Ever wonder why it is so hard to manage lawyers?
Dr. Larry Richard of the professional service consulting firm Hildebrandt authored a great article in LAWPRO Magazine helping to explain why. The article is titled, “Herding Cats”, if that gives you any hint as to Dr. Richard’s conclusion. You can check out the article here.
If any part of your job involves managing attorneys you should definitely read this concise four-page article. It’s not going to instantly solve all your problems with a quick-fix solution, but it will help you draw a bead on why managing a law firm can be so challenging.
Dr. Richard points out that lawyers, as a group, have a set of distinct personality traits that influence the way they work in organizations. Traits like high autonomy, low sociability, high urgency, and very high skepticism, to name a few. This cluster of traits hugely affects many aspects of leading a law firm and managing lawyers -- from mentoring to teamwork, practice group leadership to client retention, these traits have an impact on all of it.
Also interesting are the differences that testing revealed between the “rainmakers” (partners excellent at developing new business) and the “service partners” (partners poor at developing new business but otherwise excellent). In the three traits most correlated with sales success (empathy, ego drive, and ego strength), rainmakers outscored the service partners dramatically. This finding underscores the folly of trying to jam an attorney in a role for which he/she is not suited. Round peg, meet square hole.
Forewarned is forearmed. Now go out and herd those cats.
