Beyond the Partner Track: How to Keep Legal Talent

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A recent Journal article about the gender wars noted a widely quoted statistic: At U.S. law firms, women account for less than 20% of partners in 2006, even though women received nearly half of law degrees granted in 2006 and 44% in 1996.

Somewhere along the way there’s a big dropoff. And women aren’t the only ones leaving big law firms. As law blog colleague Ashby Jones wrote a couple of years ago, more than 30 percent of associates leave by the end of their third year as well.

We spoke recently with a couple of big-firm lawyers who’ve been thinking a lot about these issues.

Over at WilmerHale, co-managing partner Bill Perlstein says law firms need to step back and consider whether the traditional associate/counsel/partner model is working. “We’re in a talent business,” he says. Attrition represents “a massive loss of talent.”

Earlier this year, his firm started a task force to look at whether there are ways to structure a law firm to better the odds of keeping talent, of both genders.
“There are many people who want top-tier work but don’t know that they want 24/7 and that this is what they view as the sole focus of their lives.”

The task force, he says, aims to explore whether there’s a way to expand the number of work options and career paths to keep people who might not want the all-out commitment of partnership. “The one brass ring may not work anymore,” he says.

Among the issues the task force may consider: extending the partnership track in some instances to accommodate people who need to scale back their commitment for certain periods in their lives; ways to keep people who are at home for a time better-connected to the firm; and ways to enable less-than-full-timers to get “top-tier” work. At the same time, said Perlstein, a firm needs to take into account the needs of clients and reward the people who are “driven to work all out.”

Meanwhile, at Cleary Gottleib, the firm in the U.S. recently instituted a few changes to better address, in particular, the way “younger lawyers are approaching their careers,” says James Bromley, a restructuring lawyer who chairs the firm’s associates committee. Some changes are granular. For example, the firm has formalized that telecommuting without special permission is okay one day a month in a lawyer’s first year, and two days a month after that. “There’s the opportunity for more comprehensive flextime” but that requires an application and review process, Bromley says.

Other changes are designed to address a broader shift in big-law culture, says Bromley. More associates “don’t know that they want to be partners at law firms,” he says. “We have to respond to that.” To this end, lawyers who want a reduced schedule can now go down to 60%, when the standard had been 80% — and that’s not just for parents.

The goal isn’t just to accommodate short-term needs. Rather, it’s to give associates “the opportunity during the course of their careers if they think they need it to have a safe place to think about their long-term aspirations.” He adds “We want to make sure that the law-firm environment is not an environment to make an ‘either I’m a lawyer at a big firm or I’m not’ choice.”

The traditional law firm model was “sort of an onramp to a highway that had a single off ramp after eight years” says Bromley. “For loads of different reasons people these days are looking for the opportunity to make sure that they want to make that deicison and sometimes make the deicsion to leave and sometimes make the decision to leave and come back.”

LB’ers, do these guys have the right answers? We know lots of other firms have given thought to these issues. Anyone out there doing anything particularly innovative?

Photo: iStockphoto