‘Management is the most noble of professions… No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.’
Clayton Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?
Allen & Overy (A&O)’s Andrew Ballheimer, whose 30-year career at the City giant saw him elected managing partner in 2016, reflects on the trade-offs his career has forced on his private life. ‘You have to work it out on a personal basis and it has to work for you, your partner and your children. It’s never linear – there are peaks and troughs – but I’m convinced it’s the quality of the time not the quantity that matters.’
His observation points to fundamental issues that law firms are only starting to address: growing demands to provide professional fulfilment for the junior ranks and, as a related matter, some measure of work/life balance.
By consensus, despite for years being resisted by the profession, the changing expectations of young associates and junior partners are increasingly forcing the point, for even the most hard-driven law firms.
‘The current generation have a different approach to life instilled from an early age – that desire to work hard as the most educated generation by far,’ says Slaughter and May executive partner Paul Stacey. ‘They want to succeed but have a high quality of life.’
With this in mind, Legal Business canvassed leading firms to find out what they are doing to improve the quality of life for their associates, staff and partners. From the responses taken from the UK’s ten highest-grossing law firms, it is clear that there has been a concerted effort given the variety of initiatives available. Boxes, at the least, are being ticked.
All firms have their own variations of policies on flexible working, parental leave and mental healthcare, with the majority also taking on different initiatives to support or offer childcare. Many have also built networks for parents, as well as ethnic, sexual and religious diversity networks to promote inclusivity and encourage emotional wellbeing.
On top of blanket policies, many of the partners Legal Business has spoken to have their own ways of trying to engage and protect their teams from the brutal demands of the job.
As Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer private equity partner David Higgins notes: ‘Part of what keeps associates happy is that feeling of being part of the business, not just like a work production unit.’
Is there more law firms could be doing? Spoiler alert: yes, there is! But we asked partners and professionals specialising in wellbeing about their own experiences, whether any firm had come close to cracking the issue and what can be expected realistically.
Priorities
When asked how partners achieved some measure of balance in their professional and personal lives, there is unsurprisingly no short cut or simple fix.
Freshfields finance partner David Trott says: ‘I try to make best use of what free time that I have either with family or outdoors. I don’t think you can regulate your weeks and say I will do X, Y and Z.’
On the other hand, A&O corporate partner Karan Dinamani says that he has to enforce a few self-imposed rules. ‘I try to manage working later at night once my kid is in bed. When I have a busy period, I try to be as present as I can be at the weekend. I’ll take my wife out for dinner somehow on a Friday night saying I need two hours. Those things make it all manageable and worthwhile.’
Obviously, the inevitable demands of a competitive, well-paid career will never make achieving a work/life balance easy.
In particular, there is considerable cynicism among the City lawyers canvassed for this piece regarding the attitudes of clients, who are good at making progressive noises on this issue… until they need something done. One head of a top City law firm voices common sentiments: ‘Clients pay lip service. They say it’s very important that people have quality of life, but as soon as it’s impinging on the service you provide them, it becomes a different story.’
Firm-wide strategies and team-specific models have been put into place to monitor the workloads of those within teams. Partners are free to pace the workflow of their teams and time off in lieu is offered to those who have been working particularly hard.
Larger firms are able to appoint multiple relationship contacts to major clients to regulate the flow. Freshfields, for example, has at least two partners for many clients, which allows them to take holiday or deal with illness or absences. ‘Obviously it gets tricky when it gets busy,’ Higgins admits.
‘What keeps associates happy is that feeling of being part of the business, not just like a work production unit.’
David Higgins, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
The majority of partners highlighted the value of time and space away from the office and respecting barriers. White & Case private equity partner Ian Bagshaw stresses the importance of keeping holidays ‘sacrosanct’ and having interests outside of work: ‘The rise of unchaperoned technology is on one hand a help and on the other hand a massive burden, particular for junior associates. People are under pressure to answer questions that they would never have had to answer ten years ago. People need to feel like not everything is sacrificed at the altar of work.’
