Building a lawyer support ecosystem

Pro sports teams invest serious resources to maximize the performance of their highly skilled, uniquely specialized professionals. Why don't law firms do the same?

Whenever I’m watching a pro sports event and the camera pans to the sidelines (or dugout or bench), I’m struck by the growing number of people there who aren’t actually athletes.

They might be wearing team uniforms (baseball) or business suits (basketball or hockey) or windbreakers-and-headsets (football), but they don’t venture onto the field or ice or court. They’re coaches, trainers, coordinators, instructors, and myriad kinds of support personnel. Sometimes it seems like they outnumber the players, especially when you consider how many more are working behind the scenes, before and after the games.

I’m now at the age where I feel I can be a little grumpy about this — “Why are there so many coaches these days? Why does it seem like every player has their own coach now?” — but also still young enough to understand why this is happening, and why it applies to law firms just as much as to sports teams.

Professional sports is a lot more “professional,” and way more lucrative, than it used to be. When I first began following baseball in the early 1980s, the minimum annual salary of a major-league player was just $32,000. By the time I graduated law school in 1993, it was $109,000. Unless you were a star player or a steady regular, baseball was no way to get rich.

But then pro sports caught on as mass entertainment in the age of cable TV. Money began pouring in from networks, and advertising and merchandising revenue exploded. Last year, the minimum MLB salary was $720,000 — a seven-fold increase in 30 years and a 2,200% increase in 40. Other sports have seen similar, if not as dramatic, upwards salary movement.

As athletic talent became more expensive, clubs were motivated to take better care of their investments, leading to more elaborate training regimens and more sophisticated coaching facilities. Moneyball changed the way teams from every sport went about scouting, acquiring, and developing young players. Physical therapists, kinesiologists, and strength-and-conditioning experts were hired; mental and emotional health coaches became ubiquitous. Players are now enmeshed in a supportive ecosystem designed to safeguard their well-being and maximize their performance.

But this trend isn’t restricted to professional athletes — look around at your own family and home. You might have a personal trainer who keeps you on track at the gym; your spouse might visit a chiropractor or physiotherapist every week; your kids might have a math tutor who helps them with trigonometry; your friends might be seeing a marriage advisor or a psychological counsellor. We’ve all got coaches of one kind or another to help us either improve our well-being and effectiveness or get us through a struggle or crisis.

It’s no surprise, then, that law firms are finally coming around to this trend — or that they’re arriving late to the party, as usual.

What has always set law firms apart from many comparable enterprises is the degree to which lawyers insist on filling the critical business roles themselves: ownership, leadership, management, sales, and of course, labour. Only clerical and basic maintenance work could be trusted to “non-lawyers.” If a lawyer didn’t do a job, went the implicit reasoning, the job couldn’t have that much value.

This “lawyer-centricity,” in my view, was a major factor behind the rise of law firm consulting in the late 20th century. As law firms grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, lawyer-centricity meant that lawyers still held all the key leadership roles, even as the scale and complexity of these entities expanded well beyond these lawyers’ management capabilities. They needed help with strategy, leadership, and profitability.

So we saw the emergence of highly successful consultancies like Hildebrandt, Altman Weil, and my former home Edge International, as well as individual trailblazers like David Maister. These consultancies provided expert assistance and navigation to firms that desperately needed it and would pay well for it. These consultancies prospered into the early years of the 21st century — but then something changed.

Law firms began to insource the kind of business and management expertise that they used to buy on the market. “Legal administrators” and “directors of finance” began appearing on law firm org charts, evolving into the CEOs, COOs, and other senior management roles that many firms take for granted today. I’m old enough to remember when a “C-Suite” title was absolutely verboten, even in large national firms — “That’s not how we do things here; this is a profession, not a business.”

Well, the delivery of legal services is a profession and a business, and it has been for ages. Law firms accepted this reality about 20 or so years ago, and most have remade their management structures accordingly. But lawyer-centricity still strongly influences leadership choices — many managing partners and practice-group leaders are much better at lawyering or rainmaking than they are at managing people. And up until recently, lawyer-centricity has also held back a critically important aspect of law firm productivity: the performance of individual lawyers.

Law firms’ traditional approach to lawyer performance has been to demand more of it all the time: rising billable targets, new client retainers, multiple cross-selling opportunities, and so on, year over year. Judging from the huge increases in law firm profitability over the last few decades — maybe not as high as in pro sports, but still pretty substantial — this has been a successful strategy. Judging from the horrific spikes in lawyer illness, burnout, addiction, and suicide during that time, as well as skyrocketing attrition rates and the ongoing mass exodus of women, it’s been a rank failure.

Law firms — more accurately, the lawyers who own, lead, and work in them — have neglected or abused their most important assets: the lawyers themselves. They’ve pushed lawyers too hard, well beyond the sensible limits of healthy professional practice. But they’ve also failed to provide lawyers with enough support and assistance to do their jobs as well as they can:

• They’ve thrown unskilled new lawyers into years of drudge work and called it training.

• They’ve enrolled lawyers in substantive law CLEs and called it professional development.

• They’ve laid off load-bearing associates and assistants and called it profitability enhancement.

• They’ve seen the signs of lawyers’ mental and emotional breakdown and called it weakness.

Smart organizations don’t operate this way. When they say things like, “Our people are our most important resource,” they actually mean it. If your favourite sports team treated its talent and operations the way many law firms do, they’d fold. And when you see the growing number of law firms collapsing or disappearing into mergers, you have to wonder whether something similar is starting to play out in the legal sector.

So my advice to law firms here is simple: Create more support for your lawyers and other professionals. Design and build ecosystems for the training, support, and personal and professional development of these highly skilled, uniquely specialized, and strategically critical human assets. Hire more full-time business coaches, skill trainers, and relationship managers. Spend money on these supportive measures now, or face massive bills down the road for the repair and replacement of the people you worked so hard to recruit.

In particular, I’d like to see more law firms create two sets of management reporting lines for each lawyer. The political reality of law firms is that traditional leadership roles go to lawyers who’ve excelled at winning cases, closing deals, or generating business — but in most cases, the presence of these “technical skills” (and the demands on the time of the lawyers who own them) excludes the development of the “human skills” needed to properly communicate, supervise, and build lasting relationships with working lawyers.

By way of analogy, some firms have an “external managing partner” who handles business, profitability, and market-related issues, as well as an “internal managing parner” who oversees the development and optimal functioning of the firm’s people. Replicate this kind of dual responsibility throughout the organization, giving each legal professional a “business report” and a “development report,” and very soon you’ll see notable improvements in satisfaction, productivity, and retention.

Professional sports teams have recognized that the ranks of athletes’ support personnel can and should outnumber the ranks of athletes themselves. Why would it be any different for your law firm? Can you begin to imagine how much more productive and rewarding your workplace could be as a result? Your law firm needs a lawyer support ecosystem. The time to start building one is right now.