By Dan Roe for Law.com
By now, most firm leaders agree that the last three years fundamentally changed the practice and the way they look at most things, including associate development and mentorship. At the management level, most also seem to think that the shift to remote work had some impact on associates’ practical and interpersonal development, but the question of whether there’s a looming crisis of inexperience remains open.
When we asked junior partners a similar question—whether they feel they can get quality work from associates assigned to them—as part of a mid-2022 survey, we got more pointed responses. Numerous new partners say they felt associates’ overall attitudes and work product had declined during COVID-19, a result of isolation and a favorable job market that distorted inexperienced lawyers’ notions of “paying their dues.”
What’s more, senior partners and managers were the least likely to notice the change, junior partners lamented, because associates knew who to suck up to. For other juniors, the associates’ attitudes were less of an issue than their firms’ unwillingness to adapt to remote mentorship, a responsibility that also fell to juniors. “I’d like to learn to motivate associates beyond traditional fear tactics,” says one junior partner. “Certain associates are very motivated and submit high-quality work product. Others need a lot of training. Remote work has made training more difficult because it has to be more deliberate.”
Having fielded concerns from junior and senior partners about the aftermath of remote work and the experience crisis that may be brewing across the Am Law 200, we set out to investigate the issue, speaking to partners, firm leaders and talent professionals to understand their concerns about associate mentorship post-pandemic and learn what they’re doing to catch up.
Got Skills?
In interviews, managing partners, office leaders, practice chairs and talent development professionals disagree on whether the pandemic delayed the development of associates who launched their legal careers in a remote setting. The debate largely boiled down to the senior lawyers’ preferred training methods and how they felt associates’ mid-pandemic experiences stacked up against pre-pandemic, in-office training.
Even in the digital age, pen and paper reign supreme at most law firms.
“The way most of us were taught was that you were given an assignment with some guidance, then after you finished, a good mentor would redline with a pen everything that needed to be reworked and then we would talk it through,” says Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough litigation partner Francisco Armada. “This is critical because the guidance and training came after the initial work was done and the junior attorney has already thought through the issues making them able to have intelligent discussions about the subject matter, and there was meaningful collaboration to finish the job.”
Several lawyers also expressed a fear that young associates would be less likely to communicate with their supervising partners via Zoom, including Armada’s colleague and fellow litigation partner Todd Norman. “The overall result has been less interaction between senior attorneys and associates. While there is still interaction via Zoom and phone calls, personal interaction plummeted during the pandemic. While it has rebounded, it still lags behind,” Norman says. “As in any profession, much of the experience and knowledge is gained not through structured meetings, but through the numerous interactions that last only a few minutes or less.”
However, whether due to partners’ intentionality or associates’ preference toward digital interaction, some partners felt remote communication tools like Zoom actually enhanced relationships between associates and mentors during the pandemic.
“One of the interesting pieces of feedback we got were from some of our more junior lawyers who felt they got more connectivity by Zoom than in-person,” says Michael Heller, executive chairman and CEO of Cozen O’Connor. “People made a more conscious effort to connect through Zoom than maybe they would have if they were sitting at a desk at the office.”
While remote work—and the deluge of demand at many law firms—presented associates with fresh challenges, some lawyers felt junior associates’ isolation during the pandemic decreased their efficiency.
“Unless you’ve developed in a system where expectations are made clear and you have constant feedback and input from more senior people about whether you’re meeting the requirements to succeed in the firm, you can easily see how someone who is billing at an amount of 60-70% of that expectation feels they are busy enough,” says Enrique Martin, managing partner of Winston & Strawn’s Miami office.
Responding to an American Lawyer survey earlier this year, many Big Law mid-level associates balked at the idea that the experience they gained— pulling 80-hour weeks during a period of historic demand that coincided with remote work—was at all subpar to their fully in-office predecessors. In response, partners contended that while the bang-bang days of deal fever hardened associates to the cyclical nature of working in Big Law, the quality of their training may still have suffered amid the hustle and isolation.
Most lawyers suffer from some form of perfectionism, Martin says, and young associates need more attention to avoid going down the wrong route on an assignment that may require a different approach. “Part of their training is teaching them that while there are no mulligans in what we do, it’s about assessing where you are in a project,” Martin continued. “The extra 50% of the time you dedicated to that one project that now likely can’t even be billed could have been dedicated to another project. So your work output would have increased.”
Reverse Osmosis
While partners disagreed on whether young lawyers’ competencies and careers will suffer from the loss of in-person training, most concurred that remote work robbed juniors of the ability to shadow more-senior lawyers and soak up the practical and personal skills needed to thrive in Big Law.
