Compensation (Re)Design for Law Firms

The good people at Ark Group recently published a new book, "Compensation (Re)Design for Law Firms," edited by Soo Darcy. I was invited to contribute a chapter, entitled "Incentivizing the New Normal." As regular readers know, I believe that many, if not most, and quite possibly all law firm compensation plans are in need of an overhaul. There are numerous opportunities for improvement: aligning incentives with client needs; recognizing that different types of contributions deserve different rewards; eliminating the competition between furthering firm strategy and partner rewards; addressing the huge looming issue of succession planning and treating it as a firm wide problem, not as the responsibility of a handful of retiring partners to graciously solve by acting against their self-interest; and much more. Above all, incentivizing the new normal means rewarding profits derived from efficiency. The primary reason law firms don't embrace alternative fees or project management/process improvement is that these novel approaches, despite being demanded by clients, will erode partner compensation... but only if we stick with outdated compensation models. The list of other contributors to this book is impressive: August Aquila; David Baca; Thomas Berman; Jim Cotterman; Arthur Greene; John Jeffcock; Joel Rose; Julious Smith; and Mike Roster. If you don't these names, click on the links to their impressive credentials. They each offer different insights into the philosophy and mechanics of rewarding behavior for maximum organizational effectiveness. I am pleased to be among such esteemed company.

If you serve in a law firm management or leadership role, do yourself, and your firm, a huge favor and purchase the book. Partner compensation has been considered by some to be the "third rail" of law firm management consulting. You can mess with anything else in this changing profession and industry, so long as you don't impact the partners' livelihoods. But here's the thing: the incentives as currently modeled in many plans are specifically designed to lead to the law firm's failure. The cost of doing nothing has never been greater. But lest the theme of "adapt or die" not be enough of an catalyst, think of it this way: your lawyers want to do the right thing for the clients; your clients want to continue to retain top lawyers; yet your compensation plan inevitably forces some unfortunate and awkward choices. The lawyers have to choose between their own self-interest or their clients' needs; or the clients have to choose between excellent lawyers they know well but can no longer trust in lieu of unknown lawyers who demonstrably place client needs front and center. The law firms that figure this out have a window of opportunity to capture market share.

When an organization's incentives are mis-aligned, and the highly compensated are rewarded for acting in ways that are contrary to the best interests of the firm, this is, undoubtedly, a bad situation and one can rightly assign some responsibility to bad actors. But the lion's share of the responsibility belongs to firm management. If you know the incentives are misaligned, and if you allow the perpetuation of highly-compensated individuals to pursue their own self-interest to the detriment of the organization, then you have utterly failed as a manager and a leader. There is nothing especially surprising about law firm incentives. Every other business on the planet has dealt with similar issues. Isn't it about time you step up?

Timothy B. Corcoran was the 2014 President of the Legal Marketing Association and is an elected Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management. He delivers keynote presentations, conducts workshops, and advises leaders of law firms, in-house legal departments and legal service providers on how to profit in a time of great change. For more information, contact him at +1.609.557.7311 or at tim@corcoranconsultinggroup.com.

Do You Have An Idea Worthy of a 2016 InnovAction Award?

Presented each year at the College of Law Practice Management’s Annual Futures Conference, the InnovAction Awards seek to identify and hold up as models those lawyers or firms or legal organizations doing things that have never been done before — or never in quite this way. The Entry Form for the 2016 InnovAction Awards is now available. Apply today and tell us your story. Click here to download the InnovAction Entry Form

Deadline for submissions is May 31, 2016.

About the InnovAction Awards

InnovAction Award winners are recognized around the world as being the best of the best among individuals and firms taking chances and creating advantages for their practices. Read more about the Awards here, and be sure to read about all the past winners. This year, the awards will be presented during the 2016 Futures Conference, September 15-17, in Kansas City.

Details for Entry

• Unless you are submitting electronically, please submit six copies of your entry.  Submissions can be made by hard copy, video, CD or on a thumb drive. You may also email your entry in a PDF format todcurtis@colpm.org.
• All entries must be received by May 31, 2016, and accompanied with the $199 US entry fee. The College waives the entry fee for recognized 501(c)(3) organizations. Please include your tax id number on your application.
• Winners receive a beautiful crystal award at the InnovAction Awards ceremony and are invited to make a presentation describing their innovations.
• Winners will be highlighted and promoted in ads placed in media sponsor publications, on the College website and featured in the COLPM e-newsletter.
• Winners will be prominently featured on the InnovAction Hall of Fame page that celebrates the innovative accomplishments of lawyers and law firms on a global basis.

Notification of Winner(s)

The winner(s) of the 2016 InnovAction Awards will be notified on or about Monday, August 1, 2016, in plenty of time to take advantage of discounted Futures Conference pre-registration rates.

Please contact Debbie Curtis-O’Connell, College Administrator, at 224.337.9033 or dcurtis@colpm.org for additional information.

