Recently in Practice Group Management Category

Unfortunately, I've seen, up close and personal, law firms that suffered serious setbacks-or even failed outright-due to what could only be called "failure of succession planning."

What brings this to top-of-mind prominence is of course everyone's obsessive issue namely The Great Reset we're still experiencing, with an environment unlike anything current managing partners and senior leaders have ever seen before. If your firm is soon to be looking towards a new firm chair (by clicking of the term limitation clock or otherwise), you would be extremely well advised to think about succession planning.

A word about term limits: First, I'm of mixed mind about them. Second, I'm against them. Yes, I see and understand the attraction of wanting an institutionalized way to instill fresh blood, and sclerosis is an organization-killer second to almost no other. I have also seen more than one firm blessed by a gifted leader who had to step down after the allotted eight (or whatever) years, only to be succeeded by a relatively inept compromise-choice who at best oversaw a period of treading water for the firm and who at worst led to its actual implosion (no kidding).

But if the incumbent is doing a great job, knows how to do it, remains fresh and energized and challenged by the job, and finally and most importantly continues to maintain the good will and enthusiastic endorsement of the partnership, why stop a good run short? Ultimately, the cure for a super-annuated leader is for someone to challenge them and win. When the time has come, my prediction is reliably that it won't be that hard.

Back to succession planning.

McKinsey has now stoutly weighed in on this evergreen topic, hanging their story on what journalists like to call a "peg":  Ken Lewis' announcement that he would be stepping down as CEO of Bank of America, with no remote plans for an actual successor in sight. And if you're feeling defensive right around now that your firm has no concrete succession plans in place, McKinsey reports that while 84% of directors believe such planning is more important than ever, only half actually have a plan in place.

Here's the diagnosis and, to some extent, the prescription:

So why doesn't succession planning get the attention it deserves? For CEOs, spotting the talent that will eventually replace them can be an unwelcome intimation of executive mortality. For boards, bringing up the succession can feel awkward when things are going well. When they are not, it can feel like a threat. But these are excuses, and not particularly good ones.

When CEO succession is a regular, structured process that forms part of the board's agenda, it becomes a matter of routine, no more sinister than the annual compensation review. In fact, boards should view CEO succession as a strategic process intimately related to corporate performance. To that end, succession planning should include not only the CEO's job but also all mission-critical positions in the organization.

Now, you don't have a "board," but presumably you have an Executive Committee or the functional equivalent. And de-fanging the process by extending it to include all "C-suite" executives and practice group leaders should also help.

The next question is: What are you looking for?

Let's start with your firm's strategy.

You need someone, to state the obvious, who buys into the espoused strategy. With a vengeance: Lip service won't cut it. And you might even want to think about bringing in an outsider for a dispassionate view:

The board and the CEO must therefore agree on the company's future strategy and the competencies it will require and then agree on how they will be assessed and evaluated in the candidate selection process. If succession planning reveals a fundamental misalignment within the senior leadership team, that discovery can be a blessing in disguise if it happens early on.

One Fortune 500 company, for example, engaged an independent third party to interview each of its directors as part of the succession process. It learned that there were diverse opinions among the directors on whether the company should continue to pursue an aggressive acquisition strategy, which had been the primary vehicle for growth, or focus during the next few years on integrating the most recent acquisitions. This finding resulted in an open discussion between the board and the incumbent CEO. In the end, they jointly agreed that while a near-term focus on integration was critical, the company also needed a measured M&A strategy for future growth, and therefore a CEO with proven competence in M&A.

The McKinsey piece goes on to describe whether it's optimal to only look inside the firm (never!) or to explore another option altogether:

The second component requires looking outside the company to map and benchmark the talent market. How do our people compare? Who might be available? Companies that fail to ask these questions can become myopic, thinking that they have the talent they need when they don't.

The day a law firm does this, of course, will be the day we all know that we have truly grown up as a professionally managed and sophisticated industry. Or else we will have lost our souls. Uncharacteristically, I remain on the fence about that. But those of you following at home can think about it.

Lastly, how about a dose of reality about how this is all really done today? And how would that be? By process of elimination, of course. Our next Managing Partner needs to be:

• Not too young and not too old;
• From a significant practice area in the firm;
• From a major office in the firm, if not historical headquarters itself;
• Exceptionally well regarded as a practitioner;
• With a high record of billable hours, origination credits, and business generation;
• Who has mentored some associates who have become successful;
• And who doesn't have significant cohorts of the firm aligned defiantly against him/her.

Once you eliminate folks not able to slip through all of those gates, you generally find yourself with a very short list indeed. Actually, it often has just one name on it.

Scientific it ain't, but that seems to be how we typically do this.

Could we do it better?

Need we do it better?

The next few years will test firms, I submit, as they have never been tested before in living memory.

Succession planning deserves a bit more respect. Just a thought.

Turbulent..  Challenging.  Unprecedented.  Once-in-a-career event.  Paralyzing.  Opportunity. 

However you want to characterize the period we've experienced and are still working our way through and out of--and shall be, I predict, for a few more years--if it has served a salutary purpose, and it has, it's been opening firms' senior leadership's minds to the possibility of "thinking different."

Welcome to Game Theory.

Game theory, codified it not invented by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944 (Theory of Games and Economic Behavior), has grown to encompass the analysis of interactions between individual actors in complex socioeconomic contexts which tend to resemble markets:

• Interactions among the players are repetitive; that is to say, it's not a one-time only encounter or a sort of sudden-death overtime.  This is important because it introduces the notion of maintaining and enhancing one's reputation.  Scorched-earth tactics and burning bridges are, shall we say, suboptimal.
• Each actor is presumed to be rational, at least insofar as they can see their own self-interest--
• But their own self-interest anticipates others' reactions to their own choices, decisions, and "moves."

Grossly oversimplified presentations of game theory--more by way of caricatures than presentations--have become standard fodder for MBA courses, typically in the form of the classic "prisoner's dilemma," with unrealistic but theoretic-model-friendly assumptions such as: the prisoners can't communicate; the game is never repeated; each can give only one answer at one point in time, etc.

Needless to say, the real world involves immeasurably more dynamic,more multi-player, and more protracted in time, considerations than the textbook prisoner's dilemma. 

So what use can game theory possibly be?

Our reliable friends at McKinsey have attempted to answer this question, in "Making Game Theory Work for Managers," which advertises itself as nothing less than an attempt to "generate answers representing the best compromise between risks and opportunities in all likely futures."

How successful are they?

Here are some of the dilemmas faced in trying to adapt theoretical game theory to the senior leaders' real-world role:

• Striking the appropriate balance between simplification of a problem to make it manageable vs. retaining enough complexity so that it's relevant.
• The extremely detail-oriented nature of any particular hypothetical exercise in game theory --our good professors call this "sensitivity to initial conditions."
• The preference of theory to generate a single monolithic predicted outcome rather than an array of more and less probable, more and less favorable, possibilities. 
  
  

(Digression:  If I were asked the classic nasty/aggressive interview question, "What's your greatest fault?," and had been administered truth serum, I suspect I'd blurt out that I don't like to state the obvious.  Because....it's obvious.  I much prefer to dwell in the land of nuance and greys rather than black and white.  Of course, this is a signal failing if you cannot assume, as I do but is often not the case at all, that your interlocutor shares the same premises you do as to exactly what's "obvious" and what isn't.)