When it comes to juggling parenthood with legal careers, partners acknowledged the importance of keeping their colleagues updated with what was expected of them at home. Many also make use of flexible working initiatives in order to balance childcare.
On top of maternity leave, paternity leave and shared parental leave options are offered by all firms in the top ten of the Legal Business 100 (see ‘The quality of life report: Wellbeing, mental health and quality of life – the UK top ten‘), maternity coaching, emergency childcare, family networks, advice lines, bring-your-child-to-work days and regular meet-ups for expectant parents or those returning to work have been made available to lawyers.
White & Case capital markets partner Jill Concannon says: ‘I have two kids, they were running around the office this morning. I don’t hide my family life, I’m very open about what it’s like. Nanny issues, school meetings – my team is always aware of what’s going on.’
Global head of Hogan Lovells finance practice Sharon Lewis, who has teenage children, notes the challenge for lawyers of balancing the long-term needs of family with the short-term urgency of work demands. ‘One of my partners said to me recently: “Children are not freehold, they are leasehold” – it’s very pertinent as they grow up and grow away from you, it is important you find things to do with them. If you let work take over to a point where you can’t prepare for a life beyond work, that is a problem.’
The autonomy paradox
Aside from lifestyle policies, there is little point if law firms cannot make the bulk of the work engaging for their staff. In his celebrated 2008 book on high achievers, Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell put forward three key tests to make demanding work fulfilling. He argued that work needed to provide significant autonomy, have a close link between effort and reward and be intellectually stimulating.
Putting nuance on that formula, Cass Business School professor and director of the centre for professional service firms Laura Empson notes in her upcoming book, Leading Professionals, the paradox of elite professional services firms intensively conditioning their candidates to make use of their apparent freedom to do what the institution wants them to do anyway. In the book, Empson quotes the head of audit at an elite accountancy firm: ‘As a partner, I have a huge amount of personal independence. I do what I want but the things I want are likely to help the firm… At one level we are completely independent but we all march to the same tune without even thinking about it.’
‘For most people work is ultimately not as fulfilling as you think it is. High achievers underinvest in their personal lives. In the long run that will not make you happy.’
Karen Dillon
Empson goes further, arguing that such institutions – and particularly law firms – actively target and reinforce insecure over-achievers to drive themselves on. To a point that is operationally useful and perhaps even essential for major law firms but it easily tips over into destructive patterns.
Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and arguably the world’s most influential business academic, gave voice to the confusion and disenchantment of the work-obsessed high-flyer in a 2010 lecture to Harvard Business School’s graduating class.
In this lecture, which became the book How Will You Measure Your Life?, Christensen boiled the issues down to three fundamental questions: How can I be sure that I’ll find satisfaction in my career? How can I be sure that my personal relationships become enduring sources of happiness? How can I avoid compromising my integrity — and stay out of jail?
Harvard Business Review‘s former editor and author Karen Dillon, who worked with Christensen on his book, notes the cycle of destructive behaviour as highly motivated professionals make choices that give them a ‘rapid return on investment’ but one-dimensional lives as social atrophy sets in, adding: ‘We get a lot of that in feedback in our career – the high of an achievement – but we get fewer of them in our personal lives. They are less good at those personal issues.’
Dillon says that professionals should be realistic where this path typically ends: ‘The problem is for most people work is ultimately not as fulfilling as you think it is. [High achievers] underinvest in their personal lives. In the long run that will not make you happy.’
However imperfect and contradictory the social contract binding lawyers to elite firms, Gladwell’s three pillars of engagement strike a chord with many partners in the deal that they should offer associates, staff and fellow partners. Particularly relevant for law firms, US giant Latham & Watkins – now the world’s top-earning law firm – has long been noted for balancing a high-productivity culture with strong staff engagement, after its pioneering move in the 1970s to plug its associates into core decision-making. Feedback, variety and more say in their own working lives are accepted as key ingredients now expected from young lawyers.
It is something Freshfields’ private equity practice has been working on – putting in place partner mentors for associates, setting up appraisals where they can suggest work they would like to pick up, allocating associates to client teams and providing them with a budget to spend on their own marketing. But one of the simplest ways Higgins offers associates freedom is to ask how the firm can reasonably accommodate them.
