Back To Biglaw’s Future

If we want to lead tomorrow, we need to ask questions today.

To my readers in the Biglaw world, have you ever felt like Marty McFly? Like you’re stuck somewhere that looks familiar, but is decades behind the times, and only you and maybe a couple others realize it? Do you feel like you’re waiting for a bolt of lightning from the sky to rip you out of the past and send you back home?

I ask this because I watched Back To The Future with my kids over the weekend, and it struck a nerve I wasn’t expecting. I’ve had the privilege of spending a lot of time these past few years researching, discussing, and thinking about the place of Biglaw in the modern business economy, and watching Marty McFly stumble around a time-shifted Hill Valley felt all-too-familiar. That transition to an earlier time is the same sensation I get when returning to the Biglaw world after spending time immersed in the larger business community. In too many ways, the Biglaw industry is operating as if the last 20 years never happened. Doc and Marty knew when and where lightning was going to strike, and they used that to launch themselves into the future. We don’t have that same luxury, but all the same we desperately need something to zap our industry out of its comfort zone.

(Fun sidebar: the movie also hit my son hard. He sobbed hysterically when Doc Brown tore open his shirt after being shot at the end of the movie to reveal he was wearing a bulletproof vest. “They’re happy tears,” my little guy said. Parenthood, amiright?)

The Cost of Curiosity

Lately I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the concept of professional curiosity as one avenue to kickstarting Biglaw out of its malaise. The larger business world is recognizing that fostering curiosity at every level of an organization is essential to boosting productivity, happiness, and engagement. Curiosity is both a cause of and evidence of a healthy work environment. It’s a piece of a virtuous cycle.

When employees feel empowered and protected, they’re more likely to feel ownership of their team, and the desire to develop it. In that environment, employees want to learn more about what they’re doing. They want to understand more about their role in the larger team, and that team’s role in the company, and perhaps even their company’s role in the larger industry. They take that knowledge and turn it into new ideas and innovations, or maybe just a greater sense of purpose and camaraderie that increases their productivity. In a healthy environment, management recognizes engagement and superior performance, and rewards it. Curious, engaged, empowered employees are the everyday R&D of a modern business.

Unsurprisingly, Biglaw’s ossified structures aren’t exactly great at encouraging employee curiosity. At what level does Biglaw typically incentivize pure learning for the sake of learning? I’d argue almost none. Associates who spend time in the library learning about new areas of law are going to be asked why they aren’t billing. File clerks and secretarial staff who bother their supervisors with questions about how the legal industry works are more likely to be reprimanded than edified.

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Where curiosity is encouraged, it’s always purely for the sake of immediate financial benefit, rather than long-term organizational health. For an example, if an associate is ordered to go research a new statute coming through the legislature so the firm can market itself with an informational session with industry leaders, that’s not evidence of an associate being given room to develop themselves. That’s more evidence of the top-down, do-what-I-say hierarchy that defines so much of Biglaw. We sell our time by the hour. It’s not surprising that we don’t reward people who spend their hours doing things that can’t be immediately sold.

Why Rain Comes with Lightning

 We also largely lack one of the big prerequisites for fostering curiosity in our ranks: the feeling of professional safety and empowerment. As I’ve discussed before, the best teams are comprised of people who feel safe within the team. Anyone who will take a bullet for someone else usually thinks the other would have taken a bullet for them. As an industry, we’re horrible at this. Our associates continually report feeling under scrutiny, under pressure, under-rested, and over-worked. Curiosity is a risk. It’s spending time away from what we know works in pursuit of something that might, just might, work better. If our associates don’t feel comfortable enough to take a long lunch break without checking in, how can they feel safe enough to ask to spend time researching new technologies or bleeding edge areas of law where the potential payoff is distant and uncertain?

The simultaneous tragedy and opportunity here is that curiosity is one of the things that lawyers are best at. We’re trained from law school forward in the art of identifying things we don’t know, curing that ignorance, organizing our thoughts so that others can learn from our effort, and in the process identifying five more things we don’t know that we could do further research on. I remember the rush I’d feel as an associate when I was assigned a research project on something truly interesting, and the internal tension between learning all I wanted to learn versus getting back to productive, billable tasks.

Encouraging curiosity also has second-order benefits that so many firms overlook. Non-billable time spent learning and engaging with the community outside of Biglaw is an investment in the future. Giving associates and young partners the time, space, and encouragement today to become industry thought leaders is a good way to have a new crop of rainmakers generating profits for your firm in a decade, and to ensure those rainmakers stay with the firm that helped build them up.

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Creating More Doc Browns

In Back to the Future, Doc Brown spent his family’s entire fortune pursuing his curiosities and creating the flux capacitor. Although law firms can’t pay first-year associates $190,000 per year to theorize and experiment around-the-clock, we can do better. By failing to foster curiosity in our firm cultures, we’re failing to fully utilize one of our fundamental strengths as attorneys. You can’t harvest a crop you never plant, and you can’t sell cutting-edge expertise and counsel when you haven’t bothered to learn anything new. Today’s learners are tomorrow’s moguls. It’s bad leadership, and bad business, not to think long term and encourage that kind of professional growth in our ranks.

Teaching our associates to ask questions fearlessly would be powerful. How powerful precisely is hard to say, but I’d stake good money it’s at least 1.21 gigawatts.


James Goodnow

James Goodnow is an attorneycommentator, and Above the Law columnist. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is the managing partner of an NLJ 250 law firm. He is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management category. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.