Biglaw

Put Me In, Coach

How lawyers are like athletes, and what it means for management.

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The NCAA national basketball championship is right around the corner, and another crop of student athletes will get a chance to make a name for themselves on the big stage. I’m here to talk about a different member of the team, however: the coach.

How Coaches Matter

Conventional wisdom has long held that effective coaching can have a major impact on a team’s win-loss records. For once, conventional wisdom and rigorous analysis are in agreement. For example, a pair of University of Chicago professors recently published a paper applying statistical analytics to detect the effect that coaches have in varying major sports. It’s a fun read for the casual fan, and their conclusions are intriguing.

Across the board, it appears that good coaches have a definitive impact on how their teams play and win. What’s most thought-provoking, though, is that the types of impact a coach has vary depending on the sport in question.

The college basketball coaches, for example, tend to have a bigger impact on the total amount of points scored in a game (by both teams) than they do on the difference in points between the teams. Coaches that emphasize fast-breaks and quick possessions tend to both score more and weaken their own defenses, while coaches that teach a slower style depress scoring on both sides of the court. Baseball coaches, by contrast, had most of their impact in one specific phase of the game: defense. Coaching was found to explain 28 percent of the variation between teams on how much they allowed the other side to score, a monstrous difference. Football coaches have an entirely different area of greatest impact: fumble and penalty prevention. Unlike in baseball, where coaches make their mark by making discrete, strategic, in-game decisions, NFL coaches can make big gains by instilling a culture of discipline into their teams, reducing dropped balls and lost yards on penalties.

Keeping The Talent Happy

Sports is fun and all, but I think research like this matters, even in a column focused on law firm management. Like sports, law is very much a talent game. No matter what practice you’re in, there is likely a huge pool of competition out there with your same basic skill set. The clients you develop and the firm you join are based on how well you develop your own talent. The best attorneys have the best shot of making the big impacts and bringing home the big checks. The difference between a good attorney and a great one can be the difference between a client making billions or going bankrupt. In the criminal world, it can be the difference between prison and freedom, life or death.

Sponsored

Talent matters in law, and talent needs to be managed. Professional sports teams manage their talent through intense one-on-one coaching by a large team of full-time coaching professionals dedicated to helping their players and their team win. Law firms tend to manage their talent with mostly full-time practioners with no formal leadership or management training.

Can you guess which one of these approaches is more successful?

Putting Thought Into Action

In law firms, “management” is not emphasized. Part of the reason is intuitive. Most lawyers didn’t go to law school to be managers. They went to law school to learn how to practice law. As a result, across the industry, it’s rare to find lawyers who are passionate about management or who are willing to educate themselves about the topic.

Another reason law firms lack significant robust management structure is that lawyers are notoriously unwilling to accept direction or coaching. It’s been well documented that, as a group, lawyers are off-the-charts on autonomy and skepticism in their personality profiles. The combination of healthy egos and the fact that partners are the “owners” of the business can make law firm leadership seem impossible.

Sponsored

But it’s not just personality, it’s also money. Part of the reason management is de-emphasized in law firms is compensation related. The primary driver of a typical law firm partner’s compensation is their productivity: how much business have they generated, how much have they collected as working attorneys, what is their profit margin, etc. In most firms, a partner’s performance as a practice group leader is rarely a major factor in determining their pay.

Firms get what they pay for, however, and what happens is a manager’s title largely becomes honorary. Rather than focusing on developing the talent and putting new plays together, practice groups function largely as a loose affiliation of lawyers that occasionally lunch together and go through an agenda that was prepared a few hours before the meeting.

This isn’t a failing of practice group managers — it’s a failure of senior management in creating structures and incentives to promote the development of the team as a whole.

So what are law firms to do?

Let’s Get Professional

Recognizing all of the challenges above, many law firms have tried something novel: they have started to take a cue from sports teams and good businesses by taking the full-time practioners largely out of the management equation.

I’ve long argued that law firms would be better run if professional managers, some of whom may not have JDs, play a larger role in running law firms. Although this could come in the form of a COO or a CEO, it can also take the form in more of the day-to-day management of law firms at the practice group level.

Increasingly, law firms are enlisting the help of non-lawyer professionals who can help practice group leaders do their job more effectively. The role of these practice group leaders is monitor performance of group members, identify cross-referral opportunities, create substantive agendas for meetings — essentially, everything a practice group leader should be doing but probably isn’t because they are focused on their practice. Realizing the need for professional management in law firms, many universities and law schools are now even offering degrees to non-JDs in law firm management.

Another step firms need to take is to adopt a flexible management structure. Perhaps out of an innate desire to standardize and fit everything into a neat little box, many law firms decide on a management structure and apply it across the board to all practice groups, without considering whether that management structure is actually the best one for the job. Just like you may want a baseball coach focused on defense, where they can make the most difference, you may want different leadership styles and structures at different places in your firm. It may be that a firm’s large litigation department benefits from a strong hand with unilateral authority to steer the ship, while their small IP group thrives best with decision-making by committee. Applying the same management model to all groups is convenient from an administrative perspective, but potentially disastrous in terms of actual outcomes and talent utilization.

Coaching Consciously

Biglaw managers, here’s your homework: go figure out if, and how, you’re coaching your talent to succeed. Then ask whether you chose that coaching system, or fell into it by default. I suspect the answers for many of us will be dispiriting at first, but learning our weaknesses is the first step to correcting them.

Making the conscious choice to invest in your people is always going to be the right call.

James Goodnow

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

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