The new and more dynamic model discussed in the McKinsey piece claims to improve upon the artificially constrained textbook model as follows:

 Instead of predicting a single outcome, with all factors balanced, the model first generates a narrow set of strategic options that can be adjusted to account for changes in various assumptions. Instead of solving an individual game, the model automatically involves a sequence of several games, allowing players to adjust their actions after each of them, and finds the best path for different combinations of factors. As one result, it supports executive decisions realistically by presenting managers with the advantages and disadvantages of the strategic options that remain at each stage of the progression. In a second step, the model finds the "best robust option," considering its upside potential and downside risks under all likely scenarios, assumptions, and sensitivities as time elapses. This approach is different from attempts to look for equilibrium in an artificially simplified world.

Are you thinking, about now, that these are generalizations that have little but platitudinous application to any issues you're actually facing today?

In fact the authors essentially admit as much by saying that "The best way to understand the model is to examine it in action," and proceed to present their case study of having worked with the deregulation of the European railway network.  Starting this very month (January 2010), cross-border passenger service will be fully open to competition in the EU.  Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the UK have expanded on that by opening long-distance domestic passenger rail service to competition as well.

The first lesson to take away from this is that every market is very much its own.  Every market, that is, is highly specific.  Context matters.  History matters.  (In the case of rail, of course, geography matters.)  So think about what follows not in terms of one-to-one correspondence with challenges you might be facing, but as illustrative of a way of thinking about moves you might make and competitors and clients might make, in turn. 

Indeed, if there is one single notion I'd like to implant in your thinking with this column, it's the power of dynamic as opposed to static analysis. 

By that I simply mean that if you take Action X, the marketplace, clients, and your competition do not stand still.  In the military's inimitable phrase, "The enemy gets a vote."  (Dwight Eisenhower, or George Patton, or Douglas MacArthur [take your pick--attributions vary] said that "no battle plan survives its first encounter with the enemy.")   Static analysis would assume the environment is, well, static. Guess again.

So, to more on the European passenger rail market.

What might entrants to this newly deregulated industry anticipate?

Price wars are certainly a possibility.  On the other hand, network effects are very important to customers in rail service.  Not can you get me point-to-point, but how thick and dense is your network?  The ability to get to an extremely wide variety of destinations on one carrier (presumably for a favorable price) is not to be gainsaid. 

The analysts posit four main avenues of attack for new entrants:

• Meet incumbents on their own terms, by providing nearly identical service.
• Attack, by providing more frequent or cheaper service.
• Specialize, with a niche service such as high frequency at peak hours.
• Or differentiate themselves with an offering focusing on, say, leisure travelers who are very price-sensitive, but who don't care about cheaper, slower, older rolling stock, or conversely going for the high-end with premium, "business class only" high-speed luxury service.

As for the incumbents, they too have a range of options:

• Ignore the newcomers.
• Try to mimic their offerings and hope to prevail through greater brand-name recognition.
• Take the offensive by undercutting cheaper competitors on price, over-delivering vis-a-vis luxury competitors on service, and reinforcing networks and "hub and spoke" models.

Then there's a third level of dynamic change going on. How is the market, overall, evolving?  Again, there's an array of possibilities:

• Overall demand changes:  If rail service improves (in the eyes of travelers), car and plane trips will, relatively speaking, decline.  Trains will gain market share.
• Cost differentiation.  While newcomers may initially have cost advantages (fewer legacy costs), incumbents often enjoy economies of scale.  Which side of the balance beam prevails is highly context-specific.
• Network advantages.  Incumbents almost invariably have more mature and extensive networks (office platforms and practice areas).  This is difficult for newcomers to surmount unless customers demonstrate a preference for the boutique approach.
• And price sensitivity.  What, in economese, is the "price elasticitiy" of demand for your services?  You better hope that it's very low indeed (that is to say, that clients are highly insensitive to rates and fees, and that they perceive your firm's services as valuable with little regard to cost.

So what can we conclude?

Intriguingly, one of the most powerful and "robust" (as academics like to say) findings of the McKinsey study was this:

"When we run the European passenger rail model through an array of different situations, a critical factor appears to be the way demand reacts to liberalization. Will the new offerings seduce travelers to take trains rather than cars or jetliners, or will overall demand remain stagnant, leaving rail companies to battle for an unchanged pool of customers?"

Why do I highlight this?

Because we tend not to think this way.

But what if changes to the BigLaw business  model, including the possibility of increased demand for BigLaw services in lieu of substitutes, could actually increase our market share, as it were?  What are those "substitutes?"  In-house counsel, most obviously.  But also, and increasingly, outsourcing vendors located everywhere from downtown Manhattan to Bangalore and Fargo, North Dakota.  Why should our instinct be to run up the white flag in the face of this brave new competition?  We shouldn't be so shy, or callow, or scared.

---

The basic message is clear:  Think about what you might do.  Then think about what other firms will do.  Then think about what clients will do. 

Repeat.

Speaking of interesting conferences in New York, on Monday, February 1st, from 1:00--5:00 pm, LexisNexis is hosting a "Business of Law" Symposium at the New York Hilton, Sixth Avenue @ 53rd Street, home of the annual LegalTech confab, which this flies under the flag of.

Why do I mention it?

Because I'm giving the keynote, called Economic & Strategic Perspectives on the Current Environment, and I'll also be moderating the three subsequent hour-long panels, on:

• Knowledge Management:  How technology can drive competitive differentiation.
  
  
• New Structures for the New World?:  Addressing what components of the conventional law firm business model might need to change, including:
  • Associate career paths
  • Alternative fee and billing models
  • Revenue and profitability models
  • Lateral recruitment, and improving the batting average, and
  • Law student recruiting--taking on the NALP menace
    
    
• Future Strategies:  If growth for growth's sake is no longer the universal solvent we once perceived it to be, what new strategies are plausible, effective, and needed in the marketplace? 

If I may say so, we've also recruited some top-drawer talent for the panels, including Harry Trueheart, Chairman of Nixon Peabody, Bill Bachman, Chief Operating Officer of Bingham McCutchen, Sally King, Regional Chief Operating Officer of Clifford Change, Aric Press of The American Lawyer, David Lat of Above the Law, Oz Benamram, Chief Knowledge Officer at White & Case,and Saul Rosenberg, Director, Knowledge Operations, McKinsey & Company--as well as many talented others.

Bonus for attendees:  Audience members will be given wireless polling devices allowing you to vote anonymously and see the results displayed in charts at the front screen in real time.    Accordingly, each session will feature several questions for the audience designed to enlighten, or perhaps uncover latent inconsistencies in attitudes.

There's no special charge for the event:  More info here. 

Hope to see you there!

What's going on at Reed Smith?

Less than a week ago, they announced a roughly 20% cut in first-year associate salaries and hourly billing rates for the 50-odd lawyers joining the firm in January 2010. Here's what they had to say about it (emphasis supplied):

"In response to our clients' feedback and concerns about driving down the cost of legal services, we wanted to send a clear message that we are listening.  So, we have therefore reduced both the rates and the salaries of our incoming first year associates" said Gregory  B. Jordan, Reed Smith's Global Managing Partner.  "We have also launched a new competency based development program to better prepare our new lawyers to meet the needs of our clients."

