Less Than Happy Holidays For Associates

The outlook gets grimmer for associates, as several sources highlight their rough road.

As we previously discussed, The National Law Journal last month reported a 1.5 percent drop in the total number of associates at the country's 250 larges law firms.

Last week, the AmLaw Daily reported on the latest Robert Half Legal Hiring Index, in which seven percent more respondents said their firms intend to add jobs in the first quarter of 2011 over the the fourth quarter of 2010.

That would appear to be good news, except for this caveat:

"Fifty-two percent of respondents reported difficulty in finding skilled legal professionals. According to Volkert at Robert Half, this suggests that while law firms and legal corporate departments may have openings, they are mostly interested in candidates who are currently employed."

To dampen the outlook even further, simply being an employed associate doesn't seem to mean what it used to. The ABA Journal recently wrote:

"Some associates who managed to avoid layoffs now lack the exposure and experience of their peers from three to five years ago."

According to that article, the unexpected consequence of the recession is that many associates who retained their jobs spent the last two years doing "pro bono work and marketing", resulting in an unprecedented lack of real experience.

"Across the board at leading law firms in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City, there are associates who haven’t gained the experience compared to years past, says Sheri Michaels, a partner at legal recruiter Major, Lindsey & Africa in New York City."

Which leads legal recruiter Amy McCormack to observe yet another potential change to the business of law:

"The dearth of experienced associates is even more reason for firms to abandon traditional class distinctions and evaluate junior lawyers on actual experience and legal skills."

Moneyball for Lawyers?

The November issue of National Jurist featured an article by University of Indiana law professor William Henderson advocating big changes in the way law firms assess which candidates to hire and train, and that article has prompted quite a bit of discussion.

The Wall Street Journal says that Mr. Henderson "pokes a variety of holes in the way big law firms have gone about their hiring for decades and decades — essentially luring the folks with the highest GPAs at the top 15 or so law schools."

The ABA Journal reports that Henderson's company, Lawyer Metrics, will apply a "Moneyball" approach to help quantify what qualities partners seek in an associate (referencing the best selling book about Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane, who introduced a revolutionary statistical-based method of evaluating baseball prospects).

Henderson himself writes as an example that, "In 2007 and 2008, 46 percent of all entry-level associates at an AmLaw 100 firm were graduates of a Top 14 law school . . . Yet, during this same period, 39 percent of lawyers promoted to partner were from Top 14 schools. Further, as of 2009, only 35 percent of general counsels for a Fortune 500 company had graduated from a Top 14 school. This suggests that the advantage of higher test scores and academic pedigree diminishes rather than compounds over time — at least for partnership or general counsel positions."

Steven Harper at AmLaw Daly voices concern that Henderson's data-driven approach won't account for "politics and luck."


The Moneyball analogy is apt if Henderson is taking a bottom-up approach -- since Billy Beane first looked solely at unbiased statistical data and then taught managers and scouts a new way of assessing talent based on the data.

However, if as AmLaw Daly reports, Henderson's approach includes asking partners "about what values and traits they want in their lawyers", then his method is a top-down approach that is the exact opposite of Moneyball.

The goal should not be to assess the data in light of what partners already think they want.

If Henderson really wants to act as Billy Beane would, he needs to assess the data and then tell partners what they should want, even if what they should want is very different than what they think they want.