The Evolution of Law Firm Compensation

Intersection

Law firm compensation plans are by and large unsophisticated, hard to administer, too subjective, opaque, and reward the wrong behaviors. As someone wise once said, "If your compensation plan is in conflict with your strategy, your compensation plan is your strategy." To generate maximum financial performance in a law firm, and achieve the highest level of client satisfaction, we need to re-align the incentives. I've said a great deal about the deficiencies of law firm compensation plans (here and here and here). A good plan should further the firm's strategy, be easy to administer, and both drive and reward the desired behaviors. Many miss the mark on one or more of these dimensions. Here are the typical challenges I observe:

No alignment with strategy. Our strategy establishes one set of goals; the compensation plan rewards other, often entirely opposing, activities. We're a full-service law firm for our clients, but we don't track or reward cross-selling. In fact, we create internal competition and ill-will by forcing partners to take a pay cut when they bring others into their relationships. We wish to expand into new practice areas and geographies, but we punish the partners brave enough to lead an expansion because their short-term economic contribution suffers. We want everyone to get out of the office and become a rainmaker, but we pay partners primarily to stay in the office and bill time. We promise clients seamless transitions when partners retire or depart, but we punish partners who introduce younger colleagues into key relationships by requiring them to split credit. We promote our client focus, but we pay for hours, not efficiency.

Limited transparency. Some firms share compensation amounts among all equity partners. Others share nothing. Some firms have lengthy compensation plan documents. Others make all decisions in a closed-door session involving a select few. Some offer helpful scenarios to guide partner behavior in matters such as fee-splitting. Others trust partners to figure it out. What most miss is that transparency is not the same as having an open or closed system (sharing, respectively, all or no compensation details). Transparency is about establishing clear direction as to which behaviors we reward, and in what proportion, and doing so well in advance of the desired behavior. More than one managing partner has been shocked to discover that many, if not most, partners are unclear on the firm's primary compensation drivers. This is management shortcoming, not a result of dim bulb partners.

Poor or insufficient metrics. Some financial metrics are easy to come by, such as billed hours or collected receipts. Others are more elusive, such as timekeeper or client profitability. Still other metrics are more directional in nature, such as cross-selling (we may know the client worked with another practice group, but we don't necessarily know whether the relationship partner drove that). Some behaviors have only subjective metrics: serving as a good mentor? community involvement? acting in the best interests of the firm? A solid plan has specific metrics tied to the desired behaviors, and a clear and sustainable methodology for measuring performance in more subjective areas.

Inconsistent or incomplete reporting. When the compensation drivers are established, they should be published and then periodically the metrics tracking performance should also be published. Why not monthly? It serves little purpose to provide no metrics until year end, or provide vague or incomplete metrics at uncertain intervals during the year. It's hard make a course correction if we have neither a map of our destination nor our current coordinates.

Failure to acknowledge self-interest. We all want to earn a healthy living. But just as partners are loath to discuss budgets with clients, many avoid compensation discussions until required to do so by executive or compensation committee fiat. There's nothing wrong with wanting to know what specifically I can do to increase my compensation -- especially if the management committee has aligned the comp plan to strategy, so maximizing compensation furthers the strategy! Also, far too often top rainmakers or management or comp committee members prevent meaningful discussions of compensation plan changes because they fear losing income. While a revised plan may indeed result in changes to some partners' compensation, if the outcome is improved financial performance for all (and improved client satisfaction), then it's bad form and quite possibly a breach of fiduciary duty for those at the top of the pay scale to refuse to review alternatives.

Pursuing a disruptive implementation. If we identify a better compensation approach that serves the partners' and the clients' interests, it's statistically improbable that everyone will make the same. The change may be good. Some partners who are more comfortable billing time might be quite pleased with a plan that offers more certainty but less potential. Rainmakers may enjoy growing their books of business without being tethered to the billable hour. But some change may be troubling: some may see a compensation decrease commensurate with a declining trend in economic contribution. But we don't have to make these changes all at once. We can establish the end-state and then migrate to it over several years, providing training or transition support to those who might be significantly disrupted by a new plan.

Incomplete modeling. By nature, any forecast is speculative. To change a compensation plan means applying numerous "what if" scenarios to current performance, with no guarantee that we will sustain our current level of performance. We also don't know if, or how quickly, an adjustment to, say, origination credit will grow the pie. We don't know for sure how many partners will defect if their compensation will decrease, because the market dictates whether their economic contribution is more valuable elsewhere than here. They may already have the greenest grass they'll ever see. So we must model numerous factors, using realistic variables, and then create a few versions of the future. Failure to do this may result in significant disruption and unrest, and risk-averse lawyers tend to become flight risks during times of uncertainty.

Big dog accommodations. Every firm has one, if not many, partners who are the top of the food chain and who are somewhat blasé or even outright hostile to firm policies. Nothing creates organizational turmoil than when senior leaders or big dogs are allowed to break rules that little people must follow. When a top rainmaker threatens to leave, sometimes the best response is to say goodbye. When new compensation policies are put in place, it may be reasonable to make certain accommodations for those who feed others. But there's a limit. The behavior we desire should be incorporated into the compensation plan, and there's no room for unwritten rules.