Annual starting salaries for the new associates beginning in January 2010 will range from $130,000 in major markets such as New York City, Chicago, California, and Washington, D.C. (down from a high of $160,000 in 2008), to $110,000 in Pittsburgh, PA.  These actions solely involve the new associates entering the firm's U.S. offices.  Salary levels for 2010 newly qualifying lawyers in the firm's European, Middle Eastern and Asian offices will be determined in the normal course of business during 2010. 

"Our new U.S. starting salaries represent a reasonable and appropriate reset based on today's economic environment," said Eugene Tillman, the firm's Global Head of Legal Personnel. "We believe this will put Reed Smith in a stronger business position in a changing marketplace while still providing fair compensation to our new associates."

Billable hour expectations were also cut for 1st-years from 1,900 to 1,700/year (just over 10%), with the shaved time being devoted to training.

But the remarks I've highlighted go virtually all the way to explaining what's going on, I believe: The firm wants to try to get out in front of client expectations (and demands) for economies in legal expense, and they're targeting a hot button--the high salaries and low/nonexistent competency levels of junior associates. Will it work? Silly question: This is a buyer's market for junior associate talent the likes of which most of us still alive and breathing have never seen. Young associates have zero bargaining power (OK, Rhodes Scholars/Supreme Court clerks/NFL wide receivers excepted, as always).

Will it become universal? Don't hold your breath. As Jordan astutely notes elsewhere (at least I think it's astute since I happen to agree with him emphatically),

In the wake of the downturn, Jordan said law firms in general are making decisions independently and apart of industry trends.

"Law firms aren't copying each other," he said. "Everybody is trying to figure out how to run their business and how to get it as rightly-positioned as they can. We're seeing it every day. We're going to see sharper decision making by all the law firms, not mimicking each other on every little thing."

And now they have announced an even more radical move--well, at least one affecting about six times as many people, at a far more senior level--with the news that their 300 or so non-equity partners will be asked to contribute up to 15% of their compensation to the firm as capital. And if you would "prefer not to?" Then you can either forfeit your "partner" status, presumably achieving instant self-inflicted demotion to "associate," or leg into the contribution over a few years. What you cannot do is stay a non-equity partner and decline to make the contribution.

Whereas the first announcement was greeted, so far as I can discern, largely with silence if not a collective yawn, the latter has generated predictable second-guessing and skepticism about the firm's professed motives, most of it centered around what it does or does not imply about the firm's financial fortunes. Jordan (disclosure: I consider him a friend and one of the more innovative managing partners in the business) was at pains to head off this speculation:

Jordan stressed that the move is not simply meant to provide a quick-fix cash injection or as a way of culling the firm's non-equity partnership. "People could say, 'Oh, Reed Smith must need the money,' but the reality is we are having a very strong year," he says. "And if you wanted to just trim non-equity partners, there are much easier ways to do that."

Performing a very back of the envelope calculation, the move could bring Reed Smith $18-million or so (say somewhere between $15 and $20-million, to be safe), which is certainly a not-immaterial contribution to capital, and it's manifestly easier to raise it from your non-equity cohort than going back to the well with your equity partners or your even less forgiving bankers.

Alas, the coverage so far raises more questions than it answers:

• What type of animal exactly is the "contribution?"
  • A one-time payment, a sort of toll extracted for the privilege of continuing to carry the word "partner" on your business card?
  • An interest-free loan, repayable (presumably) upon your departure from the firm (and what if the departure is "for cause" as far as the firm is concerned?)
  • Is it secured or unsecured?
  • Oh, and again, does it earn interest?
  • Assuming it's not characterized as an equity investment--and both the language of the stories and the premise of "non-equity" partner strongly imply it's not--in what sense, then, are you a "partner?"
• The firm explains that part of the rationale is that some (but apparently not all) non-equity partners in European offices, primarily those in legacy merged offices, already have been required to contribute capital, so on that view it's only a way to level the famous playing field between the US and the rest of the world. (there are two ways to achieve that, of course, this being only one of them).
• How does the 15% number compare with the capital contributions expected/required of equity partners?
  • Are the other "terms" of the contribution identical or materially different?
  • When a non-equity's compensation goes up, or down, does their contribution rise or is a rebate expected?

One could go on, and I invite you to do so with your friends at home, but I have a larger issue to close with.

Assuming the Holy Grail of our world is the "one-firm firm," the institutionalized firm in which everyone, from Managing Partner to non-equity partner to paralegal to administrative assistant, feels invested, a firm with a vision they can buy into, what here is not to like?

This has to be what Jordan is driving at when he says "[Non-equity partners will] have a stake in the business and meaningful profit participation, not just carrying the title [of partner]. [and] "It's about not just saying you're a partner, but actually being one. It means something. It revolves around risk-sharing in the business."

We can take potshots from the sidelines to our heart's content (here's a sample), but who would seriously argue with the goals Jordan here articulates?

Or we may simply be overthinking this.

Econ101 teaches that if you want people to demand less of something, make it more expensive. Reed Smith has just made non-equity partner status more expensive.

Put that together with my belief that as an industry we let the entire non-equity tier grow out of control during the boom years, and you may be seeing the beginning of one approach to the problem. It's certainly easier than having all those awkward one-on-one conversations with underperformers.

One of the more thoughtful and, frankly, creative responses to my two recent columns on lateral partners asked a simple question:  What should a firm recruiting a potential lateral be obligated to tell the putative future partner?

This is the kind of question that gets the juices of us securities lawyers flowing.  (No, I don't practice actively anymore, but I would like to think I remain a student of securities law in general and its perpetual evolution.)

The first reaction I had was that we already have a template for what ought to be disclosed, and how:  The Private Placement Memorandum.

A PPM, for the record, is a sort of species of prospectus typically used in conjunction with a "non-public offering" under §4(2) of the '33 Act and/or Reg. D, which was promulgated in 1982 as a non-exclusive "safe harbor" describing a roadmap for complying with §4(2).  Basically, Reg. D introduces the concept of an "accredited investor," which is defined as institutional investors, insiders of the issuer, rich folks (with a net worth of >$1-million or net income >$200,000 for a few years), and, more or less, combinations of the preceding.

Of course, as with all matters securities-law related, the antifraud provisions always and everywhere apply.

So what's the analogy to a lateral partner?

Roughly speaking, I see it this way:  A prospective lateral is pretty much by hypothesis a sophisticated investor when it comes to evaluating a commitment to a new law firm, at least if he/she has been paying any attention to the business operations of their current law firm.  So consider them analogous to an "accredited" (Reg. D sense) investor.

The interesting question is then what this hypothetical PPM ought to disclose.  Here's what the template of a prototypical PPM's table of contents, adapted to Law Land, might look like:

• Summary of the Offering
• Investor [Lateral Partner] Suitability
• Risk Factors
  • Conflicts of Interest
  • Management of the Firm
  • Legal Proceedings
• Purpose of the Offering [Becoming a Partner]
• Capital Structure; Dilution
• Financial Statements
  • Financial Model, Projections
  • Income Statement
  • Balance Sheet
  • Statement of Cash Flows
• Business Plan
• Competition
• Client Base
• Growth Strategies
• Practice Areas
• Geographic Footprint
• Industry Focus
• Client Conflicts, Current and Projected
• Recruitment and Retention Strategies
• Fees and Billing Methodologies
• Partner Capital Obligations
  • Amounts:  When Due
  • Uses of Partner Capital
  • Conditions for Return of Partner Capital
  • Risk Factors
• Appendices
  • Partnership Agreement
  • Compensation Model (to the extent reduced to writing)

Now, your reaction is probably either that this is fascinating or that it's preposterous.  I doubt many of you fall inbetween..

