“It used to be a family, and then it became all about making money,” said a senior lawyer of his former firm. “We’re like a family,” said another lawyer of his new boutique firm.
But unless the firm’s members are of the same actual family, a law firm is not a family. It’s an organization in which people with a host of differences come in the door, and can behave in all sorts of errant ways. Arguably, firms face more internal competition than ever before. I say arguably because, if you trace the lineage of any venerable large law firm, you will discover break-ups, make-ups, divorces and skeletons in closets. Yet even allowing for that, the Canadian legal market for business clients is shrinking, at least in quantum. So business lawyers face more competition, period.
In this new reality, organizational behaviourists are reclassifying “soft skills” – i.e., those generally associated with emotional intelligence (EI) – as the new “power skills.” While EI is a tricky term to pin down, suffice it to say there are a range of behaviours that in a corporate organization are taught, instituted, encouraged, even regulated, by HR departments and backed up by the executive. Of course, some companies do this more effectively than others, but generally companies teach employees to perform effectively as a team in order to attain common goals, rather than be defeated by internal competition. This is good for business. Subject to varying rates of adherence, of course, corporate HR directives apply to all employees. Everybody is on the team, albeit in hierarchical formation.
At law firms, by contrast, the rules are not the same for all persons within the office. Lawyers, especially partners, are treated differently than others. A few years ago, a chief marketing officer told me an anecdote about being two weeks into her new job and having to ask someone about how she would get paid, since she hadn’t signed anything that looked like payroll documentation. Because she wasn’t on the lawyer team, or the administrative team, she had fallen through the cracks.
Law firms tend not to go beyond referring to teams by function: legal, admin, support. The same protocols may apply within that functional group, but there isn’t parity among the three of them.
One might argue that partners are owners, after all, and that makes the difference. Or that everyone is treated alike when it comes to the most negative aspects of organizational behaviour: no one is allowed to harass another person, for example, and firms put appropriate rules in place to prevent those kinds of things from happening. Moreover, there’s human rights and labour and employment legislation governing egregious behavior. But surely these constitute a minimal threshold for drawing everybody who works together, together.
Simply put, EI enhances team effectiveness, which in turn ameliorates client service and law firm profits. With exceptions, law firms tend not to teach EI to any significant extent. Moreover, firms do not compensate for lawyers’ teamwork capabilities. The existing law firm economic paradigm isn’t conducive to doing so, since EI is not a direct output or work product. And again, the functional teams are divided; when it comes to being paid, it would be easier to figure out a way to remunerate administrative personnel for good or bad teamwork than it would be to pay partners for it.
This seems rather unfair, which in itself detracts from effectiveness of one side of the team. More to the point, it doesn’t get the best out of anybody. Of course, corporations aren’t families either; they devote resources to the programs, training and coaching that they do, because financial results would be poorer if they did not.
In-house counsel have said that, when they make the move from law firms to corporations, they need to learn how to function well with people in other departments. This comes to them largely as a new revelation. Their department isn’t in charge. In fact, it can feel especially difficult for “cost centre” departments like Legal to be appreciated. Its incumbents need to be especially diplomatic and emotionally intelligent. This includes, for example, effective behaviour at meetings.
Interdisciplinary cooperation in corporations can indeed be very challenging: it amounts to asking people to create and pursue a vision together, even though some of them look through a lens of numbers, while others see engineering, or production, or words, or science or law. Modern law firms break down into functions, too. But they don’t build up again. In order to do so and therefore serve clients better, firms might take a look at their most successful clients’ HR departments.
Jean Cumming is Lexpert’s editor-in-chief. She can be reached at [email protected].
