"Lifestyle Firms" No More

One of the odder features of the current market is the sight of law firms that historically billed themselves as “lifestyle” firms now going out of their way, during associate interviews, to insist and absolutely insist, that they are most definitely not a lifestyle firm. From one perspective, this is perfectly understandable since those law firms that have not yet re-jigged their economic models to allow for variable associate profitability targets (read: the AMLAW 200) need every new hire to be billing at maximum capacity – and thus have no need for associates who want to spend weekends with their families. On the other hand, as matters of branding and reality – it borders on the ludicrous to say that a top regional firm with global aspirations is “not a lifestyle firm” in the exact same way as Cravath is “not a lifestyle” firm. Forgive me – but when wonderful firms that just happen not to be in the Top 20 start going out of their way to scare off potential associate hires by telling them that they will be working just as hard as they are at Cravath “because we mean to become the next Cravath/Sullivan/Simpson” (and nothing but!) – I start wondering what it is that they are so ashamed of. Particularly if it is actually true (as is sometimes the case) that their associates do not work as hard as at Cravath!

The fact of the matter is that, for the sake of achieving profitability targets that will take them higher up the AMLAW 100 charts, these firms are sacrificing one of the few things that associates fleeing the Cravath-tier look for in a new home – and that is an expectation that they will no longer be in a Cravath-tier firm – or in a firm with Cravath-like aspirations. By shedding a significant distinguishing characteristic – these firms thereby place themselves at a significant recruiting disadvantage to better-known firms since associates will decide that there is no point in working 2500 hours at a “no-name” firm when they can be working those same hours at a more established brand. This creates a significant disincentive for associates to move on – and could potentially affect how successfully up-and-coming Cravath wannabees achieve their recruitment targets. Moreover, given that these firms will be expected to match the ever rising associate salary expectations – this reduced ability to attract associates carries a significant risk to their bottom line, in part because it will be harder for wannabe firms to attract premium business.

Finally, these firms may need to relax their recruitment criteria by accessing a much broader talent pool – well outside the New York market – to find qualified associates willing to work top-tier hours at firms that have little or no name recognition in the New York or global market. The broader candidate base will necessarily need to include attorneys with credentials that, 10 years ago, would hardly get a second look at premiere New York firms. This will require some significant institutional courage since law firms have historically touted their highly-credentialed attorneys to their clients as evidence of their competence in highly sophisticated matters. And yet, how many top New York law firms have the courage to allow their chairman be quoted as to his disdain for Yale Law School graduates? Cadwalader let Robert O. Link do this – with no ill effects to their recruiting or to their profitability. Then again, Cadwalader, which Link described as a meritocracy, has never pretended to be a “lifestyle firm” - only a very profitable one. Not every firm can be, or wants to be a Cadwalader. Where are our lifestyle firms when we need them?

Would You Want to Work for this Firm?

I sometimes delude myself in thinking, in a seller’s market for legal talent, that my clients will be especially keen on making a good first impression on a candidate – and particularly where that candidate is in the league of those fabled Cravath associates.

And yet, here's what still happens:

SCENE: A junior superstar attends for his first interview with the practice heads of a AMLAW -20 tier corporate practice group. The associate arrives on time, but is then kept waiting for 45 minutes with no explanation except for the hasty apologies of a temporary recruiting assistant who advises that the interviewers are on conference calls and are not available. Disgusted, the attorney finally leaves the office.

I write the partner and my recruitment coordinator contacts the following e-mail:

“CANDIDATE just called me on from his blackberry to tell me that he sat in your reception area for 45 minutes, and ended up leaving your offices without having met with PARTER ONE or PARTER TWO. Needless to say that CANDIDATE is quite upset. What happened?”

Here is the response I got from PARTNER ONE

“PARTNER TWO and I apologize. We were on different conference calls but each was with clients and each of them ran long past the time they should have been over. On the other hand, when I disengaged at 12:48 to meet with CANDIDATE, he had already left. Given that the meeting was to last until at least 1:00, I am not sure why he did not stick around until that time.”