If that's the case, join the club.

My reaction is precisely the same.

Yet we are, among other primary and salient virtues, a profession dedicated to disclosure, transparency, and precision.  And of course you know that to we securities lawyers, Disclosure Is God.

How many lateral partner acquisitions fail because of mis-communication, unarticulated expectations, "surprising" capital demands, unforeseen conflicts, unexpressed cultural assumptions?  Wouldn't it be marginally logical to try to lay out some of those expectations beforehand, in a PPM?.

Which leads me to this observation:  If you think the notion of a PPM for potential laterals is preposterous, I strongly doubt that yours is a rational objection: I suspect that instead it's a cultural, "not done here" objection.  That doesn't make your objection remotely less substantive; but I submit that it puts the burden of proof on you to explain why your firm should not make those parameters I summarily laid about above somewhat clear to prospective laterals.  Labeling an objection "non-rational" is by no means tantamount to labeling it vacuous or empty; but it at least requires the proponent of the non-rational objection to explain its substance and its historic or cultural context.

Then again, there's a very realistic objection to developing a PPM for your firm.  It's hard work.

Not only hard work, but consensus work.  Can't you just imagine being in on the conversations defining the terms in the sections of the PPM dealing with "Competition," "Client Base," and "Growth Strategies?"  You can hear the gears clashing from here.

So is the real objection to the concept of a PPM not that it's untoward, that it's unprofessional, that it's "not done," but that in reality it's un-do-able, because the firm could never achieve consensus on what should go into it and how to describe the firm, its prospects, its competition, and its risk factors?  That, in other words, the strategic business path ahead for your firm is in some profound sense ineffable?

Try telling that to your next startup client.

Perhaps I don't write as much as I should about lateral partners.

I mean the economic phenomenon of lateral partner hiring, not gossip that much of the legal press seems to specialize in about specific "gotcha" movements of partners or small groups from Big Loser firm to Big Winner firm--stories whose half-life, in my experience, is measured by how long it takes for Big Winner firm to suffer a "shocking" loss of partners in its turn. Truth be told, much of it seems on the surface to be a revolving door.

Of course it's not really so simple.

If you stand back and look at the lateral partner migration phenomenon on a macro basis over the past two decades or so, what I think you see is a vast, and economically compelling, sorting-out. It's a sorting out of partners with high-margin, high-value practices migrating to firms where there are kindred souls and where the value of their practices can be maximized, and, on the other side of the coin (as it were), partners with low-margin, commoditizing, practices moving out of firms less willing to support those practice areas and into firms where they still feel welcome.

If you were to graph this in a conceptual way, I surmise you'd find something along these lines:

• People specializing in white collar crime, corporate governance investigations, tax litigation, high-end M&A (well, at least until last September 15), securities litigation, and other "high end" practices are by and large moving to firms with higher PPP's and greater prestige.
• Generalists in commercial litigation or corporate transactions are probably churning around a bit but not, on the whole, moving up or down the food chain as a cohort.
• And those in now-disfavored areas such as T&E, employment, or generic real estate are moving down-market to less prestigious firms with lower PPP.

This is a surmise, as I said, but I would like to believe an informed one.

Why, you may be asking, would anyone voluntarily move down-market? They wouldn't, and they don't. They have no choice. Firms that have decided they no longer care to be in the business of (say) T&E or employment simply make it clear there is no long-term home for them, and so they find a home where they can. Nobody guaranteed you a rose garden.

What else can we say about lateral partner movement?

The primary, most important, and most amazing thing to say about it is that it's both something many firms have obsessed about for the past many years (decades?) and that by and large we're terrible at making it work.

One managing partner recently told me that his firm's batting average was 1 in 3: One lateral in three succeeds. Another told me that they seem to have equal shares people who hit home runs and those who unceremoniously ground into double-plays--and that no matter how hard they analyze everything, they can't tell which will be which up front. They continue to be surprised both by who succeeds and who flames out.

Indeed, this mirrors my own experience.

For many firms, for the past many years, a core part of their strategy has simply been "lateral acquisition." And the primary reason I haven't written about it much, if at all, here on Adam Smith, Esq., is because I simply don't know what intelligent observations can be offered on that "strategy" in general. So much depends on the specifics of (a) clients; (b) cultural fit; (c) timing; (d) sexiness or sudden lack thereof of the practice area being sought [remember the firms who paid at the top of the market for private equity folks?--I do]; (e) receptivity or hostility by the incumbent partners; (f) emotional and intellectual flexibility of the incoming lateral; and (g) did I mention culture?

In other words, it's hard to discuss a "strategy" that is so hyper-dependent on intensely local and personal considerations of chemistry and nuance.

Two last observations before I move on to what I think is actually new and different and fascinating in today's lateral marketplace.

First, there's ample evidence from the worlds of celebrity entertainers and sports stars that marquee names tend to capture essentially the entire present discounted value of their economic contribution to the firm (the record label, the movie studio, the Yankees), leaving very little if any "surplus" for the acquiring firm. While the data in law-firm land to examine this question are, systemically, sorely lacking, it's worth thinking about. (I cite entertainment and sports only because they have a wealth of publicly available data which economists have glommed on to in order to analyze who "captures" the value of the Big Name.)

Second, we have the unfortunate phenomenon of the serial killer mover. You know the type: They'll move for a 10-15-20% bump in pay (preferably with a guarantee, thank you very much), ply their trade for a few years until their new host gets tired of them or cottons to their game of large promises and underdelivering, and then they'll move on again. If clients ask me about folks like this, all I can say is that the best predictor of getting divorced is having been divorced.

---

This brings me to why I wanted to write about lateral partners now.

I detect a new reason for lateral partner movement, which I've never seen before.

I characterize it as laterals motivated to move because they're asking themselves, and implicitly their firms, "What's the plan here?" And not finding a persuasive answer.

Some context:

• I'm not talking about laterals tempted to move by a 10--15% bump in compensation. If somebody moves for that "reason," you can bet there's something else really going on.
• I'm also not talking about extremely senior (in years, that is) laterals who may be about to bump up against their firms' mandatory retirement age and are looking for an escape hatch; that's not the type of "what's the plan?" I mean.

Rather, I'm talking about youngish to middle-aged laterals who can realistically envision another 20 or 30 years of productive laboring in the vineyard, who look at their firm's reaction to the Great Reset we're living through and who do not perceive a credible response. Firms, in other words, without "a plan."

Now, if you're 55 or so and up, this scarcely matters. Momentum, if nothing else (market shares, and perceptions, lag reality by years), will carry you through safely to retirement.

But what if you're 35 or 40, or even 50 and are allergic to the concept of "retirement?" Then you have a serious problem if your firm appears to be clueless in responding to the seismic changes afoot.

