Building cohesion in the post-pandemic law firm

Complaints about culture and a "lack of engagement" are symptoms of law firms worried about a lack of internal cohesion. Here's how they can start getting it back.

Illustration by Midjourney

Last week, a director at a global legal information company asked me whether I thought law firms viewed Generative AI as a strategic concern. I replied that most firm leaders I’ve been speaking with seem to be placing Gen AI in the category of “important, but not urgent.”

Managing partners are fully aware of Gen AI. They know it’s going to be big, and that it could reset a lot of the assumptions the law firm business model is based on. (I don’t know that they’ve entirely grasped what will happen when clients start using it regularly.) But for the most part, they regard Gen AI as a tidal wave approaching in the distance, whereas they’re more fixated on the sharks swimming around them.

The shark that’s getting the most attention right now has been described to me in different ways. I’ve sometimes heard it expressed as a concern for the “fabric” of the firm, or as a sense of “malaise,” but most often as a “lack of engagement,” especially (but not exclusively) among younger lawyers. It’s usually connected to law firms’ emptier, post-pandemic law offices, and prompts a desire for stricter return-to-work policies. But it goes deeper than that.

I’m coming to think of all these worries as falling under a single heading: law firm leaders are concerned for the cohesion of their firms. A law firm’s cohesiveness is an expression of the strength of its identity, its sense of common purpose, and its degree of structural integrity. “Cohesion” goes some distance towards explaining what law firms feel they need — and what they fear they might be losing.

Think of it this way: Every law firm is a “what.” That is to say, it answers to a pragmatic description: This many lawyers, in these general areas, doing these kinds of things for these kinds of clients. You can find a law firm’s “what” on its home page and all over the internet. But most law firms also strive to be a “who,” a more abstract but impactful concept: These sorts of people, sharing these complementary purposes, forming these sorts of relationships in this sort of environment.

It’s not always easy to define a law firm’s “who.” Even those within the firm can disagree about its nature, or whether there’s much of a “who” — an “us” — there at all. A firm’s cohesion reflects the clarity, strength, and resilience of its “who.” It’s a sense of identity, of “unity in community,” that “we’re all in this together”— where “this” stands for the firm’s mission or values or purpose. People’s own missions and values don’t have to precisely match the firm’s, but there should be a generous overlap among them.

Cohesion is not the same thing as culture, although many lawyers (especially partners) often conflate the two. Every law firm has a culture — though not always the one it believes it has — but not every law firm has cohesion, and the weakness or absence of the latter usually has a negative effect on the former.

Now, even at the best of times, law firms aren’t the most cohesive places. They tend to be low-trust, highly compartmentalized, profit-obsessed organizations whose revenue-producing assets walk out the door every night and, more and more often these days, show up at a rival firm the next morning. I don’t think anyone will confuse most law firms for the Navy SEALs or the Order of Jesuits when it comes to the deep commitment of its members to the mission and vision.

Yet most law firms have always had some base level of cohesion — some sense of an “us” working together for “our” clients and to keep “our” firm going. The lawyers and staff do subscribe, at least implicitly, to shared values like professionalism and client service, and they can probably muster a vague idea of “what the firm stands for.” They also develop relationships with each other, anywhere from a nodding cordiality to genuine friendship, and that builds cohesion too — because they’re not just engaging with each other, but with the firm as an overarching entity, a professional home. If it’s true that law firms could be much more cohesive than they are, nevertheless they could also be much less.

But ever since the pandemic happened, cohesion at many law firms has decayed. Deprived of daily personal contact, likely to spend more quality time with clients than with colleagues, many lawyers might not have noticed as the social bonds they’d built over years of regular office interaction — and the firm’s internal identity that was built along with it — quietly began to dissolve. Some lawyers concluded they could run their practices only with a desktop, a smartphone, and what’s between their ears. No longer required, by habit or culture, to commute to the office every day, they looked for other reasons to make the trip, and they didn’t find enough.

I think this is what’s driving the disquiet, especially among older lawyers, about a loss of engagement in their firms. The simplest and easiest method of engagement — regular physical proximity — went away, and firms didn’t have anything to supplement or replace it. Their internal cohesion depended too heavily on the happy accidents of daily personal contact.

Hence the calls, if not the commands, for lawyers to come back to the office — demands that are largely pointless, because the hybrid legal workplace is a fact of life for the foreseeable future. And that future, I’m sorry to say, will include more pandemic variants, more spikes in illness, and more lockdowns. Mandatory physical proximity isn’t going to be the answer anymore.

So how do you build cohesion in an organization with a hybrid workplace? You do it by recognizing that the absence of full-time physical co-location means you’re going to have to work harder to achieve what used to come naturally. Cohesion is no longer cost-free.

It’s true that in-person interactions and personal relationships greatly enhance cohesion, and firms should do whatever they can to encourage those interactions and relationships. I wrote at length about how to do that, last year and again last month. But what the firm really needs to do to increase its cohesion is to live out its values.

A law firm’s values, as I’ve written before, set its priorities, influence its choices, and dictate its actions, thereby creating its culture. Values also determine cohesion, insofar as the stronger the firm’s demonstrated commitment to its stated values, the stronger the firm’s identity and cohesion (and vice versa). A law firm that acts out its values shows everyone that there’s a unique, identifiable entity here — a law firm with a purpose and a presence, one that’s worthy of people’s engagement.

You don’t create cohesion in your organization by letting everyone do what they feel like. Or by observing one set of rules for the people who bring in lots of money and another set for everyone else. Or by tolerating obnoxious behaviour from toxic personalities. Or by making people feel like the only thing that matters about them is whether they bring money in the door.

You do create it by showing people that they’re valued not just for what they produce, but for who they are and how they add to the firm’s community. And by creating an expectation that people hold their peers to account for their words and actions. And by putting time and money into causes and benefits consistent with the firm’s values. And by declaring that what anyone should expect to get from the firm is equivalent to what they’re prepared to put into it.

If you want people to gather in the office more frequently, then you need to create incentives and spaces and, yes, obligations for them to do so. But what you should be aiming for is that people want to gather more often, to learn and mentor and brainstorm and problem-solve and hang out with people who are worth their time. Then they feel like they’re part of a community that has values and that values them. They stick around longer, they recruit more talent, and they build more business because they feel good about bringing clients into the firm. They’re proud to be there.

Ask yourself and your colleagues how you can make your firm more cohesive. Take just a few steps in that direction. I think you’ll be surprised how quickly things start to turn around — how quickly it comes apparent that this was what people in your firm have been looking for all along.