Why your law firm needs a retainmaker

It's not enough anymore to bring in rainmakers. You also need dedicated professionals empowered to engage, manage, and grow the firm's young talent.

So this is the first time I’ve written an article based on a typo.

I had just finished interviewing the Chief Strategy Officer of a client law firm and was writing up my notes. We’d been discussing the difficult but critical function of managing younger lawyers to help the firm stave off attrition and build the next cohort of leaders. Some partners in management roles, we agreed, were excellent rainmakers but mediocre (at best) managers who weren’t helping the firm retain its young talent.

Now, I type quickly and not especially carefully, and my initial drafts are sometimes kind of a mess. So in my attempt to rapidly type “rainmaker” in close proximity to “retain,” I found myself looking at the word “retainmaker.” I started to delete it, and then stopped and thought: Hang on. There might be an idea here.

For as long as there’ve been law firms, there have been rainmakers, figures of legend whose singular talents (including immense self-confidence, basic sociability, and no obvious aversion to the word “sales”) dazzle ordinary practitioners. Rainmakers possess above all the mystical ability to “think like a client” — a rare proficiency far beyond the “think like a lawyer” badge we all earned in law school.

Rainmakers build relationships with clients, and from those relationships come the engagements, retainers, and billable hours that keep law firms solvent. That’s why rainmakers are so greatly coveted, disproportionately rewarded, frequently indulged, and almost universally feared. They are the gravitational centres of law firms and the apex predators of the private legal market.

But despite (or probably because of) their particular strengths, rainmakers are often under-supplied with other gifts — like patience, empathy, communication, and collaboration. That’s a problem, because rainmakers usually rise to the top of their firms or practice groups, where they find waiting for them responsibilities like managing the daily activities and overseeing the professional development of less experienced lawyers and staff. If rainmakers also possessed those skills, they’d be amazing managers, too. But they mostly don’t, and they mostly aren’t.

This isn’t really their fault, to be honest. The problem is that law firms have never taken seriously enough the management and development of younger legal talent. Rather than formally train their new lawyers, law firms immerse them in billable work and wait for osmosis to kick in. Rather than incentivize lawyers to manage well, firms reward the finding and performing of billable work and little else. Rather than diversify the array of strengths and skills within their ranks, firms fetishize business development and judge every lawyer, sooner or later, on this one ability.

The firms that make it through our current crisis moment in the law will be those that successfully prioritized the management and growth of legal talent. They’ll do the difficult, risky, and courageous work of elevating professional development to the same priority level as business development. They’ll recognize that it’s just as important to retain good talent as it is to bring in good business.

The successful law firms of the future will recruit, promote, champion, and handsomely compensate people who can keep and grow legal professionals more effectively than other firms. Alongside the always-important rainmakers, these firms will feature an equally valuable cadre of — if you’ll allow me to officially coin the term — retainmakers.

A “retainmaker” is someone who excels at keeping the lawyers in a law firm engaged, fulfilled, and committed. This person occupies a supervisory position over younger or newer lawyers — not necessarily a direct-line-of-report superior, but certainly someone with the power to manage the junior lawyer’s workload, assess their performance, listen to their concerns, and oversee their growth. A retainmaker’s job is to help the firm get the most from its lawyers, and help the lawyers get the most from their firm.

The reality is that 90% of the lawyers who join a law firm will not spend their entire careers there. The great majority will move on, months or years after they first arrived — to another firm, to a sole practice, to a government or corporate job, or out of the law altogether. Knowing that, the firm should greet every new hire with a simple message along these lines:

“For as long as you’re here — and we hope that’s a very long time — we’ll help you gain experience and expertise and to grow as a professional. We’ll dedicate people and resources to advance your professional development. As you’ve fully committed to us, so will we be fully committed to you.”

And then back up that sentiment by appointing, empowering, and paying someone to live out that promise. This person could be the practice group leader, if they have (or are willing and able to learn) the human skills needed to perform this role on top of their other responsibilities. It could be another partner for whom managing and developing young professionals is a better calling than bringing in or sending out billable work. In some cases, it could be a senior and respected professional staff member with the clout to make partners pay due attention to their juniors.

The “retainmaker” who keeps the lawyers engaged would (immediately or eventually) need to command as much gravitas and pull as the rainmakers who keep the lawyers busy. The firm would have to recognize that both these roles are essential, and that one can’t be fully effective without the other. The firm’s culture would need to evolve to a point whereby a contribution to the firm’s prosperity beyond the immediately financial could be recognized as necessary and valuable.

Obviously, this kind of evolution will be neither quick nor easy. I understand how set in their ways law firms have become, and how deeply entrenched is the cult of the rainmaker. But the hard fact is, law firms that can’t keep their lawyers growing and engaged will bleed talent continuously, and this hemorrhaging inevitably will cost the firm its life. It’s not enough anymore just to bring the work in. You need to do whatever it takes to ensure people are present, equipped, and excited to do that work.

Law firms need to recruit and retain dedicated and enthusiastic lawyers and legal professionals. But until firms start treating talent development as equally important to business development, they will struggle with lawyer disengagement, burnout, and attrition. If you want to avoid this fate, start thinking about how a “retainmaker” could re-energize the relationship between your firm and its younger lawyers.