JULY 2007: FOCUS ON LAW
John Russell, one of five founding partners at Alleman
Hall McCoy Russell & Tuttle.
Photo by Michael G.
Halle
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Bridging the gap
Work-life balance is key for the next generation of lawyers.
By Christina Williams
John Russell ambles into the conference room in jeans, a faded
T-shirt and Birkenstock clogs. The 34-year-old sits down to
talk about the intellectual property law firm he founded with
four partners, but he’s more eager to give a tour of the
offices.
The Portland offices tell the story better than one clean-cut,
sloppily dressed lawyer can. There’s the bicycle stashed
in Chris Tuttle’s office (Alleman Hall McCoy Russell
& Tuttle aims to be a carbon-neutral law firm). In 2005,
Tuttle took two months off to ride around Spain while his
partners handled the clients.
Down the hall is the office of 38-year-old M. Matthews (Matt)
Hall, another of the founding partners who was the first of the
five to take time off when his wife had a baby. In the
2½ years since Alleman Hall opened its doors, four of
the five partners have taken family leave.
Then there’s the additional 1,100 square feet of office
space being refinished for more lawyers to join the firm and
everywhere boxes and filing cabinets overflowing with patent
work from newly won clients, including Nike and Microsoft.
And did we mention that all of the firm’s partners are
under 40? Welcome to the law firm of a new generation. Young
lawyers hailing from Generation X, Y and beyond want different
things from their careers than their older counterparts —
and they’re speaking up about it. Law firms that
aren’t addressing the issue risk losing their young
associates.
The Multnomah Bar Association spent most of last year studying
a problem they identified as a generation gap after hearing
complaints from older lawyers about the slack work ethic of
younger lawyers and fielding questions from young lawyers about
the burdensome time requirements of their work. In the
much-vilified billable hour system, law associates are often
required to work 2,000 billable hours per year, which, if you
do the math, works out to 50 neat 40-hour workweeks. But the
reality is more often marathon stints of 80-hour weeks to meet
a deadline.
All about balance
Lawyers hailing from Generation X, those born between 1965
and 1980, surveyed by the Multnomah Bar Association ranked
work/life balance as their top motivator at work. Firm
culture came in second among Gen X-ers and supportive
leadership was ranked third.
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“It’s a concern in the legal world,” says
Judy Edwards, executive director of the Multnomah Bar
Association. “How do you retain good talent in a law
firm? Because it costs a lot of money to invest in a young
graduate and you want them to stick around.”
The survey by the bar, conducted with the assistance of Jo
Smith, a Portland-based business consultant who specializes in
law, found that only 53% of surveyed GenX lawyers, who were
born between 1965 and 1980, expected to be working full-time at
their current firm in 10 years. Of those who didn’t,
nearly 40% said they planned to be out of law and 17% said they
planned to be taking extended family or personal leave.
Smith says that turnover is on the increase at most law firms,
with industry averages hovering around 20%. “It’s
much more commonplace for the younger generation to change
firms and change jobs than it was 20 years ago,” Smith
says. “The boomers are still puzzled by it and the
management is troubled by it.” (Baby boomers were born
between 1946 and 1964.)
The study also found that younger lawyers want more mentoring
from experienced lawyers, better communication within the firm
and more flexibility to work hours that better accommodate a
family life. To hold onto their young lawyers, firms across
Oregon are wrestling with the question of how best to
accommodate these demands.
MENTORING PROGRAMS ARE NOTHING NEW at Oregon law firms, but
they’re getting more attention as firms wrestle with high
turnover among their young associates.
“We’re failing ourselves if we’re not
meeting the needs of those associates,” says Mark Long,
managing partner at Schwabe Williamson & Wyatt in Portland.
He adds that the effects of high turnover aren’t just
financial — though firms do invest a considerable amount
in recruiting and training — but morale also flags.
To try to avoid the associate exodus, Schwabe has experimented
with an expanded mentorship program for associates at its
Seattle office, a program Long says is likely to go firmwide
soon. Professional development is front and center and a
part-time, or “reduced goal,” track is available to
associates who seek it out.
At Stoel Rives in Portland, a decade-old program of matching
young lawyers with older coaches has been augmented to include
a second matchmaking, pairing a younger associate with an older
associate for a more informal mentoring relationship.
“The firm pays for up to two lunches a month per
relationship so we encourage people to take advantage of
that,” says Barbara Nay, a Stoel Rives partner
who’s been active in setting up the program.
Nay says the mentoring program is just one of several ways the
firm is trying to reach across the gap. Earlier this year, the
firm held a women’s retreat at Skamania Lodge to focus on
issues of particular concern to women lawyers. “The
younger lawyers are more willing to speak up about what is of
concern to them.”
Speaking up is the strategy recommended for firms looking to
address the generation gap by 33-year-old Catherine Brinkman,
outgoing president of the Multnomah Bar Association’s
Young Lawyer Section and an associate at Schwabe. “Firms
are definitely in transition,” says Brinkman, who
presented the bar’s generation gap study to her
firm’s senior partners. “The suggestion I had is:
Keep the lines of communication open. It starts with the
interview process. Don’t sugarcoat it. You have to
encourage people to do soul searching, to ask themselves how
much of a personal sacrifice they’re willing to
make.”
Brinkman and other young lawyers say they know plenty of
colleagues who aren’t willing to make the sacrifices
required of them at the other end of law school and are finding
other careers. Jobs in government or the corporate world
don’t have the stress of the billable-hour culture that
so often leads to long hours spent working for clients and
little time for other interests.
Kelly Struhs, an associate at Portland-based Stoll Stoll Berne
Lokting and Schlachter, estimates that 15% of her law school
class has left the profession and she was surprised to see the
high numbers of lawyers planning to leave their firm captured
by the bar’s survey. But she points out that sometimes
when young lawyers rail against the business and swear
they’ll get out, they never make good on the threats.
“I probably would have answered that question the same
way the first year or two or four out of law school,”
says Struhs, 31. “And I’ve heard from other
attorneys that they felt sort of the same way when they
started. But now they say they wouldn’t have done
anything differently. That’s one of the biggest things
that the mentoring role serves. It’s not just ‘can
you answer my legal questions,’ it’s ‘did you
like practicing in the beginning?’ and ‘how did you
balance your life?’”
JOHN RUSSELL READILY ADMITS that occasionally he and his young
partners wish they had a senior attorney who could offer advice
or inspire trust in a client. But he and his colleagues, who
left Portland intellectual property firm Kolisch Hartwell en
masse to start Alleman Hall, made that tradeoff with eyes wide
open.
They traded the mentoring, the established name and the
infrastructure for a firm built around their values. “We
want to make sure we’re profitable but we also want to
make sure that a work-life balance isn’t something we
just give lip service to,” Russell says.
To that end, Alleman Hall made the unusual move of
establishing a cap on the number of hours a partner can work in
a year (an internal figure) as part of the firm’s
partnership agreement. At least two partners are assigned to
every client to ensure that when someone is taking time off,
there’s someone there to cover. The managing partner role
rotates between each of the five founding partners every six
months.
And the work has been there. Since opening their doors in
January 2005, the five founders were joined by four other
lawyers, two patent agents and two technical advisers in
addition to the firm’s support staff.
The firm’s been so successful that the partners have
been challenged of late to keep that balance that they wanted
so badly when they popped the champagne bottle and started
designing a different kind of law practice “The question
we always ask ourselves is: Are we better off?” Russell
says.
So far, their answer is yes.
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