Rethinking Year One
Changes in the law profession made one Atlanta-based firm reconsider how it trains first-year lawyers. In August 2007, Ford & Harrison, an employment law firm, announced it was eliminating its billable hours requirement for first-year attorneys in favor of clinical hours.
“Because of the Internet, the information immediately available to our clients is staggering,” said C. Lash Harrison 62b 65l, managing partner at Ford & Harrison.
“You can find more information quickly, but how do you use that information? We have to train our lawyers to use knowledge and apply it successfully for our clients.”
Modeled on the traditional medical residency, Ford & Harrison’s Year-One Associate Program requires 1,800 clinical hours of hands-on training with an additional 100 hours of classroom instruction and an approved independent self-study.
“The self-study should produce a work product of use to the firm or worthy of publication in a journal or magazine,” said Margaret F. Holman, attorney and director of professional development at Ford & Harrison. “We want them to develop a focused area of expertise within our practice or in an industry relevant to our clients.”
The 15-month program assigns first-year associates to a resource partner who serves as a mentor. First-years complete traditional assignments, such as research and writing memos or preparing summary judgments while engaging with clients and helping prepare cases, depositions, and hearings.
“My resource partner, Jeff Mokotoff, is always asking me if there is something I would like to be exposed to,” said Valeria Cometto, a first-year associate. “He’s always asking me to tag along and watch. Recently, I worked on a summary judgment with him.”
Earlier this year, Cometto was able to attend a complete trial in a case on which she had been working.
“In the past, [first-year associates] might do the research, but not understand how it fits into the bigger picture of the case strategy,” said Holman.
Investing in the future
Typically, first-year associates generate 1,500 billable hours, Harrison said, while recording 1,900 – 2,000 hours of work.
Given the firm’s current rates, the lost revenue per associate in the new program, therefore, could be as much as $300,000.
“That’s about $1.8 million for all six first-year associates,” Harrison said. “It’s quite an investment and does not include the significant investment in infrastructure necessary to run a program like this one.”
“Our hope is that we will begin to see an increase in the productive work that these associates are capable of before the end of the year,” Holman said.
The firm is removing any results- and success-based pressure any new lawyer feels when he or she enters a competitive environment, Harrison said.
“We’re giving them the opportunity to progress faster, learn more, and expand their knowledge,” Harrison said. “Junior lawyers used to come to work scared to death. We’re getting rid of that angst.”
“We’re taking all that energy and channeling it into something positive,” Holman said. “We decided to turn the problem inside out and address the write-offs.”
Cometto said her former classmates are jealous. “They say it’s a good idea and that their firms might do that in a couple of years. They wish they could take advantage of it.
“I don’t have the built-in pressure of generating 1,900 billable hours my first year out of law school,” said Cometto. “My partners understand I have a learning curve.”
“We’re giving them confidence,” Harrison said. “The consequence is they’re happy about what they’re doing. We’re hoping that as second-years our associates will be capable of handling more responsibility for more sophisticated work than junior associates have been in the past.”
Clients helped force the issue by refusing to pay for year-one or year-two associates to work on their cases.
“Clients were not subtle — they were explicit,” Holman said. “Our very large clients told us, ‘Do not use first- and second-year lawyers. We’re not going to pay for you to train,’” Harrison said.
“The market is different because more and more companies are relying on in-house lawyers,” Harrison said. “They no longer accept that a lawyer is a lawyer. When I started, people accepted you simply because you had the degree. Few knew or cared about your experience.
“Everyone was talking about the problem,” Harrison said. “I was frustrated by everyone complaining and nobody doing anything about it. I decided to start doing something, even if we had to risk not getting it right the first time.”
Embracing clinical hours
While most firms have not made any adjustments to their first-year associate programs, some have reduced their billable hours. Harrison foresees the industry adopting similar programs in the future in spite of mixed reactions to the program.
One blogger reported the firm would be out of business within a year, Harrison said. “We’re not.”
Instead, the firm embraced the concept. In addition to first-years, all associates may apply for clinical hours. The clinical hours are applied to their productivity requirements.
“When we rolled this out to the partnership, we emphasized the benefits — the ability to fully utilize junior lawyers and give them greater responsibility sooner and the fact that this program will set us apart with regard to recruiting and, hopefully, retention,” Holman said.
Client reaction has been overwhelmingly positive because the firm is responding directly to an ongoing problem, Holman said.
As for retention, when young attorneys are engaged and doing meaningful work, they are happier, Harrison said, adding the firm will survey the first years to better gauge the program.
“It is no fun to be stuck in an office while others are practicing law,” Harrison said. “This way they get a better sense of how the pieces fit together. Feedback is something folks don’t get early on.
“How do you motivate smart young people who are easily bored?” Harrison said. “They don’t want to sit in their offices and grind out research memoranda. You have to challenge and motivate them.
“The program is creating lots of buzz,” Harrison said of recruiting. “It will take some time to cycle through. We are hoping to see results next fall. We’ll have concrete examples by then.”
By Wendy Cromwell