Rewriting the terms of associate engagement

Generational differences play a part, but the crisis of disengaged associates in law firms is really about whether a firm has a meaningful value proposition that can earn (young) lawyers' commitment.

Maybe you’ve seen this viral commercial from Australia, depicting a war across four generations, that nicely skewers four separate demographic groups. (I especially enjoyed the running gag of the Gen-Xers repeatedly cut off when they start moaning about how everyone’s forgotten them.) The commercial (you’ll never guess what it’s for) has a happy ending, which is more than can be said for similar conflicts in modern workplaces everywhere, particularly law firms.

I’ve been working with a few firms recently whose leaders are increasingly troubled about their junior lawyers. In some cases, the firms are most worried about associate apathy towards partnership opportunities; in others, high rates of attrition, low levels of productivity, a perceived absence of commitment, and declining attendance at the office are the main concerns. What unites them all is a sense that there’s a “lack of engagement” on the part of their junior lawyers towards their work, the firm, or even their legal careers.

But it’s important that we understand what’s meant by “engagement” here, and that the generational piece of it, while significant, is not close to the whole story. This is less about “young lawyers today,” and more about what law firms have become.

Over the past few decades, law firms and their leaders have grown accustomed to welcoming waves of junior lawyers willing (if not always eager) to toil very hard and compete with each other to do great work and climb the ladder towards partnership. Associates back then understood the assignment: Show up every day, bill a ton of hours, build relationships with partners and with each other. The law firm business model sustained itself on the productivity and leverage that these juniors generated through their acceptance of the firm’s conditions. The firm interpreted this acceptance as “engagement,” and liked it. A lot.

Roughly five to seven years ago, give or take, all that began to change. Lawyers who’ve entered law firms since the mid-to-late 2010s have taken a good look around, sized up the landscape and the people, and decided this wasn’t somewhere they had much interest in staying.

Some of this change was generational — I’ve written (and so has seemingly everyone else) about how Millennial and Alpha-Generation lawyers have different priorities than the Boomers and Xers who built and laboured in the billable-hour mines. There is a genuine values gap here, especially as it concerns how much of one’s life and energy a person is willing to sink into their job. Lawyers 35 and under tend to decide that issue differently than older ones did at similar points in their careers.

But I believe this change has also been structural and environmental, and that associate behaviour would have changed regardless of which cohort showed up at the door.

Part of this was not generational, but demographic. The number of US law graduates dropped 28.5% between 2012 and 2020, creating the conditions for the current seller’s market in legal talent. Those lawyers entered the profession with breathtaking amounts of debt, and therefore with every incentive to maximize revenue in the short-term, including changing jobs at a rate that often shocks senior partners.

Accordingly, young lawyers have neither the patience for “paying their dues” nor the luxury of taking the long view compared to previous generations — not in today’s world. “It’s really hard and uncommon for Gen Z law students to plan and see themselves as partners in 20 years,” says a 24-year-old law student, “because nobody knows if their city is going to be underwater in 20 years.”

And while it’s true that new lawyers are less interested in the partnership track (and the sacrifices required to walk it) than any previous group, it’s also true that the “partnership track” itself is fading away.

From 2012 to 2022, the number of days required for an entry-level associate to make equity partnership in US firms grew an astonishing 238%. Firms seeking to limit seats at the equity table and prolong the leverage of highly skilled intermediate lawyers piled on layers of padding between associates and equity partnership. As far back as 2013, I noted six different terms law firms were using to describe leveraged lawyers, headlined by the famous “non-equity partners.” Since then, “of counsel” has become the newest holding pen of choice.

By 2018, Bernie Burk was noting that “what used to be a ‘partnership track’ disappears into the underbrush at a point you can see from the starting line.” In the six years since, little has changed. Associates’ promised reward for all their hard labour has grown too distant to carry much weight.

And of course, then there’s the pandemic. Associates who weren’t immediately laid off in 2020 were obliged to work from home — which proved to be an exhilarating experience, because firms had been insisting for years that lawyers simply could not work remotely, and here were all the lawyers, working remotely, and everyone was doing just fine.

