the early 1990s, my law firm announced we would ride out the economic crisis by henceforth buying legal pads without our firm name embossed on the binding. Layoffs of partners, associates and staff quickly followed. Some caught life rafts to other law firms; some were not so lucky. Those who stepped on others going up the compensation ladder were not treated well on their way back down. The water was cold and filled with sharks.

It seemed then, and seems now, that the entire profession has forgotten two critical principles of legal practice: clients, not profits, come first; and, partners see one another through the tough years in the same manner in which they share the profitable ones. Because people (our clients, our colleagues and our staff) are our only assets, I have five people-centered tips for surviving, perhaps even flourishing, in this challenging economic environment.

1. Listen more than you talk. I learned this from the General Counsel of a major international petroleum company. Here’s what he said. “As a business man, I am not interested in the law. I am interested in my business. If you’re talking, you’re not learning what you need to know to help my business succeed. Here’s what too many lawyers do not understand. I do not have legal problems. I have business problems with legal issues. If you don’t understand my business, you cannot solve my problem and I will not hire your firm no matter how prestigious it might be.”

2. Use litigation as an opportunity to negotiate a business deal. In hard economic times, GC’s are not in the “millions for defense but not a penny in tribute” mood. Google’s GC Eric Schmidt famously said that litigation is “just a business negotiation being conducted in the courts.” The more working parts any potential business deal has, the easier it is to find solutions that benefit both parties in different ways. Before we can explore the most effective and efficient business solution to a commercial problem, we must shed our merits-based resolution blinders and explore the parties’ commercial interests. One of the swiftest means of doing so is bringing the decision-makers on both sides to the planning, problem-solving and bargaining table. If the parties agree that these brain-storming sessions can be considered “mediations” you can avail yourself of state or federal confidentiality protections. Then let the business people do what they do best: plan for a productive future rather than fighting about an unproductive past.

3. Innovate, don’t litigate. This, along with “don’t sue your own market” is the foundation of Sun MicroSystems’ dispute resolution strategy. Now that technology and the economy are moving faster than the adversarial process, it’s time for litigators to follow suit by creating something new through study and experimentation, which is the very definition of “innovate.”

4. The new economy is more about being nimble than it is about being “right.” Though there’s often more money in war than there is in peace, war destroys where peace builds. Take a deep breath, close your eyes and dare to pretend that you’ve already produced, collected and coded a million-plus documents, taken weeks of deposition testimony and confirmed it’s the view of your case that you had when suit was filed. Now what? It’s time to negotiate a durable resolution to a predictably expensive and protracted piece of litigation

5. Though often ascribed to Warren Buffet, it was Fairfax M. Cone, one of the pre-eminent advertising men of the last century, who famously said that our human capital goes down the elevator every night and must be given good reasons to come back the next morning.

There’s no greater object lesson for modern legal practice than the recent and sudden catastrophic collapse of Heller, Ehrman, which temporarily forgot the first law of all business enterprises—the top rests on the middle and the middle is supported by the bottom. As a college friend with eight brothers and sisters once explained family management—“the Bigs took care of the Middles and the Middles took care of the Littles.”

As that great purveyor of early American wisdom, Benjamin Franklin advised, “we must hang together, gentlemen…else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.”

Gini Nelson: Support Team Members By Giving Them What They Need To Be Successful

For most people, conflict is very stressful. We’ve heard the warning “stress kills.” Short of that, it also steals valuable time, money and energy away from both a productive business and a meaningful life. On your own office team, you probably devote valuable time heeding the “hidden costs of conflict,” mediating disputes, and dealing with absenteeism, unnecessary turnover, and grievance filing, which are the prime indicators of workplace conflict according to John Ford of John Ford & Associates, Oakland, California. Instead, we focus on conflict’s direct costs—legal fees paid when conflicts escalate, and increased insurance costs due to theft and sabotage.

When I first sat on the board of directors of a nonprofit organization, back in the early 1990s, we focused our energy on raising significant amounts of money. I’d never known many rich people and wasn’t experienced in or skilled at social networking. The discussion focused primarily on fundraising through conventional nonprofit activities and outreach. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be very good at that. I’m still not. But I am good at systematically analyzing projects and developing creative options. I urged, in effect, the board to undertake an expenditures audit of the organization, including looking at energy conservation. How could we become more efficient, how could we save money, how could we reduce our costs? Clearly I did not advocate my position effectively because there was very little discussion and no one seconded my suggestions. The conventional efforts went forward. In the end, I’m sure my suggestions would not have freed up the quantities of resources needed for the Board’s project. At the same time, they might have freed up some resources; the process might have triggered other, creative options; and I might have felt more appreciated by the board and stayed on longer than I did.

What does this anecdote illustrate?

• Different people are good at different things
• People often achieve better results when they do what they are good at instead of what they are not good at
• People often want to do their work successfully
• People often feel bad if their work product is not good
• Most people want to be seen and appreciated
• People tend to leave an organization if they feel they are not good at what they are doing, their work product is not good, their ideas and efforts are not acknowledged and appreciated, and that they are not appreciated.

Put another way, people tend to leave an organization when they feel that they are not valued there.

Savvy lawyers value their human capital. Valuing people does not mean the firm fails to require people to do the work they’re hired to do, fails to supervise how well they do it, or fails to discipline where necessary. It means the firm supports all members of the team by giving them what they need to do a job they’re good at. If you require people to do what they are not good at, or if you cannot give them the tools they need to do it well, tell them you know you are sending them into the game with one hand tied behind their backs, and that you will appreciate their efforts no matter what the outcome. And mean it.