Last week, Leah wrote about why we needed to dismantle the billable hour.  Who would join us in this quest? Fortunately for us, lawyers have been leaving big firms in droves.  If you are of a certain age, you remember a time when it seemed like all your friends were applying to law school.  A few years later, they were griping about their jobs, and a few years after that…many of them had left private practice.  Why was our profession losing its talent?

The problem is that elite firms need the smartest people.  They need high achievers who steadily excelled in high school, college, and law school.  But people like that—those people want.  And what they want isn’t money.  Money is nice, but smart people want more than money.

Smart people want autonomy.  They want art.  They want adventure and family and a connection to the world around them.

Those things are hard to get if you’re working days, nights, and weekends at a law firm, year after year for the rest of your life.

Again and again I saw stellar attorneys in their 30s walk away from promising careers at great firms.  They had proven that they could run with the big dogs, and now they were choosing other priorities.  Not many of these people disliked the actual practice of law.  As a young attorney in DC, I remember being surprised by how pleasant my workday became once I found my groove.  It was intellectual work, I was lucky to have a great team, and every little task completion rewarded my brain with the craft pleasure of a job well done.  Despite that, I just couldn’t see myself staying for 20 years as a “lifer.”

Every time a friend handed in his or her resignation, I understood.  I also thought: what a waste of an excellent attorney.

The idea for Clarity really took root on the day we realized we could (as Gandhi once said) be the change we wanted to see.  We weren’t the only attorneys who had seen how billable hours poison the attorney-client relationship.  We weren’t the only ones who enjoyed practicing law but wanted to have more control over our lives.  We were all ready for a change.

In creating a law firm for ourselves, our ideas were simple:

• People crave the feeling of accomplishment that comes from working with clients as a respected partner, not a hired hand.
• People thrive in a left-brain/right-brain culture that recognizes and rewards their curiosity.
• People need autonomy like they need oxygen.

Getting rid of the billable hour already put us a step ahead in the war for talent.  To be a long-term home for the kind of talent we wanted to attract, we also needed to figure out a “part-time” option that works for both clients and attorneys.  I say “part-time” in quotes because all attorneys know that “part-time” is never part-time.  Because we keep a careful eye on our attorney-to-client ratio, we hope to come closer to offering real part-time than any firm has ever come before.  For full-time attorneys, we hope that having the support of a flexible team will make 100-hr weeks a rarity.

The response so far has been overwhelming, even though our firm is still so new.  We were inundated with unsolicited résumés right after the Washington Post featured us.  And it’s not just the recession talking.  Even attorneys at big-name firms got in touch.

I don’t know yet if we will be Facebook or Friendster, but a sea change is coming.  Law firms, are you listening?  Your people want you to set them free.

People always ask how it started.  It started in Greece, on vacation.

In Greece, Sue and I roamed around ruins, got stranded on an island, ate lots of good food…and talked, the way old friends do. Something about being in the birthplace of democracy really sparked our thoughts about the future– new ideas and the eternal question of “what does it mean to live a good life?”

After law school, I had chosen a small but very high-quality law firm in the Chicago suburbs called Meltzer, Purtill & Stelle.  Unlike most firms, MPS had far more partners than junior attorneys.  Being one of only a few younger lawyers there meant that I had direct contact with clients early and often, and I had the opportunity to work with each of the different partners in their various areas of law, so I acquired a solid sense of business context.   It was a great learning environment with bright, supportive colleagues.

Sue had been at Latham & Watkins since her summer clerkship in law school, and she had pretty much the best possible big-firm experience.  She had many friends and mentors, worked on headline-making deals, and was treated with respect.  For example, she asked the firm to move her to Hong Kong just because she wanted to work in Asia, and they did it.  If an attorney took 4 months of paid maternity leave and resigned shortly after returning, the firm would wish the new mother well.  It was a pretty classy operation.

So there it was: we had each tasted the best that the industry had to offer, and still it didn’t feel like a lifelong vocation.  At firms less supportive than MPS and L&W, the story was a lot worse.  For a long time now, the statistics have been pretty clear on depression, divorce, and alcoholism amongst lawyers.  Sue and I shared a conviction that something was wrong with our profession as a whole.

One of the things we talked about was an article called “The Billable Hour Must Die.” It first caught my eye because it was written by best-selling novelist Scott Turow, whose daughter had been one of our classmates at law school.  Even though Turow was a partner at a big firm, he was upset that his daughter was following his career path.  He wrote passionately about how billable hours create distrust and sabotage the attorney-client relationship.  Not only was the billable hour system causing attorney burn-out, but Turow had never been comfortable with the ethical questions of a system that rewards inefficiency.

After practicing for years, I was aware of many of the problems that Turow articulated.  No matter how efficiently I worked, I could tell that clients always wondered if I could have worked even faster.  The system fundamentally created distrust.  There were cautionary stories about clients who faced disasters after waiting too long to talk to a lawyer.  The thinking was always the same: everyone knows that a lawyer charges you every time you call them, and clients feared ending up with huge, unexpected bills.  Clients who knew better would let their lawyers be proactive, but that required a lot of trust, which could take years to build up due to the problems of the billable hour.

In his article, Turow laid down a challenge: The billable hour was strangling the legal profession, but surely we were smart enough to come up with a better way.

Sue and I agreed. There had to be a better way, and we would find it.

Today, when a client calls me, she knows that I will take the time to listen and answer thoughtfully, without checking my watch every six minutes.  She knows that if I need to research an issue and get back to her, I will fix a time limit in advance and report back with a progress update before spending any more of my time and her money than expected.  She knows she will never see a charge for the phone call, and if I think of anything else she might be interested to hear, I will follow up with an e-mail.  Because I am familiar with her business, she knows that I am keeping an eye out for risks that could affect her business.  Ultimately, she knows that we share the same goal: for her business to succeed.

So how did we get there from here?

To be continued…

comic credit: xkcd.com

We were featured in the Washington Post yesterday.  Hooray!

And yet…I wish the Post had focused on the bigger picture.  Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I’m a lawyer and a compulsive looker-in-of-mouths.

The story had a great angle on how we are bringing down the cost of having a legal team, though we don’t exactly think of ourselves as a “timeshare.”  We are more of an SaaS business model.  We describe it as a plug-and-play legal department.  Until now, having a squad of salaried attorneys on your team was a luxury that cost almost a million in upfront capital.

Cost-cutting is very attention-getting, but that’s not how our story began.  We started by thinking about what kind of relationship we wanted to have with clients.  We wanted clients who weren’t afraid to call us early and often.  We wanted to point out bear traps along the way.  Believe me, it’s hard on everybody when we have to fetch the shovels and dig clients out.

We saw a lot of clients who treated law as a sort of expensive dry cleaning: drop it off and pick it up, then pay the cashier.  We saw a different path.  Lawyers are like doctors for businesses, and Leah said, “Let’s be small-town doctors.”  We take care of people and keep them out of the ER.  When they need major surgery, we accompany them to the hospital.  It’s that simple.

The billable hour got in the way, so we kicked it aside.