Legal News

What Is the Key to Improving Associate Satisfaction?

By Brian Harris

By Jaime Bochet

Of the Legal Staff

The AmLaw Daily has an excerpt of a column written by Steven Harper that addresses the seemingly answer-less question of how firms can improve associate satisfaction. Harper, an adjunct professor at Northwestern University and former partner with Kirkland & Ellis, points out that what satisfies associates and what the firms value are very much at odds.

The recent AmLaw midlevel associates  survey reflects that associates today value "relations with partners and other associates, interest in and satisfaction level of the work, training and guidance, policy on billable hours [and] management's openness about firm strategies and partnership chances."  

But as Harper sums it up, those don't jive with "the metrics that dominate today's large law firm business models -- billings, billable hours, and associate/partner leverage ratios, all of which produce equity partner profits. For too many, the relationship is inverse. The absence of a metric by which firms hold partners accountable for associate satisfaction means that it gets ignored. From there, it's a short step to the unhappiness that this year's survey results capture."

The answer, Harper says, is not to pay associates more or tell them "too bad, that's life." His suggestion is to "pretend that there's a cost associated with young attorney dissatisfaction that their short-term profit-maximizing metrics aren't capturing" and then "develop a mechanism for evaluating partner behavior" that takes the associates' definition of satisfaction into account -- and rewards or penalizes partners accordingly.

But how exactly to do that? Well, the first part is easy -- smart firms shouldn't "pretend" that there's a cost associated with associate dissatisfaction; they should already know there IS. Associate turnover is very expensive, and most firms realize this.  What they may not realize is that they can help avoid it by simply paying attention to their associates

So what is Step Two? How do firms hold their partners accountable for their associates' satisfaction? Just as each firm has it's own criteria for compensation and evaluation, will they will now need to build in a reverse-evaluation, by which each partners' associates evaluate him or her and how they contribute to his/her happiness at the firm?

This isn't completely unheard-of. Plenty of companies have such evaluation systems in place.

But what do you think of them in a law firm setting? Do you think it really is the partners' responsibility to monitor and work toward their associates' satisfaction? Does it come too close to coddling for you, or do you think it's absolutely the responsibility of those higher up to lift up those beneath them? How would you measure partners' success or failure?

Tell us what your reaction is...leave a comment or e-mail me at JBochet@alm.com.

Full post as published by The Legal Intelligencer Blog on September 14, 2010 (boomark / email).