I’m speechless. I know all about client pressures and I understand that these things happen. What I don’t understand is why the firm did not have another attorney or senior recruitment coordinator available, as a back-up, to meet with this candidate? Why leave the candidate with the concern that this firm doesn’t really care about its junior associates - since it doesn't seem to care about impressing the associates it tries to recruit? Worst is the presumption, in Partner One's e-mail - that a candidate should be content to wait the better part of an hour, with little or no explanation, to interview for a job with partners that would likely treat him the same way, if not worse, once the recruiting "courtship" was over.

On the other hand, if these things didn't happen - then associates everywhere would be happier and Lawcruiters would have fewer candidates to work with. And who wants that?

“Best Practices” for Candidates

As we all know, Lawcruiters and hiring managers alike salivate profusely at the sight of a mid-level Cravath M&A associate who is willing to move firms quickly – and thus are often tempted to overlook failings that will sink the candidacy of lesser mortals. For those of us who do not prompt such Pavlovian reactions in hiring managers, here are some “best practices” (besides that niggly bit about credentials and experience quality) that guarantees that a candidate will be given serious consideration.

1. Carefully Prepared Resumes: A resume has one basic narrow function: it informs the reader as to why its author is an appropriate candidate for a job opportunity. To this end, the reader wants to know: does the candidate have relevant experience (and what is it) AND does the candidate have appropriate academic credentials and law firm training. In almost all cases, this information can be reduced to a one page resume to which is attached a transaction summary describing specifically, and in a detailed and carefully structured way, what the candidate can do, and at what level of accomplishment. Besides foreign language skills (fluent only), all other information, in most cases, is irrelevant. The sole exception to this is credible evidence that the candidate has the character or abilities of someone who can be expected to generate business for the firm. A minority of lawyers have these abilities. This means, for the remainder, that a “just the facts” resume will be greeted gratefully by eyestrain-plagued, resume-swamped hiring managers who will surely note, approvingly, the writer’s self-confident refusal to “pad” the resume with extraneous information.

2. Carefully Prepared Interviews: Just like the resume gives a candidate a limited space to make a good first impression – the interview affords that candidate a limited window of opportunity to prove her qualified for the role being sought. To this end, the candidate will need to read firm biographies, understand firm practice structures, prepare summary presentations of her transactional experience, and thoughtful answers to the “Why do you want to work for us” question. Most importantly, the preparation must be designed to meet the needs of that particular search. Thus, someone being interviewed for a senior associate role will want to reassure the interviewers about her maturity and experience level. Someone being interviewed for a mid-level transaction completion role will want to show energy and a desire to advance in his career.

3. People Skills and Good Manners: Given studies about how people rely on first impressions, we know that the candidate actually needs to do very little in order to confirm a favorable predisposition in her favor. The converse is equally true. This best practice recognizes the reality that lawyers spend more time with their professional colleagues than with virtually anyone else. It reasonable that firms will want to hire people who “fit” – meaning that they have the social graces, character attributes, enthusiasm and other people skills needed to make that person a pleasure to work with. At the same time, all of us (the writer included) can benefit from regular refresher readings from a book of business etiquette - particularly at interview time.

4. A Business or Career Plan: Every lawyer needs a business plan. This is not just for those of us who are growing our own businesses, but for anyone who wants to map out how she will be taking her career from Point A to Point B. Business/career plans force careful thinking, clarity of purpose, and realistic objectives. Once written and internalized – these plans bring order, integrity, and greater effectiveness into everything a candidate does to advance her career. A candidate with a plan understands precisely why she is interviewing at a given firm, and exactly what information she needs to convey to her interviewers. For that person, everything makes sense – and it shows.

Lateral Hiring Follies - Part II: Top 5 Dumb Client Mistakes

You would think that our clients would know better. Compared with our candidates – who are often relatively inexperienced twenty-somethings in the early phases of their professional lives – our clients have years of institutional knowledge and hiring experience, not to mention battalions of seasoned partners and teams of professional lateral hiring coordinators. Sounds impressive? Well – it turns out that they are human too!