“Young lawyers missed out on what I would call observational learning, being able to see the body language and intonation of how lawyers talk to opposing lawyers and clients,” Heller says. “I think you clearly miss something on Zoom that is better in-person.”
Part of surviving Big Law has to do with a lawyer’s ability to balance the demands of the job and the rest of their life—another skill that may translate better in the office, says Martin. “A lot of the training and input and support we receive in high-pressure environments comes from our colleagues,” he says. “A lot of that support can come from informal interactions you have with each other: by the coffee machine, in the hallways, interacting with your workers who have been there for many years and developed a formula for success that has little to do with the substantive part of what you’re expected to do.”
Several partners say shadowing became a top priority as soon as pandemic precautions eased and in-person trials and negotiations resumed. Ultimately, time will tell whether the junior associates of COVID-19 are as equipped to handle the rising responsibilities of the coming years, but one Am Law 100 managing partner says associates will benefit from shadowing the more-senior lawyers who take the lead in tense situations.
“If you can’t handle a meeting live with a client, whether litigation or a transaction, that’s a problem,” the managing partner says. “Clients have a lot of trust in you. You’re carrying a high billable rate and working on impactful, important stuff for the client, so you have to do things to make them feel comfortable. And if you have a gap in that reading-the-room thing, that’s going to be problematic.”
Time Will Tell
Without other options, firms did their best with the experiences that remote work offered. “As is our habit at Boies Schiller, we lean heavily on our associates, including junior associates, who have had opportunities to stand up in a courtroom, question witnesses before a jury, argue entry points to a judge—those are the sorts of experiences we want associates to have,” says Matthew Schwartz, the firm’s managing partner. “One can effectively argue a motion or examine a witness in-person or remote. Some things like the logistics of handling exhibits can be quite different, but those are also skills that if you learn the legal mechanics of it, smart lawyers like we have are able to pretty quickly adapt to the technical logistics of it.”
The pandemic also prompted firms to scrutinize, formalize and centralize their training programs, which focused on practical and interpersonal skills as well as mental resilience.
“We’ve started to implement periodic training sessions on a national or international scale, which we’ll try to supplement with a local-level-training program,” Martin says. “That promotes greater interaction, it gives young associates a topic to discuss, and we’ll have a partner sit in on the training and supplement the discussion.”
At Cozen O’Connor, practice-specific training programs were already standard throughout the firm, but the firm asked mentors to make extra efforts to connect with mentees to minimize any losses. “We did litigation training, deposition training, trial advocacy on the litigation side. On the transactional side, we still went through draft agreements, educated lawyers on the provisions of those agreements and negotiating strategies,” Heller says. “We did all that by Zoom. I think the question is, can you get as much out of it by Zoom as you did in person? Only time will tell.”
Some firms focused on advancing lawyers’ mental health and resilience during remote work, while striving for empathetic leadership among management. “People are much more aware and better at providing support. We brought many people into the firm—in-house coaches and counselors—and aligned folks with counselors so that associates could have resources,” says the talent development officer of one Am Law 100 firm. “Leadership was also encouraged to reach out to people and check in, to make sure the stress and isolation were acknowledged and that listening ears were brought to bear.”
Pandemic Lessons
While most managers agree that a few days of in-office work each week leads to better associate development than full or mostly remote work, the challenge of adapting to the latter circumstance helped firms identify areas of improvement for associate training going forward.
“One of the things we focused on over the past few years as a firm is being more integrated geographically, staffing cases across offices,” Schwartz says. “We were making good progress on that, but COVID really accelerated that. When everyone was working remotely and no one was in physical proximity—other than the time difference, there was no difference between the next block and someone who lives on the other side of the country or the ocean. We got very good at working collaboratively across jurisdictions, and I think we’ll hold onto that.”
In addition to centralizing mentorship and staffing functions, the Am Law 100 talent development officer says the pandemic also helped make the distribution of work among associates more equitable. “A lot of firms I know are taking the initiative to put in place a more centralized work allocation model,” she says. “Work resource managers have to work with associates’ availability, benchmarks, career development goals, to help distribute work in an equitable way.”
Managers also learned about morale and how associates respond to varying management styles during times of uncertainty. For his part, Heller learned the importance of constant communication. “For everyone who was very scared about not only their family and their health but their job, I wanted there to be complete transparency and for people to know everything that was happening,” Heller says. “Associates say that was a differentiator for us compared to many of their friends at other firms. For a year and a half, we communicated with our entire firm once a week. We now send an email to the entire firm every two weeks.”
It took several years after the Great Recession for law firms to look up and realize they didn’t have any, say, fourth-year real estate associates, for example. It may be a few years before they can assess whether the COVID-era work settings left them with less qualified talent, or a more rational approach to the practice of law.