Is Your Firm Stacked with Five Tool Attorneys?

Maybe the better question to start with is: Are you a five tool attorney?

It is undeniable that attorneys need to have a certain set of skills to be successful. A simple approach would be just to say that an attorney needs to be “a great technician,” and if he or she is a great lawyer, he or she will be great for the firm.

There is far more to it than that.

Did you know that major league baseball scouts grade prospects in high school and college based on their ability and skill levels at five tools? The five tools in major league baseball are:

1. Running, speed;
2. Arm strength;
3. Hitting for average;
4. Hitting for power; and
5. Fielding.

Obviously, a baseball player possessing all five tools would be greatly valuable to a team.

Now, by taking a longer term view of an attorney in a law office, can you imagine the value of an attorney possessing the following five tools:

1. Providing the highest quality, thorough legal work;
2. Meeting production goals;
3. Marketing, networking, and being civic minded;
4. Being a leader, and training young attorneys; and
5. Participating in managerial and entrepreneurial thinking.

As you can imagine, a five tool attorney will add great value to your firm. However, the vast majority of attorneys coming out of law school do not possess these five tools, nor is it even possible to identify those tools in the interview process for a young attorney. Therefore, unlike the five tools used for scouting major league baseball prospects, the five tools used to evaluate an attorney are viewed in the progression articulated above.

As you think back on your career, no matter where you are in your career, you can appreciate that you cannot tackle tool number two without mastering tool number one. It is only after you master tool number one and tool number two that you can take on tool number three. If you start marketing and networking, but you are not a great attorney and do not meet your billing goals, you probably do not add as much value to the firm as you think.

What we all need to do is try to find individuals who can develop into five tool attorneys. To be more specific, the following skills are needed to be developed for each of the five tools.

Providing the Highest Quality, Thorough Legal Work

Do you realize how difficult it is to teach a new attorney what A+ quality legal work really looks like? It is a rhetorical question not to be taken lightly. We regularly train lawyers right out of law school and, on occasion, hire laterals who have been practicing for several years in our office to add a skill set that compliments one of our practice groups. If such attorney has not been working for one of the large firms in a major metropolitan area, it is very questionable whether that attorney has been properly trained to provide only the highest quality legal work. Without this guidance, attorneys cut corners and take short cuts on research and drafting, not re-checking their contract work with check lists and comprehensive templates to ensure that every nuance is thoroughly vetted in the written document.

Each of us has a different intelligence quotient, which may appear to make it easier for some attorneys to do great work over others. Keep in mind that hard work is the ultimate equalizer. Time spent pouring over cases, practice books, law review articles, and periodicals all make you a better attorney and could help you to provide a higher quality work product. Quite frankly, you are in the wrong business if B+ work sounds sufficient enough. It is not. Through long hours in the law library, engaging in long hours of online research and continuing legal education classes, any attorney can gain valuable information and meaningful skill sets for the practice of law.

Meet Production Goals

Just imagine for a moment, that you have a brilliant, articulate attorney working for you who writes the greatest briefs, the most thorough contracts, and is magnificent in court. Now imagine that that attorney does not keep track of his or her time contemporaneously on your firm’s time and billing software. When pressed to produce their timesheets, after two or three requests, you are certain that what you receive is not accurate—just guesses from a week or two earlier. That type of conduct will create a great deal of stress and anxiety, and most likely, over time, malpractice actions against your firm for fraudulent conduct.

Often, attorney’s inaccuracies in billing are not the result of carelessness and undisciplined practice mentioned above. More often it is the result of self-editing time. When an attorney really spent four hours on a project, and deemed it, on his or her own, excessive, they will report two hours. Such editing should only be done by a managing partner or a billing partner and not an associate working on a case. Some of the time is often lost on “leakages” throughout the day. These leakages come in two types:

• Intentional office to office visits. There are intentional office to office visits that happen in the course of the day. I submit that these are intentional because people actually get up out of their office and start conversations that result in lost time for billing purposes.
• Task to task interruptions. Most attorneys switch from task to task, getting interrupted by email, telephone calls, and visits from other associates. If you have movement from task to task, it usually creates a leakage of time that is not captured for billing purposes. It is critically important to stay on task to enhance the quality of the work product and deliverable, and with minimal leakages for billing purposes.

