The Power of One: Teamwork and culture in the legal profession.
** This article is in progress on the culture of isolation in legal culture. It is heavily biased towards my experience of corporate practice in BigLaw in Canada.**
🎒 Studying alone at law school
In three years of law school, I wrote 27 exams, 9 papers, and sat in 258 lectures. But I only did one team project. Only one. And it was only worth 7% of my grade in the class. On a fully diluted basis, less than 1% of my total assessment in law school involved working with other people.
In each graduating law school class, there is one gold medalist, one silver medalist, and one bronze medalist. The lucky recipients typically have their choice of prestigious clerkships with judges or large starting salaries with renowned law firms, sometimes both.
The gold medal, the highest pinnacle of achievement you can obtain in law school, is awarded to one person. Not to a team.
As a lawyer, you are taught at a very young age to not trust anyone. To be self-reliant. When the professor announced the team project that was worth 7%, there was outrage. The students all had the same complaint:
My grade in the class would at all be dependent on the inputs of other people. I would be measured on my ability to work with others. To optimize work and communication to achieve results as a team. I would be measured as a team?
In most university programs, companies wait to hire you until you’ve actually graduated, or are about to. Not in law school. In North America, the big firm recruitment happens right after your first year.
There’s a common saying among law students, there’s only one year of grades that matter, the first year.
For those that don’t get hired based on first year grades, they’re in a mad dash to not be the one student that didn’t get hired by the end of law school. The one student that has to keep working hard for more than one year because grades matter.
“The academic culture we have fostered and sustained within legal education places profound emphasis on individualism.”
— Jerome Organ, 2018 Symposium: Future of Legal Ed
First year is a pressure cooker. Many people drop out. You’re learning a new way of learning and being evaluated. There’s no time for downtime. And teamwork is downtime. You study by yourself to prepare for exams. If you’re lucky enough, these will be the only exams that really matter in all of law school.
👩💻 Working alone in a law firm
When you graduate and move into practice, the industry ranks you on shortlists as as one of the top “leading lawyer in [X] practice area” in magazines that are circulated to corporate clients to help them pick the one best lawyer to tackle a certain problem.
You have a target number of hours you need to bill. In big law firms, it’s typically between 1,700 to 2,000 hours per year. In smaller firms, it can be less: between 1,200 to 1,500.
As a lawyer, you work far more than your hours billed. Much of your day is non-billable client work. Or even worse, sometimes you do billable work but a partner will write your time off and it isn’t counted towards your target. Either way, don’t do the math on a lawyers hourly wage. It’s sad.
If you exceed your billable target, you get a bonus. Typically ten to twenty percent of your annual salary.
As a result, you hold on to as much work as you possibly can. Even work better suited to other professionals in the firm. It’s the rational thing to do at the individual level. If you share work, you make less money.
You’re incentivized to not share it. The economic distribution model of law firms rewards you to work alone.
It’s not just the billable hour model that encourages teams of one. Traditionally, client relationships are owned by the lawyer, not the firm. Although some larger firms are trying to “corporatize” relationships, the lawyer-client relationship dynamic is extremely strong and enduring.
In fact, most law firm billing software have fields for the “relationship lawyer” and the “billing lawyer”. These dynamics are extremely entrenched.
When your leverage and your personal income is directly tied to a relationship, you guard it. It’s really hard to trust anyone else.
If you bring another lawyer on to help with a project for a client, there’s two risks. First, that lawyer might screw up the work and make your client upset and you may lose the client. Second, that lawyer might do such an amazing job on the work that they might steal your relationship with the client. In either scenario, your personal income is at risk.
📊 The data
The culture of one has huge consequences. Lawyers are 359% more likely to experience “major depressive disorders” than the average person. Over 20% of the entire legal profession suffers from clinically significant levels of substance abuse, depression, anxiety or some other form of psychopathology.
It makes sense. Lawyering is high-stakes. You are responsible for outcomes that are highly impactful on the personal circumstances of your clients. And it’s all on you. It’s a lot of pressure to be placed on one.
With such emphasis on individualism, law firms are remarkably fragile.
Many law firms have a 20% associate attrition rate. In other words, many law firms lose a fifth of their team every, single year. There’s a complete turn-over of staff every five years!
As the economic pressures on law firms increase, collapses are starting to happen more frequently. The reason for almost all law firm collapses is a critical mass of partners leaving for another firm because they can take their client relationships and optimize their personal take-home income at the new firm. Google “Heenan Blaikie” or “Dewey & LeBoeuf” as examples.
🔮 The future
The economics of legal services are now demanding teamwork. Lawyers that figure out collaboration are the ones that will win.
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Adrian Camara is a founder of Athennian, all-in-one software for legal teams. Document automation, eSign, collaboration, legal entity management and more.