I see this in laterals' resumes now coming out of firms they never used to come out of. And it's not about the money, and it is most assuredly not about the "prestige." Not that these people are going down-market; that's the last thing they need to do. They're simply going "sideways-market," which in and of itself makes little sense; thus my hypothesis that something else is going on.

The most important conclusion I can draw from this is that strategy matters. It matters if for no other reason than your partners now believe, perhaps for the first time in their careers, that it matters. People didn't used to shuffle between firms because they feared the ship they were on was rudderless, or captained by intellectually absentee management. This is what's new.

And here's my diagnostic suggestion for you: If your firm has recently lost a few people, ask yourself--really ask yourself--why they left. And if your firm is seeing great resumes, particularly resumes of a caliber you didn't typically used to see, ask those people what's motivating them. Dollars to doughnuts it's not the money. I bet it's the strategy.

How could the SEC have missed all the warning signs about Madoff?

Understand that I don't have a dog in this hunt. Although I'm a securities lawyer by training, I never worked at the SEC and, so far as I know, I'm not close to anyone who lost serious money with Madoff. But as reports have come out this past week about the bungling revealed by the internal investigation, you have to ask yourself what adult supervision was in place at the Commission.

If you, like me, have been wondering about this, I've been reading all I can in an effort to arrive at an hypothesis to explain it. And I only report this because I think (fear?) it has potential lessons for all of us.

A few days ago,The New York Times summarized it thus (emphasis mine):

The report details six substantive complaints against Mr. Madoff received by the agency, which were followed by three investigations and two examinations. Yet the agency never verified Mr. Madoff's trading through a third party. Time and again, it was noted that the volume of his purported options trades were implausible. When the enforcement staff received a report showing that Mr. Madoff indeed had no options positions on a certain date, the agency simply did not take any further steps.

In fact, the string of lapses was capped by a staff lawyer receiving the highest performance rating from the agency, in part for her "ability to understand and analyze the complex issues of the Madoff investigation."

Here are a few other selective nuggets:

Mr. Kotz recounted incidents in which investigators seemed hopelessly out of their depth, far too credulous and perhaps just plain lazy.

One investigator described Mr. Madoff as "a wonderful storyteller" and "a captivating speaker" after the 2005 encounter in which Mr. Madoff, a former Nasdaq chairman, boasted of his ties to people high up in the S.E.C. and said he was on the short list to be the next agency chairman.

...

The inspector general revisited the failure of the S.E.C.'s Boston office to take seriously the warnings of Harry Markopolos, a private fraud investigator who had been trying since 1999 to get the agency to investigate Mr. Madoff. The failure to heed Mr. Markopolos was almost inexplicable, except that some agency officials did not like him personally, Mr. Kotz said.

...

From 1992 until the Madoff empire imploded, one inquiry after another went nowhere, the inspector general said. Some investigators "weren't familiar with securities laws," and some seemingly refused to believe their own ears even when Mr. Madoff contradicted himself or offered illogical answers to questions.

...

At one point, investigators drafted a letter to NASD seeking independent trade data, "but they never sent the letter, claiming that it would have been too time-consuming to review the data they would have obtained," the inspector general wrote.

And from the Wall Street Journal:

On May 21, 2003, an unnamed hedge-fund manager sent an email to an SEC examiner laying out concerns that Mr. Madoff's self-described trading strategy didn't add up. The manager said the strategy wasn't duplicated by anyone else in the market, Mr. Madoff's accounts were in cash at month end, and there was "always replacement capital." These could be "indicia of a Ponzi scheme," he wrote.

However, the SEC didn't open an examination until December 2003, and an agency memo said the focus would be on front-running, a potentially abusive trading practice. The memo didn't raise questions cited by the hedge-fund manager, such as why there was an apparent lack of volume in the market to reflect Mr. Madoff's supposed trading strategy.

Senior examiner John McCarthy told the inspector general that it wasn't a mistake to focus solely on front-running "because that's where my area, my team's area of expertise led," according to the report.

We learn today that over five years ago the SEC reviewed internal emails from Renaissance Technologies (James Simons' hedge fund firm) that raised serious questions about Madoff including what Simons' son Nathaniel called "several strange characteristics" of Madoff's operation including unusually low fees, rumors that Madoff cherry-picked profitable trades for favored clients, and (from Renaissance's "chief scientist," Henry Laufer) questioning Madoff's timing in selling investments to exit the market and holding primarily cash to avoid losses hitting competitors:  The timing of the moves, Mr. Laufer said, was almost statistically impossible. "We would have loved to figure out how he did it so we could do it ourselves," he testified this year to the SEC. "And so that was very suspicious." He added that unearthing Mr. Madoff's fraud "is not rocket science," and was dismayed the SEC had failed to do so.

What do these various exercises in laziness, incompetence, terminal blindness, and general on-the-job abominations add up to?

• People staying vehemently within their "comfort zones" regardless of plain evidence in front of their very eyes that should shock them out of it (pursuing "front-running" instead of a potential Ponzi schedme because "that's my area, my expertise."
• Not sending a letter whose results would have been "too time-consuming" to analyze.
• Preferring the "capitivating storyteller" over the black and white facts.
• Discounting the warnings of someone because we "didn't like him personally."
• And finally, being so intellectually lazy as to specifically commend a staff lawyer with the "highest performance rating" for her supposed understanding of the Madoff Ponzi scheme when, of course, the truth was that she had no clue about any such thing.

The easy reaction would be to dismiss government bureaucracies as terminally incompetent, but you should know by now that I'm constitutionally allergic to dismissive rationales, and besides, we're talking about tragic consequences to the SEC's failure to police Madoff, be it in 1992, 2003, or even 2006. Fortunes were tragically lost and lives were potentially ruined (although I do not for a moment equate losing a fortune with ruining a life).

No, I'm looking for a deeper explanation. Because this is too big a story to dismiss as run of the mill human incompetence.

Could part of the explanation simply be the audacity of the Madoff fraud?  That it almost defied belief, even after it was fully disclosed?  Perhaps.  Similar theories, of course, have been advanced about our various intelligence agencies' failures to foresee 9/11:  The notion that Al Qaeda (or anyone) would fly two fully-loaded jetliners into the Trade Center towers might have seemed too preposterous to worry about seriously.  Yet, by analogy to the SEC/Madoff tragedy of errors, it turns out in hindsight that there were plenty of glaring clues--such as flight school students who couldn't be bothered with troublesome details about the exotic maneuver known as "landing."   

And even before the first (1993) bombing of the Trade Center, the head of security at Morgan Stanley/Dean Witter, Rick Rescorla, a British-born Vietnam vet (originally from Cornwall, who served in the British Army before emigrating here), with a ribald take-no-prisoners approach to life and work (I was a mere securities lawyer at the firm), told me Islamic radicals would love nothing more than to destroy this conspicuous symbol of Western capitalism.  Tragically, Rick was one of only three people at the firm who died on 9/11--he was staying behind to make sure everyone else got evacuated:  There's a memorial to Rick in Cornwall, which you can see here.

So it's not that preposterous.

What, then, explains it?

I hesitate to invoke "the banality of evil," and I'm slightly misapplying it when I do so, but I believe that's what we're dealing with.  To my mind, there's no question Madoff qualifies, in spades, for the title "evil," so my focus is on banality.  Not--here's my misappropriation of the phrase--the banality of Madoff, but the banality of the SEC's behavior.

