Dave, a partner, was exhausted. He was looking forward to a beach vacation and some much-needed time with his family. Taylor, an associate, drafted a document and gave it to Dave as promised, before leaving to attend a family wedding. While Taylor thought the draft was “final enough,” it required so much revision that Dave spent most of his vacation redoing it. Dave returned to work even more exhausted, his spouse and kids angry and disappointed.
What happened?
What happened is that both Taylor and Dave lost sight of what they are each fundamentally being valued for and paid to do.
This column explains Taylor’s value to the firm (and the value of all associates). In a future column, we’ll focus on what Dave and other partners bring to the table.
Associates, What’s Your Value?
Having coached many associates over the years, I’ve observed that their value is not always made explicit to them. That’s unfortunate, because successful performance (not to mention engagement) depends on understanding one’s value to the enterprise. I offer the following explanation to help bridge this gap. I hope firms will consider sharing it with their associates to help them be as successful as possible.
The Big Law market rate starting salary, excluding bonus, for a new law school graduate—often (but not always) a younger, single person with no practical legal work experience—is now nearly triple the salary of the average four-person household in the United States. Even beyond the biggest firms, brand-new lawyers still earn far more than rookies in other fields.
Why?
Junior lawyers often think their value to the firm is the revenue from their billable hours. That’s a mistake. Junior lawyers are actually paid for three distinct things, of which billable hours are simply a byproduct:
- Conscientiousness, especially attention to detail.
- Availability.
- Potential, which requires ownership.
Conscientiousness
Clients who’ve chosen to pay premium rates in a competitive legal market do that so they will obtain the best possible outcome and can rest assured that every detail—from filing requirements, proofreading, cross-referencing of agreements, citations to both facts and law, and all other such minutiae—is as close to perfect as humanly practicable.
As a junior lawyer, that’s your job: to focus on even the smallest details and attend to each dotted i and crossed t. But not just for your firm’s external clients. It’s equally relevant to your internal clients—the senior lawyers who invite and allow (even though those two words may sound odd) you to work on matters that are important to their hard-earned and valued clients. Because they trust you.
As every good lawyer knows, the devil is in the details. Are the details always glamorous? No. But they’re crucial—in fact, often dispositive. Because they’re crucial, firms pay their junior lawyers a lot of money to trust them to attend to those details.
Availability
To deliver premium service, firms hire lawyers whom they expect to be available whenever reasonably necessary to service their clients’ needs. In fact, when a client paying more (sometimes much more) than $1,000 per hour for legal services says “Jump,” some firms, rightly or wrongly, deem the only acceptable answer to be, “How high?”
This explanation of paramount availability isn’t always communicated as explicitly as it should be. Many senior lawyers assume that anyone who chooses to accept a law firm salary knows they’re expected to be available. Firms are understandably conscious of their brand and reputation in the recruiting marketplace, so what firm wants to be the only one to raise its hand and say, “Yep, we’re a sweatshop. Come work here!”?
What do firms do instead? Some emphasize billable hour requirements, which, while a nod to reality, doesn’t necessarily reflect the “paramount availability” ethos as much as it does a “we work hard” ethos. Other firms promote themselves—sometimes accurately, others not so much—as “lifestyle” firms.
There’s a line between lawyers being available, on the one hand, and working themselves to the bone and forfeiting mental health or well-being, on the other hand. (That’s a subject for a future column.) But the bottom line is that everyone is better off when they acknowledge the reality of the implicit bargain that every lawyer makes with their firm, which is this: Firms can pay their lawyers because they have clients. They have clients because they deliver premium service with the expectation of availability. If clients don’t get premium service, they’ll take their legal business elsewhere.
No law firm clients means no law firm job. So committing to the goal of servicing premium clients, and making oneself available to attend to their needs, is a big part of why Taylor the associate is handsomely paid.
Potential
New lawyers are hired for their potential. While many lawyers will leave their firm before being considered for partnership, every single lawyer is hired with the assumption that they could become a partner—an owner—of the firm. Therefore, firms hire people who are eager to grow into the best lawyer they can be.
It’s the associate’s job to learn as much as possible. But not just for the benefit of the firm. Even more importantly, it’s for your own benefit. Whatever skills you acquire, you take with you. Some associates tell themselves they’re just working at a firm temporarily while paying off student loans. But the truth is that you’re working for yourself.
By thinking of yourself as the person solely responsible for your work, you get to grow and own what you learn—from experienced lawyers at the top of their game—about complex and nuanced things like legal analysis and judgment, effective negotiation and writing, professionalism, client management and more.
In our example, “ownership” means Taylor writing the document as if Taylor’s own name is on the top line of the signature block. Ownership is ultimately an investment in yourself. The people who have the drive and skill to learn from feedback and from making mistakes (even when that’s less-than-pleasant), and from working hard, are the people who have maximum career opportunities. The folks who choose to coast or to engage less than fully will ultimately miss out.
Associates who excel understand their value, and then it becomes their own. The associates to watch take ownership because they know that’s how they’ll forge meaningful careers. Their future work may not look exactly the same as what they’re doing right now, but their professional choices will be theirs to make.
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Reprinted with permission from The American Lawyer. © 2021 ALM Media Properties, LLC.
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