‘The thing I hated when I was a young associate was when partners were very gratuitous with your time – as if it didn’t matter. If a partner rings you and says “I’m sorry, we have to do this call on the weekend, but is there a time that suits you?” It’s not great, but at least it feels like someone’s trying.’
Most of the City’s top law firms now offer agile working schemes, allowing lawyers to work from home or remotely in other international offices or with clients.
‘Have we achieved a lot? Yes. Have we cracked it completely? No.’
Andrew Ballheimer, Allen & Overy
‘When I started there was a “facetime culture”,’ says one Linklaters corporate partner. ‘But now people can work from anywhere, so that helps.’ Linklaters now reinforces this with new technology in the form of tablets that do not recognise the location in which staff are working. The firm has also recently ushered in a shift in approach to say that such agile working should be allowed on request unless there is a clear reason otherwise, upending the ‘burden of proof’ on flexi-working.
If major firms have on the face of it comparable polices, one indicator of how they play out comes in the number of staff they have working part-time. For top ten UK firms responding to our research, they range from 2% for fee-earners at Slaughters and 4% at Linklaters and A&O at the low end, to a high of 10% at the UK practice of DLA Piper. City firms with higher proportions of lawyers working part-time include Hogan Lovells on 9% and Freshfields at 6%. All firms had far higher proportions of business services staff working part-time, with all those that disclosed figures having more than 15% of non-legal staff working part-time.
While there are now more options to work flexibly or reduce hours for mid-rank associates, counsel and support staff, obviously junior lawyers clock up considerable hours. The website Legal Cheek last year gathered over 1,500 responses from trainees and junior lawyers on the length of their typical working day to produce averages for 56 ranked law firms. The five firms with the longest hours in the poll were Kirkland & Ellis, Freshfields, Clifford Chance, White & Case and Latham & Watkins, with respondents at all five comfortably averaging 11 hour-plus days Monday to Friday. However, with most young lawyers accepting long hours are part of the deal, it is the unpredictability of hours that are cited by many as having a far greater negative impact on morale and personal lives.
The obstacle many firms said they have tried to overcome is encouraging lawyers to take up such initiatives. Macfarlanes, for example, has told senior partners to encourage the use of flexible working arrangements, which allows lawyers, excluding trainees, to work from home one day a fortnight. ‘We didn’t want the feeling that flexible working was frowned upon,’ says senior partner Charles Martin. ‘We hate having any elements of an “us and them” culture here.’
‘We didn’t want the feeling that flexible working was frowned upon. We hate having any elements of an “us and them” culture here.’
Charles Martin, Macfarlanes
Another service many firms offer their lawyers is mentoring and coaching. While it sounds fluffy, several high-billing City partners interviewed for this piece were vocal in their support for such measures.
Topics addressed range from career progression and management, to health, family, money and general emotional wellbeing. As well as official programmes, partners also have their own mentoring systems within their teams – whether that be via associates being assigned to specific partners, or senior figures offering their advice on an ad hoc basis.
Bagshaw says: ‘Coaching is increasingly important. Getting objectivity in how you manage workplace issues is increasingly important. We look at reinvigorating what we’re doing all the time as a team. If you look at our PE practice, we’ve grown so quickly, we’ve laterally hired over 50% of our team, so we’ve had to find ways of integrating.’
Higgins strikes a similar note: ‘A lot of partners are sceptical about coaching – they wonder what they’ll [learn] about their business. My coach is great. She’s not trying to teach me how to run [my team] because that’s not her job. What she can say is that she’s worked with lots of successful people in similar industries who’ve had similar challenges and this is how they’ve addressed it. It makes you think.’
Partners say they are pushing beyond the policies of their firms to try to keep up engagement. Ambitious lawyers eager to make partnership often relish hard work, but sufficient rest time and variation is important in order to keep people engaged.
