DLA Piper is Nation’s Largest Firm, Survey Says

Bill
Nov 12, 2007 8:35 AM CST

It’s interesting to see the continuing process of the law industry reorganizing itself through merger against the background of articles about associate salaries and unhappiness.

As a preliminary comment, the law industry is not the law profession. The law profession refers to the practice of law. The law industry refers to the aggregate of all of the law firms and also refers to the manner in which these firms choose to combine or seperate, and how these firms organize themself both in terms of structure, modes of doing business (bill hourly versus other fee structures) and core areas of practice.

The law industry is like every other industry in that once management of the firms have their say about how they wish to combine and organize, the employees have their own say and vote with their feet.  There have been several recent gloomy articles about associate attrition, that seems to assume first that the sole cause is the law profession and second that the attrition rate is an unmitigated disaster. Both assumptions should be challenged.

Instead of assuming that associate attrition is a terrible thing, why not cheer that the market is being efficient?  That associates leave one law firm for another has several positive connotations:

1) Associates who are unhappy and not staying in jobs that make them unhappy. This is good for everyone: the firm, the associate, the client, and the law profession.  Wally from “Dilbert” is funny in a cartoon but not so much when its your lawyer committing malpractice.

2) That lawyers are able to leave their firm, means that they can go someplace else.  That means despite gloomy prognostication about the legal market, the market is robust enough to allow this sort of movement.

3) The articles point out that many of the really big law firms continue to raise associate salaries and the billable hours requirements, while doing nothing to address the intangible forms of consideration “culture”, “work/life balance”, etc. Assuming, for arguments sake, that this is true, it should mean that smaller and medium sized firms have an oppurtunity to compete by varying their compensation.  Moreover, it should mean that the law industry is broader and more varied. This too can only be a good thing because it means the market will decide what forms of compensation are sustainable and what forms are not.

4) There are many denigrating comments on some of these articles about associates leaving because they are either naive or lazy.  On the contrary, they are merely being rational and are influenced in their decision-making by a multiple factors that must be balanced.  And if there is one thing that a newly-minted lawyer can do, its spot issues, apply the rule, list out the weight factors, and come out with a defensible conclusion.

Hooray for big law and the law industry.

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