Can't we see in hindsight that everyone at the agency appeared to be behaving in an eminently reasonable manner, oh-so-dutiful and correct?  After all, if your "team's" expertise is front-running, how can you be expected to delve into indications of a Ponzi scheme?  What's wrong with discounting news from a disfavored source?  Being capitivated by a storyteller?  People behave like this in our homes, churches, schools and universities, on our athletic fields and in the media, and--in our offices,

It's all so so banal, isn't it?

What's missing, of course, is the indispensable ingredient of Critical Thinking.

Truth time:  How do you measure your own personal performance on this score?  That of your team?  Of your firm?

Critical Thinking can cover a lot of territory, but it's often postulated as the core justification for our entire higher education industry:

• Being able to think past what the author asserts;
• Evaluating "facts" for plausibility, alignment or dissonance with other conditions or characteristics we know to be true;
• Testing analogies, metaphors, syllogisms, and other argumentative techniques for rigor and internal consistency;
• Abstracting from the source (the alternative is to shoot, or muzzle, the messenger);
• Trying to square assertions with prior and subsequent statements--or finding good and sufficient reason for new developments;
• Being so familiar with pleasant and familiar tropes that bid to explain so much that we prefer not to see past or beyond them (e.g., "our human heritage of nomadic hunter-gatherers on the savannah explains sexual and economic behavior to this day");
• Having the imagination to ask "child-like" questions about bedrock assumptions so profound we rarely even articulate them;
• And, above all, getting out of our intellectual "comfort zone" to do the hard work of rigorous analysis.

How good are you, really, at this?  I can report from first-hand experience it's a tall, even life-long, assignment.  But worth it.  Fortunes, and even lives, could be at stake.

Results are in from our poll of a few weeks ago in Where Have You Gone, Work-Life Balance? and here are the results (multiple answers were permitted):

Since it's hard to read, here are the results in order of popularity.  The question, again, was "Work-life balance is:"

• flatly incompatible with firms performing at the highest level--39 votes
• compatible with high performance if it helps retain talent--29 votes
• so last August--26
• achievable in firms of all stripes given flexibility--20
• a useful notion only in the "lifestyle" cohort of firms--15
• an indulgence affordable to firms only in times of high lawyer demand--14
• a weak accomodation to lawyers who aren't serious--10
• a humane and "evergreen" virtue responsive to reality--9
• a disservice to high-performing professionals--8

What may we conclude?

Most striking to me is the honest, and fairly emphatic, disagreement over whether or not work-life balance is compatible with high performance.  Lacking any a priori hypothesis as to why this might be so, I'm tempted to fall back on the explanation that people may simply be reporting on their own experiences.  That is to say, if one has sacrificed mightily in terms of family life to be a high performer, one probably thinks that's the way the world works and that work-life balance is accordingly incompatible with being at the top of one's game.  Conversely, if one has had the benefit of at least a period of decreased demands, one may believe everyone should be able to accomplish that as well.

Here's another way of slicing the results, however:  If you add up all the votes cast for a "negative" view of W-LB vs. all those cast for a "positive" view, you get:

• Negative:  112
• Positive:  58

or nearly a 2:1 ratio of negative to positive views.  (I count "so last August" as negative, since it fairly strongly implies the issue is dead for now.)

High performers of the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your work-life balance.

Pop quiz: Which of these would be worse:

• Learning that, based on economic performance, lawyers in your practice group (including yourself) would be getting year-end raises smaller than average across the firm; or
• Feeling that you, individually, are being systematically shunned by the head of your practice group.

If you answered (b), welcome to the Mammal population.

I'm not being facetious. Neuroscientific research described in Managing with the Brain in Mind, (Booz & Co., Strategy + Business, Issue 56, Autumn 2009, p. 59--not yet published online, but keep an eye on their site) demonstrates that mammals perceive the feeling of emotional exclusion (based on activity in the "suffering" region of the brain) as the neurological equivalent of the distress associated with physical pain.

According to Naomi Eisenberger, the UCLA researcher who designed the study reaching this conclusion (involving fMRI's and a rigged computer game, since you asked), "Most proesses operating in the background when your brain is at rest are involved in thinking about other people and yourself."

What does this mean to you as a manager? Plenty.

As social animals, and as mammals animals extraordinarily dependent on the support of members of our community, work is not a financial transaction, not a quid pro quo of compensation in exchange for behavior. It's social interaction, where being given an assignment we feel unworthy of, being reprimanded (fairly or unfairly), or feeling excluded are far more devastatingly negative experiences than the differenceof a few dollars, or thousands of dollars, at the end of the month.

So what?

Don't think you can treat people--especially highly talented professionals--like a hydraulic system or internal combustion engine, where you adjust the richness of the incoming fuel/air ratio (compensation) and get corresponding horsepower out of the system.

Now, this is not news to anyone who's legitimately earned a role in management (and who has any memory whatsoever of the schoolyard playground), but what's shocking to me is how often this core human insight is honored in the breach in large and medium size firms.

Before, we might have thought that leaders who were empathetic enough to engage employees' strongest talents, support and encourage collaborative teams, and generally create an environment fostering productivity and creativity were "nice to have's."  But the reason I bring this new research to your attention is it argues strongly that such leadership is a lot more than that:  It's indispensable to high-performing organizations.

In an important sense this new research challenges Abraham Maslow's famous "hierarchy of needs," which posits that higher needs can only be met once lower-level needs are satisfied and which ranks the "hierarchy," from bottom to top, as follows:

• physiological survival, such as breathing, sleep, food, and clothing;
• safety, such as personal and financial security, and health;
• social, such as friendship, intimacy, and family
• esteem, both from others and self-esteem; and finally
• self-actualization.

But if being hungry, being physically threatened (by a snake, let's say, a vicious-looking dog, or a reckless driver), and being socially ostracized all trigger the same response in the brain--which this research confirms--then "merely social" needs start to appear more fundamental.

Coincidentally, we got unintentional but powerful confirmation of where "social" needs fit, in what otherwise would have seemed a small bit of news this weekend: The story was that three fishermen were rescued after spending 9 days 200 miles off the Gulf Coast on top of a capsized boat---one day after the Coast Guard called off the rescue efforts as in vain, and by sheer accident as a sharp-eyed guy on a passing boat spotted what he first thought was an innertube and went to investigate.

The story continued that the three had survived on a few gallons of fresh water serendipitously saved from the boat, a box of crackers, "and some bubble gum."  (The nutritional value of bubble gum being a topic that had hitherto not crossed our minds.)  But what's germane about the story?  When asked by the inevitable reporter looking for a "human reaction," "What was the hardest part of the 9 days?," the spokesman for the three replied:  "Right around the fifth day we just really all wanted somebody else to talk to."

Bingo.  You're hanging on for dear life to a useless boat in the middle of the Gulf with dwindling and palpably inadequate resources of food and water, hope for rescue diminishing by the day, and you report that "the hardest part" of the ordeal was being deprived of human companionship?  I did not make this story up.

Making this more important is what happens when the threat response is triggered, as hunger, danger, and ostracism all do:  Analytic thinking and creative insight go right out the window, and in a professional, performance-driven setting, just what people need most deserts them. 