1. Breaching Confidentiality: I am always amazed at how casually some partners treat the confidentiality of the candidates whose resumes cross their desks. Transgressions range from calling common client contacts for feedback on the candidate, to innocently mentioning a meeting with the candidate to the candidate’s colleague, to accidentally disseminating a candidate’s resume outside of the law firm firewall. Apart from the breach of any legal obligations these firms owe to the candidates in question, who surely suffer when word gets back to their current employer – the firm that permits these breaches to occur commits incremental suicide to its reputation in the lateral marketplace.
2. Improper use of Lawcruiters: Once the introduction is made – the Lawcruiter’s role is (1) to ensure that the interview process effectively establishes to both sides why (or why not) a candidate represents a good or bad hire, and (2) to ensure that that both sides receive each other’s feedback as promptly as possible. A client does its own recruitment efforts no favors by keeping the Lawcruiter in the dark on issues such as specific concerns or questions about the candidate’s background, or the duration and intensity of the hiring process. For example: leaving a candidate “hanging” for weeks on end without any feedback as to the “why” – is as good as saying “no interest” because, even if the client decides to move forward, the candidate will likely be too annoyed to want to proceed.
3. Interview Failings by Partners: These include (and I am not making these up!): failing to have read the candidate’s resume, taking phone-calls or meetings during an interview, scolding a candidate for showing up with the wrong experience confusing a candidate with inconsistent job description, asking corporate candidates for copies of their litigation briefs, etc.
4. Interview Failing by Associates Those candidates who are (properly) trained to treat every interview (including meetings with HR and support staff) as a potential deal breaker are often surprised at how poorly the interviewing firm will train its peer-level associate interviewers on the art of interviewing and recruiting an outstanding candidate. Insofar as the associate-level interview is usually a golden opportunity for a firm to put its best foot forward – it has amazed this Lawcruiter to hear accounts of associate interviewers bad-mouthing their employers, showing indifference or hostility to the candidate – or otherwise acting as though they had better things to do than recruit the candidate to their firm. With predictable results.
5. Superficial Interviewing: For our clients - lateral hiring is an expensive and time consuming business. As such, it would make sense that our clients, in the interests of raising their rates of associate retention, would want to weed out those candidates for whom a lateral move represents little more than changing Mr. Hyde for Dr. Jekyll. Since clients are sometimes desperate, the lack of clear career planning by candidates is often overlooked by hiring managers – particularly when confronted by the magic bullet of potential hire from Cravath. Clearer eyes would ask, why should the Cravath associate who is moving simply because he or she wants “a better environment” prove to be any less likely to be the same person who moves on to the next “better environment “ one or two years later? Given the cost of integrating an associate into a firm, and the time lag before that associate becomes profitable – it strikes me as ludicrous that firms don’t dig deeper into a candidate’s motivations so as to ensure that they really do get a “keeper”. Why not give the job to the Fordham grad from Dewey who knows exactly why he wants that job, since that person is most likely to stay...
   

And here is wishing all of us a successful start to the lateral hiring season!

Pity the Cravath Associate

Pity the life of a recruitment coordinator (RC). Pity the life of a Cravath associate. Huh?

THE PROBLEM: The Broken Telephone

Let's talk about the way RCs, Cravath associates, and the Lawcruiter community all suffer when our clients fail to adequately communicate the details of their lateral hiring needs.

Lets start with the RC. Charged with the responsibility of managing the process of recruiting, interviewing and hiring lateral attorneys – this individual (or, increasingly, team of individuals) needs to translate the sometimes inconsistent, all-too-briefly stated needs of his/her partner-masters, to the information-hungry (and usually information deprived) Lawcruiter community. In response, the Lawcruiter community - knowing that that the information provided is often incomplete or incoherent, will do one of three things:

1. Send reams of tangentially relevant candidates - to the great frustration of the RC and the hiring partners - in the hope that at least one of them will meet – however unintentionally - the “real” objective of the search;

2. In the hopes of increasing the odds of a successful placement – send very few tangentially relevant resumes, but only resumes of associates from “Top 10” firms. Here, the Lawcruiter community plays upon the time-old recruiter’s maxim that “No one ever got fired for recruiting someone from Cravath” – but essentially achieves the same result, i.e., a sub-optimal placement rate and the continuing frustration of the RC and hiring partners. Here, we can also think about the frustration those poor Cravath associates who are deluged with inappropriate recruitment calls - and who are really no different from their more neglected colleagues at the “lesser firms” insofar as all they really want is for one recruiter to call with information about the “right” job for them

3. Finally – some Lawcruiters try to optimize their recruiting efforts by speaking directly to the hiring partners (and bypassing the RC) in the hopes of getting more detailed hiring criteria, and quicker feedback on pending candidates – especially where there are “shifting” criteria for the ideal candidate. Well – imagine what he RC thinks about that!