Among other things, the hybrid-work shift of the last few years was a body blow to law firms’ credibility on the subject of how and where legal work could be done. Firms could fulminate all they liked about the importance of in-person attendance for “culture” and “training” — the lawyers knew better. Full-time in-person attendance hasn’t returned to law firms partly because the myth of its importance has been busted.

And most recently, law firms’ ethical and moral choices have (quite unexpectedly) entered the chat. Perhaps driven by the turmoil of the last few years, institutions’ social values have become a hot topic. Most companies and organizations now take DEI and ESG seriously — not just as lip service for PR purposes, but as legitimate strategic and competitive factors.

Uncomfortably for law firms, their client choices are now in the spotlight as well: Who do you work for? Are they bad actors? Warmongers? Wrecking the environment? There’s growing talk that some clients don’t deserve legal representation, and even that lawyers should be free to refuse to work on their files. Traditionally, law firms’ interest in ethics has not extended much past conflicts checks on new clients, and absolutely has not included digging into the moral uprightness of clients or their conduct. That’s not sitting well with the current mood.

Add all of this up, and a picture starts to emerge — not of disaffected young lawyers who demand work-life balance, necessarily (although that’s part of it), but of a law firm value proposition that’s no longer very attractive to many new lawyers.

Managing partners correctly perceive that associates are less engaged with their firms. But I think it’s a mistake to put that down to Those Wacky Millennials or whatever. I think law firms are less engaging to young lawyers than they used to be. Associates have to work harder and longer, make more sacrifices of health and family, and endure indifferent or frequently callous management, while generating little positive impact on the world (if not the real possibility of the opposite).

Why would young lawyers be engaged by that? Why would any lawyer, of any age, be engaged by the modern law firm’s value proposition? We’ve been joking for years about law firms being a “pie-eating contest where the winner gets more pie.” Maybe the joke’s not that funny.

When law firms use the term “engagement” to describe their employees’ relationship with the firm, they’re implicitly setting the terms of that relationship: “If you work to our standards and play by our rules, you will reap our rewards.” Increasingly, younger lawyers’ response to this offer sounds like, “Those standards are absurd and those rules are draconian, and those rewards aren’t worth the sacrifices. We’d like to engage with you — but in terms of what matters to us.”

Engagement is not a unilateral declaration. It’s relational. It starts with an offer from one side and it succeeds if the offeror, and the terms of the offering, are deemed worthy and are accepted by the other. Wedding engagements require the enthusiastic consent of the person being asked — “Marry me whether you like it or not” isn’t much of a proposal. The same applies to law firms.

So if you want associates to be engaged with your law firm, I strongly suggest you examine the value of your engagement proposal, of your value proposition. Or maybe I should say, your “values proposition.” Because as I’ve been saying for years now, the law firms that will get through this era and thrive in the next one will be those that establish and live real values.

What are your firm’s real values? If they’re being honest, quite a few firms would admit their highest value is “making the partners rich” — but that no longer draws and keeps the best and brightest young lawyers. Many others would cite “client service” or “a culture of excellence,” but however sincerely you might esteem them, these don’t resonate with young lawyers who want jobs that are objectively worth doing.

Good legal work won’t be its own reward in future. Helping clients achieve their goals, with little regard to whether those goals are worthwhile, used to be value enough for lawyers. Law firms are now facing the new reality that who they choose to work for will affect who chooses to work for them.

So I recommend that, if you haven’t already, identify positive real-world goals and values for your firm (aside from great client service and a culture of excellence), and devote financial and reputational capital to pursuing and promoting them. You will get the attention of younger lawyers — and maybe to your surprise, of many older lawyers as well.

You’ll also need to clean up the other messes in the aisles of the law firm business model, of course. Reduce associate leverage with the use of Generative AI so that you can shorten the development process and quickly create highly proficient lawyers. Assume your lawyers want to be great, and allow them to choose where and how they work best in order to do that. Recognize the reality that every organization is now judged on its social commitments, so start making some as a firm.

But ultimately, this comes down to accepting that if you want your firm’s lawyers to be engaged, the firm has to do whatever it takes to genuinely engage them. If you’re not sure what that might be, ask them — because they’d really love to tell you, if you’re really willing to listen.