Lest you think that this is all about avoiding dysfunctional human behavior, the good news from the new wave of neuroscientific research is "that the brain is highly plastic. Even the most entrenched behaviors can be modified." Neural connections are not static from adolescence (or thereabouts) onward, as once was thought:

Neural connections can be reformed, new behaviors can be learned, and even the most entrenched behaviors can be modified at any age. The brain will make these shifts only when it is engaged in mindful attention. This is the state of thought associated with observing one's own mental processes (or, in an organization, stepping back to observe the flow of a conversation as it is happening). Mindfulness requires both serenity and concentration; in a threatened state, people are much more likely to be "mindless." Their attention is diverted by the threat, and they cannot easily move to self-discovery.

What conditions, then, might conduce to "mindful attention," or at least to a disposition to collaborate instead of to clam up, to suggest imaginative or creative approaches instead of reproducing the last matter's approach by rote, or to truly engaged conversations instead of what we often get instead, punctuated monologues?

Again, the new research provides evidence that the predisposing conditions include:

• status
• certainty
• autonomy
• relatedness
• fairness.

Status is something we are constantly evaluating: Higher, lower, the same? In whose eyes? And high status is very important: It correlates with higher longevity and health (even adjusting for income, education, etc.). In a firm, the key point is that which indicators of status people value depend on the perceived values of the organization. If the firm is all about rewarding rainmakers, then the only "status" signal that matters is compensation. If the firm is committed to training and professional development, then recognition for increasing levels of professional competence and excellence will be at least as valuable in terms of morale-boosting and teamwork as serious raises.

Certainty is valued simply because its opposite, uncertainty, requires so much energy and attention, a/k/a distraction. Take this with a grain of salt: Moderate uncertainty (will we win the client? will we win the oral argument? will she go to bed with me the client approve our strategy?) can increase tension in very positive, creative, and energizing ways.

But too much uncertainty is simply exhausting. We have to pay so much attention to what seems like a series of unknown but potential threats (each one of which has to be assessed, discussed, and worried about) that we can't focus on what we're actually here to do. Particularly when change is on the agenda--especially if it's internally at the firm--all-hands efforts to reduce uncertainty are called for. Explain the rationale for change and then explain it again. Be reassuring not by assertion that everything will be fine but by explaining what is entailed and--one can hope--letting the logic of the change speak for itself.

Autonomy is an uber-value for lawyers. But it's important across the board, because the more autonomy one feels one has, the more capable one is of dealing with "the same" level of stress. The classic example is people who can control the hours they work vs. those who can't. A 40-, 50-, 60-, or even 70-hour week is relatively manageable if one feels in control of when one will be working and when not. But if quixotic and unpredictable forces from above dictate when you'll be working and when not, far fewer total hours can be worked productively before total burn-out sets in.

With lawyers in particular, be exquisitely sensitive to their perceived need for autonomy. Present options, not mandates; alternatives, not requirements; and offer independence wherever possible.

Relatedness goes right back to the old "friend or foe" distinction we all come hard-wired with. New people perceived as different may not be embraced in a spontaneous one-for-all hug. But if you lay the groundwork for new people to meet through social events (partner retreats, anyone?), the path will be smoothed towards accepting them as colleagues down the road.

Fairness may be the most critical ingredient of all. How many of you can sympathize with an executive who, when asked why he'd been at the same firm for 22 years, responded, "Because they always did the right thing."

Conversely, leaders perceived as having an "inner circle," whiffs of clubbiness, croniness, or old boys' networks, will destroy the perception of fairness in a heartbeat.

Particularly in times like these when cutbacks and pain are on the agenda, they must be perceived as fairly distributed, equitably arrived at, objectively parceled out, and explainable in common sense sentences containing words of few syllables.

---

What might all this mean for you as a leader?

Apply it to yourself, is the short answer.

Give people latitude to make their own mistakes (at least where it's not mission-critical). Buttress economic incentives with social reinforcement. If you're inclined to micromanage, try to wean yourself from the habit (it doesn't help your targets, and in the long run it doesn't help you).

The beauty of learning how to read your own reactions better, as a leader, is that once you're more comfortable in the zone of uncertainty, others will pick up on that cue and be able to relax into doing their real work rather than obsessively second-guessing your decisions. Don't be afraid to be spontaneous; it shows you're real and increases confidence.

The acid test may be this: Do you trust your colleagues in the firm to rise to the highest professional standards because that's what they believe in, because they feel confident their status entitles them to make autonomous decisions, and because they know they'll be treated fairly if they exercise their best judgment, regardless of the outcome?

---

As I said at the outset, you may think all this is obvious. I commend you if you know it all already. But the new research shows how profoundly grounded in our human and animal natures is the need for reinforcement of the social, not just the economic, context of our daily work.

---

Oh, and where do we fit in the Linnaean table?

Domain: Eukarya
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Subphylum: Vertebrata
Infraphylum: Gnathostomata
Superclass: Tetrapoda
(unranked) Amniota
Class: Mammalia
Linnaeus, 1758

When on the same day both the WSJ and Corporate Counsel publish feature articles heralding that the time has come for alternatives to the billable hour, it's time to step back and ask if they might actually be right this time around.  (It doesn't hurt that the Journal's article was written by its two best legal-beat reporters and that the Corporate Counsel piece was co--authored by the rather more prominent Ben Heineman and Bill Lee.)

They may well be right—and I'll discuss what I perceive as the intrinsic defects of the billable hour in a moment—but first I want to suggest another thought:  The debate about the billable hour is not, actually, about the billable hour.  It's about something far more fundamental to the lawyer/client relationship.  (You can either jump ahead at this point or have confidence that I'll get to it.)

Well, of course it's about the billable hour at some level, but I don't think the question of whether any of us will live long enough to see the triumph of fixed or alternatives fees and the elimination of this rather remarkably durable and dysfunctional institution (the billable hour) actually depends on their relative merits or the rational parameters of the debate.

---

What's wrong with the billable hour?

From my fundamental economic perspective, all you need to know is that it starts and ends the pricing determination based on "cost of production" rather than "value to client."  In my book, that's per se irrational. 

It can be difficult for those of us who've spent our careers in this industry to get perspective on this, so let's step outside for a moment.  What if cars were priced in linear proportion to cost of production?  We can imagine a few things would occur, but what would not occur is a car marketplace looking anything remotely like the one we have which, for all its self-inflicted troubles of late, is clearly providing incredibly valuable services to a fast-growing worldwide customer base.  But in the car "cost of production" world, we would see these irrational conditions:

• There would be almost no such thing as premium luxury brands.  Perhaps Ferrari, Rolls Royce, and few other "bespoke," one-by-one handcrafted brands would truly have costs of production so astronomical as to justify astronomical prices, but any cost accountant worth their salt would tell you the difference in cost basis between a top-of-the-line Lexus and a Toyota Yaris is not on the order of 10 or more to 1.
• Conversely, manufacturers might lose any incentives towards efficiency.  Who cares whether it takes 22 or 44 or 88 hours of labor to assemble a car if the customer picks up the passed-through costs?  Factory managers might even be measured and favorably rewarded based on how many hours of labor they require to get a finished car out the door.  (Sounding familiar?)  "Cost plus" pricing tends to create such results.
• At the very least, one could imagine manufacturers losing all interest whatsoever in producing rock-bottom, purely utilitarian, econo-boxes—regardless of whether a small cohort of customers would actually prefer them.