Trott says his finance practice has deliberately tried to offer its associates a broader platform than some peers. ‘If I got out of bed every morning and had to do the same loan documents or a bond document day in and day out, I’d find that pretty boring. Variety is everything. If you keep people interested and keep them motivated by challenging them in a good way, you stop people going stale, and that also helps for a healthy environment.’
Earning the right
Researching this article, it has become clear law firms have improved their policies on softer lifestyle issues. But have they gone far enough? And are they achieving any results?
The stark realities of firms’ cultures are exposed in RollOnFriday‘s Firm of the Year survey. For its 2017 survey the site canvassed over 4,900 lawyers and non-fee-earners across the UK, asking them to rate their satisfaction with pay, career development, management, culture, work/life balance and social life. And while those with an axe to grind are more likely to be vocal, the results are not encouraging.
The Magic Circle firms were spread out across the middle of the group, with highest-rated Linklaters among the group at number ten, while Freshfields came in at a lowly 45 out of 66.
Burges Salmon came out on top, which is in keeping with the awards the firm has garnered, including The Workplace Wellbeing Charter’s Excellence Award 2017 and Best Legal Workplace 2016 at the HR in Law Awards.
The Bristol-based firm (see box, ‘Gert lush’, below) has introduced a number of lifestyle-focused initiatives, including flexible working and bringing in professionals to discuss diet, exercise, mental health, stress and relaxation. Burges Salmon has also produced a list of pledges lawyers can expect the firm to adhere to, and vice versa. These pledges are tested on an annual basis by surveying the partnership.
‘It starts with engagement and taking that seriously. We’ve been asking our people for their views, listening to their views, doing something about it and going back to them,’ Burges Salmon’s chief people officer Robert Halton says. ‘You’d be amazed at how many organisations don’t do that.’
‘You have to have a good track record before people will give you credit for owning up to your limitations. In the early stages there will always be someone hungrier than you.’
Laura Empson, Cass Business School
LBC Wise Counsel’s Paul Gilbert, formerly a general counsel and now a consultant, believes firms could be doing a lot more.
‘I see lots of firms, very reputable and well-intentioned firms as well, who are saying out loud: “We put the wellbeing of our people at the heart of what we do.” It’s a good thing that they’ve got wellbeing training and mentors. But it would be better if they were addressing some of the reasons why this is necessary.’
He suggests firms establish a cut-off point, beyond which it is not healthy for people to be working. ‘This should be explicit. In client engagement, matter by matter, I would expect partners and clients to have that conversation about what we expect of each other and our availability. It should be reasonable and realistic, and mindful of people’s wellbeing.’
Gilbert also says advisers should press clients to be explicit about their commitment to the wellbeing of external lawyers. ‘I know that when the relationship between the lawyers is really strong, the in-house team think of external lawyers as an extension of their own team. If that’s true to their belief, then they shouldn’t expect external lawyers to work any differently to the work they do themselves.’
Trott says law firms have to be willing to press for a mature discussion with clients. ‘More often than not, deadlines are not real. There are some hard deadlines but with documents that need to be turned over by tomorrow morning, of course, everyone would like shiny, bright, new black-lined documents in their inbox at nine o’clock but if they get them at ten o’clock it’s not the end of the world.’
Ultimately, however, partners and professionals alike say it is also up to individuals to take control of their lives and careers. Chetna Bhatt, a government employment lawyer, suffered from myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome herself which drew her to start wellbeing executive coaching platform Being Lawyers. She says: ‘Employees can innocently use certain challenges in law or with their employer as almost an excuse for not taking the personal responsibility needed to improve their wellbeing.’
When asked whether firms had resolved this issue, all senior law firm partners admitted there was a way to go, but argue that improvements were being made. Ballheimer says: ‘There is a piece around resilience of people that’s important and it’s a never-ending work in progress. Have we achieved a lot? Yes. Have we cracked it completely? No.’
What has been missing in the profession is much of a debate about what the current social contract in professional services should look like. With the shape and culture of the industry having changed hugely from the clubby incarnation of the 1970s to the 24/7 hyper-connected work of modern global law, there has been little serious discussion of what the reasonable expectations should be from elite law firms and the restless young lawyers now joining them.
