Caste System Persists Among Attorneys and Business Professionals

While the last decade has brought a revolution of global law firms employing thousands of attorneys and an army of professional staff — pricing executives, marketers and legal operation specialists, among many others — many professional law firm staff tell stories of a two-tiered system that minimizes their role and contributions. Observers said the caste system is a long-standing cultural mindset that stems from an age when firms were smaller and more informal, without hundreds of employees.

In some firms, the separation between lawyers and staff is literal: Katten Muchin Rosenman's largest office in Chicago had two separate cafeterias, with the majority of staff barred from eating in the attorney dining room.

"It made me feel worthless, that what I offer means nothing to you, and that you don't care about me," said a former Katten business professional.

Katten did not return a request for comment.

Nearly every law firm professional has a war story: a thrown stapler, ignored emails and even public shaming. Professionals find themselves constantly scrambling to justify their presence, and just one mistake — even a small PowerPoint typo — can erase all the goodwill.

Park remembers being publicly shamed by a senior partner after submitting the wrong version of a Chambers and Partners entry. After privately emailing the partner to point out the mistake, he berated her in an email sent to all the partners in the firm.

"If you're a legal professional trying to earn respect from your partners, that's how they destroy it," said Park, who left the legal industry in 2017. "You can't say anything; you can't do anything. You just have to take it."

Many say the unequal treatment exacerbates the already stressful environment within Big Law firms, leading to mental health concerns among staff.

Even as mental health awareness in the legal industry is gathering steam, professional staff often do not have access to the same wellness resources offered to their attorney colleagues. An ALM survey of 30 Am Law firms found that 36% of firms that say they offer mental health programming do not extend those programs to their professional staff.

The difficulty in proving one's value to partners is so pervasive that professional conferences devote entire sessions to strategies and tips. At the 2019 Legal Marketers Association Conference in Atlanta there was a session titled "How to Secure a Seat and Have Your Voice Heard at the Power Table."

Angela Hickey, CEO of Chicago-based Levenfeld Pearlstein and a member of the firm's executive committee, remembers palpable discomfort when she met with another law firm's executive committee. On three separate occasions, the other partners mentioned aloud that they "did not have nonlawyers on their executive committee."

"Well I'm on an executive committee with a lot of non-MBA's," Hickey said. "I know a hell of a lot more than you do on running a business. Let's talk about what we have to offer as opposed to what we don't have."

Good Business Practices

The ranks of business professionals within law firms are only going to grow in the coming years as clients demand cheaper, more efficient services.

Husch Blackwell's legal operations team led by Kevin Bielawski, for example, won accolades for developing a proprietary system that assessed risk and probable outcomes to help channel resources appropriately. The system resulted in a 53% reduction of active litigation for one of their clients, Monsanto. Neither Bielawski or Paul Eberle, Husch Blackwell's CEO, have law degrees.

Legal industry observers said firms that were first movers in technology and practice management systems such as Latham & Watkins and Kirkland & Ellis have comparatively better reputations in how they treat business professionals. Because the firms had to get firmwide buy-in to take a risk in investing in large departments of professional staff, these professionals need to spend less time proving themselves to skeptical partners.

From Hickey's perspective, treating a firm's business professionals as lesser is a bad business practice, not just demoralizing.

"We hire these very smart, very talented well-trained people supposedly to help us with our business, and then we don't give them a seat at the table. What's the point?" she said. "If the point from a business perspective is to engage your assets and your only assets in a law firm are people, you have to engage them."

Legal consultant Ron Friedmann agrees. For two decades, Friedmann has been closely watching the development of professional staff within law firms. He frequently consults on legal operations and technological innovation.

"There are a host of professionals in law firms today that didn't exist in any capacity before," he said. "Multidisciplinary teams are what will be required to solve complex problems."

He added that changing this caste mentality will be incredibly difficult, unless a firm's attorneys work closely with staff, such as coordinating with them on matters and creating multidisciplinary teams. Culture alone, he said, is nearly impossible to change.

There may be less incentive to change the attorney-staff caste system at firms with the largest profit margins. But Friedmann said cultural change may be more likely at midsize firms. Between their peers, mid-size firms have less differentiation in the kind of work they do, he said, and the intense competition for clients and professional talent may reward the firms that value their staff and multi-disciplinary teams.

"If the nature of the work is changing, and the economics favor multidisciplinary teams, that's where survival of the fittest comes in," Friedmann said. "If business professionals feel like they have a home, they'd (law firms) get the better talent."

*****

Dylan Jackson writes about how national law firms manage their talent, diversity and Latin America. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @DylanBJackson.