A compensation assessment or redesign can be an extraordinarily effective tool to improve financial performance, foster a client-focused and collaborative culture, reduce unnecessary distractions, and provide a roadmap for career success. Expecting smart people to somehow "figure it out" is lazy management. Build the future you want in your law firm. Start today.

Timothy B. Corcoran is principal of Corcoran Consulting Group, with offices in New York, Charlottesville, and Sydney, and a global client base. He’s a Trustee and Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management, an American Lawyer Research Fellow, a Teaching Fellow at the Australia College of Law, and past president and a member of the Hall of Fame of the Legal Marketing Association. A former CEO, Tim guides law firm and law department leaders through the profitable disruption of outdated business models. Tim can be reached at Tim@BringInTim.com and +1.609.557.7311.

Useful Metrics & Benchmarking

The path to success in a law firm or law department has changed, yet many continue to rely on outdated metrics to track performance. Both buyers (law departments) and sellers (law firms) rely on billable hours as a proxy for productivity and value. This is silly. Sure, hours are a unit of production and law firm leaders should be aware of what it costs to produce the output of legal work. And yes, law department leaders should be aware of what they're purchasing. But if I visit the grocery store with a list of 47 specific items, I don't necessarily declare victory if I return home with 45 or 35 items, or 47 completely different items that cost less. I've also written previously about the lazy reliance on benchmarks -- relying on dissimilar metrics from dissimilar organizations in dissimilar markets with dissimilar characteristics is a recipe for mediocrity. A general counsel declaring that "We should reduce legal spend to 1.3% of revenues just like our competitors in the same SIC code" is as short-sighted as a managing partner stating that "We need to reduce our secretarial ratio to 4:1 to keep pace with more nimble competitors." There are a hundred factors in play that should be considered. Perhaps an investment in the legal department can improve organizational throughput, e.g., reduce the time negotiating contracts, accelerated IP review increasing our speed to market, so cutting funding harms the business. Perhaps a practice that derives profits from lower-cost paralegals and secretaries managing large piles of filing will come to a screeching halt when this work is pushed up to associates and junior partners, simultaneously eliminating the benefits of leverage and annoying clients who have come to expect lower rates.

On a recent speaking tour of regional educational conferences hosted by the Association of Legal Administrators, I asked audience members to volunteer the metrics they track. We captured pages and pages of performance metrics and the non-surprising results indicated that they vast majority are lagging indicators, e.g., "What happened last year, or last quarter?" and reflect short-term financial performance, e.g., "Was this matter profitable?" We need to evolve as a profession to also incorporate leading indicators and focus on long-term financial performance. As corporate guru Jack Welch once said, “You can’t grow long-term if you can’t eat short-term. Anybody can manage short. Anybody can manage long. Balancing those two things is what management is.”

My friend Silvia Hodges Silverstein, founder of the Buying Legal Council invited me to participate in recent conferences in London and Chicago, where rooms full of legal procurement professionals, in-house counsel, and law firm lawyers and professionals discussed the evolving world of legal metrics so we can find common ground in measuring and delivering value. For the Chicago session, I recorded my remarks, and you can view the session below.

My friend Greg Lambert, a leading information professional and co-founder of the award-winning 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, then riffed on my session to focus on metrics for a sub-set of professionals within law firms. After you view the video, you should read Greg's article. How can you incorporate better metrics in your organization?

Timothy B. Corcoran was the 2014 President of the Legal Marketing Association and is an elected Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management. He delivers keynote presentations, conducts workshops, and advises leaders of law firms, in-house legal departments and legal service providers on how to profit in a time of great change.  For more information, contact him at +1.609.557.7311 or at tim@corcoranconsultinggroup.com.

Random thoughts on the future of law and technology

I have the good fortune of meeting and collaborating with some pretty influential players in this cozy little global profession of law practice. Monica Bay is one of those with whom, and from whom, I've learned a great deal. While it's shocking to comprehend the passage of time, I first worked alongside Monica over 20 years ago when we were colleagues at a spunky little technology startup called Counsel Connect, a division of American Lawyer. You can probably google the history somewhere, but essentially Monica and I were part of an effort to bring social media and technology to the mainstream legal profession long before it was cool to do so. I played a minor role in comparison to the other staff members and volunteer contributors, many of whom continue today as thought leaders in this field. But over time I've gained a few insights of my own, and I've had the luxury of sharing my learnings and wisdom, such as it is, as a leader, manager, mentor, and now consultant, where I regularly offer insights at law firm and law department retreats, at conferences, and, of course, on this blog. I was delighted when Monica, in her role as roving reporter at the recent ILTACON15, asked me to spend a few moments reminiscing on what we've seen transpire in this profession, and what we see coming in the near and long-term. We touch on the role of technology, the demise (?) of the billable hour, project management, process improvement, change management and how incentives influence the pace of change, and what's next. I hope you enjoy watching and listening to our conversation as much as I enjoyed having it.

ILTACON 2015 - ILTA TV - Monica Bay interviews Timothy Corcoran from ILTA on Vimeo.