Empson stresses that a credible debate has to be based on the realities of professional life. ‘You have to earn the right to be vulnerable, you have to have a good track record behind you before people are willing to give you credit for owning up to your own limitations. In the early stages there will always be someone hungrier than you.’
A more substantive attempt to define the etiquette, priorities and values for what will be a demanding career would be a step forward. It seems that debate – tentative, awkward and jargon-laden as it may be – is at last taking place. LB
madeleine.farman@legalease.co.uk
Gert lush – Selling the Bristol life
‘Every time I travel on the tube it reminds me why I left London.’
Robert Halton, Burges Salmon
While life in corporate law tends to revolve around the Square Mile, it has not prevented regional law firms from leveraging decent work and a better quality of life to persuade City lawyers to up sticks to a new home.
And no regional city has played the quality of life card more effectively than Bristol, which was once a relative backwater among English professional service hubs.
Just outside the city centre towards Temple Meads station is the business centre of Bristol, a stone’s throw from trendy pubs and waterfront bars frequented by professionals after the working day ends.
Unsurprisingly, leading Bristol-based law firms have consistently performed well in workplace surveys, such as on RollOnFriday. This year its Firm of the Year poll was won by Burges Salmon, which romped home with an 82% score, closely followed by Osborne Clarke (OC), the fast-growing City and international firm with strong roots in Bristol. Financially, Burges Salmon has enjoyed a run of form of late, growing 32% in the five years from 2011 to 2016 and seeing profit per equity partner climb 9% to £525,000 in 2016. OC, meanwhile, has been one of the strongest performers in the entire Legal Business 100, with turnover of £178.6m, up 98% over the same five-year period.
There are currently around 3,500 members of the Bristol Law Society, which includes support staff and many firms with corporate memberships. The city has also seen a number of international and London firms open their doors locally, with office openings for Simmons & Simmons and RPC in 2012.
Burges Salmon has for years pushed the Bristol life in its marketing material. The firm still maintains a webpage dedicated to the city: ‘Not only is it one of the most prosperous cities outside London, it is renowned for its vibrant entertainment scene.’
While some commentators say the firm has softened its once aggressive Bristol-focused recruitment drive (with an unsubtle marketing ploy of a poster showing a surfboarding lawyer), the firm maintains it takes employee buy-in into its culture seriously. Partner and chair of diversity and inclusion Liz Dunn says: ‘We have been working very hard over the last few years to articulate our offering to our people and our expectation of them.’
TLT is another high-performing and progressive Bristol firm, growing 65% since 2011 and last year enjoying a 15% boost in turnover to £71.6m. Senior partner Andrew Glynn notes: ‘Bristol has a talent of trying to attract people along the M4. It has been successful at doing just that. Bristol firms will say our success is not built on having a massive hinterland of clients, but about being a great place to be and attract great people to live and work here.’
OC managing partner Ray Berg, who is based in London, comments that although the firm has expanded way beyond its Bristol heartlands, culture remains key to its quality of life: ‘It’s really important how we treat our people and showing what they can expect from us. It’s not necessarily a London or a Bristol thing, but we want to keep to our roots and that is recognised.’
Others are more upbeat about the city’s place as the clear London alternative. Bristol has enjoyed a strong ride with its leading law firms growing in turnover, and is continuing to experience a revival in the national media, winning the award for the most desirable UK city in The Sunday Times this year.
Burges Salmon chief people officer Robert Halton concludes: ‘The beautiful thing about a city like Bristol is people can walk to work, they can cycle too and over half our people do. From a quality of life perspective it’s youthful and vibrant. In terms of quality of life that is really important. Every time I travel on the tube it reminds me why I left London.’
Please also see:
Wellbeing, mental health and quality of life – the UK top ten
Pursuits – Edward Braham, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
Pursuits – Ian Bagshaw, White & Case
Pursuits – Steve Cooke, Slaughter and May
For more coverage, please return to The quality of life report