I don't need to pursue this for you to get my drift.  It's just plain a weird way to price products or services, because it fundamentally disconnects price from perceived value in the eyes of clients.

The Journal and Corporate Counsel pieces add a few other specific facts, observations, and counts to this indictment, of their own, including:

• Alternative billing is reported to have accounted for $13.1 billion this year vs. $8.6 billion in the same period last year, which if true would represent a 52% increase.  Unfortunately, it's not clear what the "denominator" of that figure is, as it's simply said to be the results of a survey of 370 lawyers at Fortune 1000 companies.
• Pfizer GC Amy Schulman reports that their alliance of 16 law firms "bills entirely" on a non-billable hour basis.  Firms are rated on such performance criteria as collaboration and diversity of teams, and "there are rewards and punishments."
• Heineman and Lee write that the move away from the billable hour, among other things:
  • reduces billing hassles
  • yields more predictable costs for the client and more predictable collections for the firm;
  • avoids clients "flyspecking" bills and demanding after-the-fact writeoffs or discounts; and
  • economizes on the "deadweight cost" of overhead devoted to the billing process.
• Flat fees have a long history of being used for "repetitive, predictable work" and while the somewhat pregnant implication is that that territory will expand, Barry Ostrager, head of the litigation department at Simpson Thacher retorts fairly convincingly that "a client can't expect to have the absolute best team of [trial] lawyers from a firm, and have the lawyers give up all the other work they could be doing on a regular-fee basis, to work 18 hours a day for months of time on a flat-fee engagement."  Somewhere in between routine patent implications and Ostrager's bread and butter (such as successfully  representing Swiss Re in its highly publicized insurance coverage dispute over the World Trade Center), we presumably have a gray, fuzzy, and moving line differentiating matters suitable for flat fees and those not.
• Heineman and Lee talk more specifically about where that line might be drawn, using these examples:
  • A single project involving expertise and judgment, but not much risk, such as writing a handbook ...
  • A repeating, routine book of business, which involves expertise and judgment, but not much risk, such as filing a certain type of patent or trademark application ...
  • A repeating, but more complex book of business that involves judgment, expertise, and risk, such as annual securities reporting ...
  • A one-off, highly complex, high-risk matter [such as] the company wide bribery scandal being pursued by enforcers in multiple jurisdictions ...
• And they write, I think persuasively, that even in the most complex types of matters, "the fixed fee can be split into segments."  This is nothing more than unit pricing, which is a time-tested model.  Don't tell me you have no historical data on how much it costs to take a deposition:  And where the 10th %-ile, median, and 90th %-ile of that distribution fall.  That's about all you need to price realistically.
• Some of the consequences of fixed fees are unquestionably salutary:
  • A Sidley Austin partner working on a fixed-fee matter for Pfizer cites her freedom to assign a senior associate to perform legal research much more quickly and efficiently than was the case under the prior rule that no lawyer with an hourly rate higher than a second-year could bill the company for research;
  • And the managing partner of Saul Ewing says they made a comfortable profit on a six-week flat-fee corporate due diligence engagement "because we were incentivized to get done in 10 hours [could have taken] 12."
• Both Heineman and Lee, and Larry Ribstein (albeit from a slightly different angle, since he sees this trend as another arrow to the heart of BigLaw), trace part of the rise of alternative billing to the increasing sophistication of in-house lawyers:  "the 20-year rise in the talent, experience, and expertise of in-house lawyers has led to co-equal partnering on matters."

And yet.

All three pieces have rather caustic observations to make about law firms' profitability:

• "One of the most important issues in setting fixed fees is distinguishing between a law firm's actual costs (which firms see), and the actual costs, plus profit margins for the partners (which is what clients see in a firm's bills)." [Heineman/Lee]  You know where this is leading:  Directly to challenging the "profit margins for the partners."
•  "'I have told firms you cannot make your historical profit margins' on Pfizer work, said the pharmaceutical giant's general counsel, Amy Schulman." [WSJ] Can't say it much more bluntly than that.
• "The implications for Big Law are substantial. Fixed fee and other alternative billing make legal work more like a commodity and less like a specialized one-on-one service.
  "Even more importantly, hourly billing has been Big Law's profit engine for decades." [Ribstein]

Now, you might think people would be more guarded about directly attacking the profitability levels of law firms.  After all, what business is it of theirs?  Why—I'm wearing the rational economist's hat now—should a client care how profitable a law firm is or indeed whether it's profitable at all (assuming only that they don't positively yearn to see the place go out of business)? 

Back to cars:  If I'm trying to choose between a BMW and a Lexus, or for that matter between a Kia and a Hyundai, should I care how profitable each company is?  What earthly relevance does that have to my decision?  Or consider, on a somewhat parallel note, clients' noisy objections to the salaries paid young associates:  Does the car buyer in the showroom ask what assembly line workers make?  If he did, would handsome wages be a demerit for the auto manufacturer or to its credit?   (Does anyone this side of Michael Moore ask what the CEO or senior executives make?)  How does that bear on the ultimate "money for value" calculus?

But clearly, when it comes to law firms, no such restraint applies.  Clients just plain do not like how much money law firms have made.

And this is getting us closer to the heart of the matter, isn't it?

---

Here are some less than randomly selected comments I've heard in various precincts over the past month or so on our topic du jour:

• "If I hire a plumber to renovate my bathroom, I want to know what his time and materials are!"  [GC, major corporation]  "Don't you really just want a nice bathroom?"  "But I don't want to be taken for a ride."
• "If I got a bill 'for professional services rendered' for a six-month period of time, how on earth would I know what the law firm had even done?" [GC, a different major corporation]  "Well, you were GC during those six months, right?"  "That's not the point."
• "How do I know I'm saving money with a fixed fee?  Isn't the law firm just going to take the opportunity to pad their bill even more?"  [GC, major corporation #3] 
• "Lawyers are risk-averse; we know that.  So if they have to quote a flat fee, they'll estimate how many hours it will take and add a safety margin.  I'll end up paying even more!"  [GC #4]
• "I'm afraid that if I submitted a bill 'for services rendered,' the client would assume I was overcharging them."  [BigLaw senior partner]
• "When I send an itemized hourly bill with disbursements, the client knows we actually did the work."  [BigLaw senior partner #2]

So this is what I believe it has come down to:  Trust.

Sadly, for too many of us, clients don't trust us with their money and we don't trust them to reward us fairly.

If you hark back to those old-fashioned typewritten bills "for professional services rendered," didn't they positively reek of a close, trusting relationship? The lawyer would no more exploit the client than the client would expect (hope?) the lawyer would price representation at bargain-basement levels.  This seems to me to be the enormous unspoken issue in today's debate over the billable hour.

If you don't trust someone, you want something quantifiable.  And you want the "most favored nation" rate and 10% discount on top of that.  If you don't trust someone, it's all perfectly understandable.  And uneconomic.  Is this what we've come to?

So perhaps more than anything else, I find the seemingly perpetual debate about the billable hour sad.  Because I can't think about it without thinking about forfeited trust.