Whatever your billing goal is for your office, whether it be 6, 7 or 8 hours a day, so long as the work is there for the attorney to do, attorneys need to hit their billing goals and accurately report them.

Marketing and Civic Involvement

It is very difficult to attain clients sitting behind your desk working on a client’s projects. There is no substitute for getting outside your office, connecting with people, and letting them know that you are an attorney and proud of your profession. Your attorneys need to understand that as soon as they master tools one and two, they need to get out of the office and start expanding their network. We generally encourage attorneys to pursue three paths to connectivity: Bar Associations, industry groups, and civic involvement (such as school boards, church groups, or youth sports). Plainly said, you need to be involved in your community and in your profession in a way that is meaningful and in a way that earns credibility among your peers, potential clients and referral sources.

Any young attorney who believes this is “salesmanship” does not understand that it is not salesmanship if you are proud of what you do, and it is your job to help people and be available to help people.

Be prepared and forewarned that marketing and civic involvement are part of being a five tool attorney. There is no substitute for these activities, and every young attorney must be acculturated in this very early on in his or her career.

Be a Leader and Train Younger Associates

Whether or not you are partner in a law office, a senior associate should be a leader in a law office both by example and in words, and be freely available to train young associates. We owe it to the future of our law firm, and we owe it to the future of our profession. We stated earlier that many young attorneys coming out of law school do not know what high quality legal work product looks like. It is the role of the senior associates and partners in a law firm to train younger attorneys on that exact issue. Training is not necessarily intended to embarrass or to intimidate a new attorney. It is instruction given after reviewing a young attorney’s work product. The general rule is simple: ask a young attorney to produce a research memo, pleading, or contract. Give them a sample of such a document so that they can see what the format of the deliverable should look like. Give them as many facts as you know. Give them a realistic amount of time that you would like to see them invest, subject to changes if they alert you to those required extensions, and let them produce the document. When a draft is complete, you, the training attorney, should take the document and, treat it as though you have ownership of the document, mark it up, redline it, correct it, revise it in any way necessary. Then sit down with the younger attorney and explain why you did things differently. Every bit of a new attorney’s work needs to be reviewed for one year, with the exception of simple transmittal emails.

Managerial and Entrepreneurial Thinking

Up to this point the discussion has been about working as a technician in the practice of law. Once you move out of working in the law office, you can then work on the law office. It takes time to start understanding that in order for the practice to be successful, you need to step away on some occasions and analyze, objectively, people, systems, and culture to make sure the law office is heading in the right direction, especially as it is growing. There are many decisions to be made.

Decisions relating to personnel, software, office space, banking, and billing all have to be made for the betterment of the firm. The aforementioned decisions have to do with issues and problems that are presently existing in your law office. Entrepreneurial thinking includes “How can we become what we are not?” Entrepreneurial thinking is the process of growing the firm and doing things differently for the betterment of the long term firm.

In the day-to-day grind of practicing law sometimes it is very difficult to rise above the noise and chaos to reflect on changes in the business, systems, and culture to ultimately advance the law firm beyond its present position. You know you have a managerial or entrepreneurial thinker when he or she puts the firm first above individual benefits because he or she will know that individuals in the firm benefit the most when the firm wins.

Keep in mind that at some point in time individual goals distance themselves from the bigger picture of the success of the firm. In order to have a high quality firm, the five tool attorneys need to invest time in running the law office as a business. These five tool attorneys will be your partners. This is done by putting the firm first, above the individual goals, economic benefits, bonuses, and all other individual awards. Everyone wins when the law office wins. With respect to the five tool attorney, the law office comes first.

Remember, you have to master the previous tool before you master the subsequent tool. It is hard work, but it is the reality of a successful attorney in any law firm.

Kerry M. Lavelle is the author of “The Business Guide to Law: Creating and Operating a Successful Law Firm”, http://bit.ly/1J1p0Aa , published by the American Bar Association. He has an MBA and JD Degree from DePaul University. Mr. Lavelle is the Founding Partner of a 24-attorney office in the Chicago area. If you have questions and would like to contact Mr. Lavelle, call (847) 705-7555 or email klavelle@lavellelaw.com.