THE SOLUTION: Better Communication!

Ultimately, our clients could save themselves and the Lawcruiter community an enormous amount of time and energy by working harder at improving the information and feedback loop that helps us all do our jobs better. (We can also save those poor Cravath associates a torrent of inappropriate recruiting calls!) Herewith two few specific suggestions:

1. Spend more time and effort writing clear and complete job description – detailing specific expectations as to the successful candidate(s) qualifications, technical skill set, and experience level. The description should describe the role that the partner is trying to fill, and set out – in detail – what kind of things the candidate would be doing on the job. In the case of difficult searches, the hiring partner might want to include specific details about how broadly the qualification specifications would be relaxed, e.g., industry expertise, technical training, etc. In these cases, merely saying that “stong corporate candidates will be considered” is substantially useless and simply encourages recruiters who devote themselves to pestering the same group of Cravath associates to the detriment of other candidates who would be more appropriate.

2. Designate a search-specific feedback contact: i.e. either hire recruitment coordinators who are intimately aware of the nuances and fluctuations in a group’s hiring needs or (better) designate a partner or senior associate whose job is to actively manage the search by providing instant feedback to RCs as to the actual current parameters of the search – and ensuring that these updates are pushed out to the recruiting community by way of e-mails, telephone calls, etc. A few of our clients are already doing this…

I guarantee that the more these two tactics are used – the fewer inappropriate resumes will be submitted, mostly because – in the face of all this clarity – very few Lawcruiters will want to be embarrassed by submitting anyone not clearly on point. As long as the vagueness and inadequate communication persists – so will the deluge of inappropriate resumes; so will the pointless recruiting calls to those poor Cravath associates; so will attempts by the Lawcruiter community to bypass the RCs – so will all of us continue to waste time and energy that can be more efficiently spent in making more placements.

Flying Elephants Used as a Recruiting Tool

For those of us who occasionally succumb to typecasting - e.g., referring to a "Cravath-type" or a "Simpson Thacher -type" to explain the relationship between a firm's culture and the personalities it produces - here is an intruiging piece by Harry Joiner, an Atlanta GA recruiter of marketing professionals (I have never met Harry) who hosts a fascinating blog at Marketingheadhunter.com.

Harry's basic point(s), as paraphrased for the law firm world, are as follows:

1. "If your law firm's brand was a person - how would you describe that person to a friend?" In asking this, Harry makes the observation that the best run companies have a very strong sense of self due to the alignment of their brand, their lawyers, practice specializations and their operating model. We all know firms who do this better than others - e.g., Orrick's evolution from an old-line San Francisco municipal finance firm to a full-service, cutting-edge, California-flavored, global player - marked everywhere by its ubiquitous "O". By comparison we have the somewhat confusing "what-were-they- thinking" imagery of dogs in turtleneck sweaters and flying elephants featured in Bingham McCutcheon's marketing materials. Each place is a fine firm. Which firm's brand is an easier sell?
2. Now more than ever, authenticity matters. Law firms need to know who they are so they can attract the best people. For the legal recruitment community, this is a critical issue insofar as we are constantly addressing the long-standing mis-perception, in our candidates, that "all firms are alike".

Obviously, a lawyer will not move to a new law firm on the basis of good branding alone. But we all know of firms that, for utterly unexpected reasons (remember Howrey's "Boot Camp"), have been deemed "cooler" then their peers - and thus more attractive places to work.

This is all very new. It's clear that law firms are still in the early phases of addressing the issues of branding and corporate culture that have long been "meat & potatoes" issues in Corporate America. It will be interesting to see where the elephants land...