In a recent post on Trendlines, Gary Boomer held forth on the staffing crisis in our profession. Succinct and to the point, Boomer lists four reasons. While all four are valid, my experience over the past five years has identified one as being most significant – Firms with low retention and high staff turnover work their associates too many hours. It’s not rocket science.
When you employ a business model that is predicated on billing by the hour, your alternatives to increasing revenue are basically limited to increasing hourly rates, or working more hours. The knee jerk reaction in most firms is to ‘work more hours’. Short term, this may work, but ultimately our young associates realize they have a ‘job’ rather than a career – and they leave. Very few of us ‘live to work’, but rather we ‘work to live’. When the Firm takes away your time, they take away your life. Knowledge workers are too savvy to allow that for long. Carl Sandburg summarizes it nicely.
“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.”
We have addressed this as a firm, but until we address this as a profession we will continue to see the best and brightest leave.
I do not know why this concept is so difficult that many smart people running firms around the country can’t seem to grasp it. Is the hold of the past so tight that we cannot loosen it to ensure a promising future?
I hope the profession sees the light instead of settling for those who will tolerate it the way it is.
Comment by Shane Eloe — July 21, 2008 @ 8:53 am
Mark, two thoughts come to mind: 1) a lot of firms throw money at their people to make the “time” bite (requirement) less painful, but good firms and HR people know that “time is a currency” these days. Even I know it while trying to juggle my family, friends, career, clients… If I could buy more time for my days, I’d spend more on that that gasoline, I assure you!
2) a must-read is a commencement speech by lawyer, Stephen Ellis, posted on David Maister’s blog (http://davidmaister.com/blog/602/Being-a-Happy-and-Successful-Lawyer).
Mr Ellis wisely asserted: The fact is our profession has become increasingly unhappy over the past couple of decades. I am convinced the vast majority of that unhappiness derives from a singleseemingly innocuous event in the late 1980’s: The American Lawyer magazine began publishing the AM LAW 100, and listed the profits per partner of the 100 largest firms. Virtually all of the firms in this country immediately bought in to that statistic as the only credible measure of success. The game was on – we lawyers would now take our measure almost entirely from money, at least in terms of what was publicly discussed. Without question, integrity, service and professionalism were important, but how we measured ourselves was money
This was a terrible mistake and now, more and more of us see its dark implications: the bragging rights on how many billable hours we charge (and the matching lost weekends and evenings); rates that are topping $1000 an hour; and clients who believe their files are being worked to death by armies of inexperienced associates. All of this so the largest firms can bump their statistical rankings and everybody else can compare themselves to the published stars.
His whole speech will take 5 minutes to read. Five minutes well spent, I assure you.
Comment by Michelle Golden — July 24, 2008 @ 1:01 pm