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Zoya Ilyenka
1961 Abogados y Economistas, Barcelona
zoya@1961bcn.com

 

Technology, robots and legal platforms are the trending topics today. Nevertheless, while our law firms are still mostly human, people are (and will remain) their most valuable asset. Building a law firm of the future is not possible without taking into account the factors important to those who will be taking care of your firm within a couple of decades.

I know that you have been trying hard to create the right setting for the talents in your firm to grow and flourish, through choosing the best talent, investing in legal training and team-building exercises. But how can you make sure that you will be the one to collect the fruits of your efforts? Do you really know what will make your employees stay at your firm?

Talent retention may become a real challenge in the years to come: the new generation is considered to be less interested in climbing the corporate ladder within one firm and more interested in living for the moment and having different work experiences. But who are we to judge? In order to find the best ways to retain talent, we decided to stop speculating and ask employees about this subject directly.

Three slightly different versions of the same survey^[1] have been sent out to three different target groups around the world:

• law students;

• young lawyers; and

• managing partners.

We selected a series of factors to be evaluated by the three groups as most or least important, but with a small variation for each group: the law students had to evaluate these factors in terms of what they take into account when looking for a prospective employer; the young lawyers had to tell us how well their managing partners were doing in fulfilling these factors; and the managing partners had to evaluate their firm’s performance in fulfilling these same factors.

These surveys aimed not only at understanding what really matters to students, but also at shining a light on whether senior and managing partners have a real picture of their own firm’s performance in the eyes of younger colleagues.

Law firm size

Let’s start by delivering some good news for most readers: law students prefer to work in small and middle-size firms. Most respondents would like to start their professional careers in a firm with either one to ten or eleven to 50 lawyers:

 

 

The three most important factors

Of course, the size of the firm in itself is not a decisive factor. The students were offered number of factors to be evaluated in terms of their importance when looking for a prospective employer. Here are the top three, chosen by a vast majority of students as ‘Very Important’:

1. employer’s effort to mentor and train;

2.  employer’s effort to provide flexible work environment and work/life balance; and

3. level of intellectual stimulation received from the work.

 

 

Expectation versus reality

Now that you know what the most important factors are, you may be asking yourself how well you are doing in terms of providing them in your firm. Your younger colleagues may also have a different opinion on this. The results in the following chart – in which the first three bars refer to the opinions of managing partners and the second three bars refer to the opinions of younger employees – clearly reflect a difference in appreciation of performance in these areas:

 

 

While 47 per cent of managing partners think that they are very good at providing work/life balance in their firms, only 18 per cent of their younger colleague agree that this is the case and do not consider a Monday to Friday all-day shift to be ‘flexible’.

Mentoring and training factors only made a slight difference and a surprising unanimity was reached between the two groups, where both were satisfied by the level of intellectual stimulation provided by their firms.

Talking about money

It seems we have now a generation of future lawyers that don’t value money above all else. At the same time, the compensation they receive is important to them because young lawyers naturally also need to pay their rent. Level of compensation ranks in the top three ‘important’ factors.

 

 

Satisfaction

Interestingly, the picture around money is quite uncontroversial: both the managing partners and the younger lawyers felt that remuneration could be increased.

 

 

The absolute winner

Curiously enough, we can see that ‘efforts to mentor and train’ scored the second highest rating of the ‘important’ factors, making this, in conjunction with the previous ‘very important’ factors chart, the most appreciated of all by the law students when looking for a job opportunity.

Relationships between co-workers

Unsurprisingly, the quality of relationships with co-workers is also one of the factors that law students care about. It is well established that lawyers often spend more of their waking hours with co-workers than they do with their families.

Team-building activities may be appreciated, but not at all essential: students don’t expect their employers to promote interaction and collaboration among employees. Members of the outgoing Generation Z are confident they will make friends on their own.

 

 

However, this confidence may fade in practice, since a few young lawyers are actually very satisfied by their workplace relationships. This doesn’t reflect managing partners’ perceptions and so might represent an area to look into within your own firm.

What are young lawyers the least happy with?

While answering this kind of survey, people do not usually select the least positive evaluation options unless they have a good reason.

The following factors received the highest rates of ‘Disagree’ and ‘Strongly disagree’ from the younger lawyers:

 

 

While most partners were aware that they could go further in providing leadership opportunities and helping younger colleagues with business development, an incredible 44 per cent of managing partners believed that they successfully promote collaboration among the employees, in contrast to eight per cent of the younger lawyers who chose this factor as one of the weakest in their firms.

What to cut down on?

Now that some possible areas for effort and attention have been highlighted, you may wonder if there could, potentially, be any areas where you might save energy and investment.

You might ask yourself if you have been over-estimating the factors of least importance so far.

The results of this survey show that a winning strategy is within the reach of any firm, be that a small local firm or a larger international one: people still appreciate human attention above all else. It is neither expensive new legal technology nor aims of conquering the international market that keep levels of employee turnover low. Instead, it is the desire to train, mentor and reward; maintaining a friendly approach; and always giving younger employees a chance to take initiatives that enable younger talents to grow, develop and stay on your team.

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