Articles
View Associates’ Performance In Context
Law firm leaders say today’s associates are not committed to doing what it takes to be successful in a law firm. Though associates today bill more hours on average than their counterparts did in 1986 (1,850 vs. 1,750), the belief persists that today’s average associate is an uncommitted slacker. To be fair, expectations are partly driven by salary increases that have seen associate starting salaries double in that same time period. To amortize the increases and support ambitious per-partner-profit goals, billable hour targets have shot past the 1,750 mark of the 1980’s to hit highs of 2,100 in 2007—and those targets do not account for non-billable work expectations.
If you are expected to dedicate a total of 2,400 hours to your firm (as many associates are), assuming you have three weeks of leave, you would need to work 49 hours every week without fail. This doesn’t sound bad—especially when you consider the six-figure salaries and five-figure bonuses that these individuals accrue. But legal work is not factory work. Lawyers don’t stand on an assembly line adding clauses into contracts that pass by them for 10 hours, Monday to Friday. They are subject to down times where no work is available followed by crises of massive proportions that keep them working straight through days at a time. This balances out if there are enough crises to make up for the slow periods, but given the current market, many associates are seeing more downtime than they would like. If they don’t bill 49 hours one week, they have to work that much more the next week—and it doesn’t take too long to get behind. With bonuses and parts of base compensation often tied to hours billed, associates become concerned very quickly.
Add to this equation persistently inefficient project managers (senior associates and partners) who waste associates’ time, supervisors beholden to their own billable targets who hoard interesting work, a preponderance of mind-numbing (and physically isolating) work in the early years of a lawyers’ experience at the largest firms, and partners so embittered by the salary increases and firm’s expectations for their own productivity that they refuse to mentor or teach.
Are associates less committed to success or have firms sucked the life out of them, particularly during early years when the feelings that would drive commitment and loyalty come alive and should be nurtured? Many firm leaders believe that when they pay someone without work experience $160,000, they should have the right to expect a strong sense of self motivation and career commitment. Unfortunately, associates today are no savvier about being good employees than were associates 10 or 20 years ago. Like the partners who now supervise them, most new associates do not know exactly what they want to get from their law firm experience, how they want to practice, or whether they want to be partners. The critical difference is that the last generation of associates had junior associate experiences that allowed them to answer those questions in the early years of their life at the firm. They had the opportunity to work closely with senior lawyers on challenging projects (sometimes more closely than they wanted!) and develop personal relationships with those lawyers. They did document reviews and due diligence, but in communal work settings—working side-by-side with fellow junior associates and physically overseen by more senior lawyers. This enabled them to develop a collegial network of peers within the firm while they were learning technical and procedural skills. Were the senior lawyers of that time better at teaching and giving feedback? Unlikely—but they had many more opportunities to interact with junior associates and by virtue of that interaction share knowledge, clarify expectations, and express satisfaction or dissatisfaction (even if only in a facial gesture). And perhaps just as important, associates had a real opportunity to become a part of the social fabric of the firm. They developed relationships that became the foundation for loyalty.
