This article is adapted from Lawyers as Leaders: Why It Matters and What It Takes (ABA 2024) by Donald J. Polden and Barry Z. Posner. Used with permission.
Strong leadership skills are essential to the success of all legal organizations in these ongoing, challenging, and turbulent times. Leadership is not just a position held by someone in an organization, but it is critical to the success of every aspect of legal organizations. Leadership development of partners and associates is an undervalued and underutilized strategy that firms can deploy to benefit their employees and clients. And importantly, when done well, it supports and advances the well-being of everyone involved. Leadership development is often taken for granted. The lack of leadership is most apparent in times of uncertainty, stress and turbulence. The cost of ineffective leadership is fatal on many fronts and often only realized by looking in the rearview mirror.
Leaders eat change for breakfast. In today’s tumultuous times, the need for lawyer-leaders is heightened across all levels of a law firm. There is a pressing need to emphasize the development of leadership skills, highlighting every individual's integral role in the success of the law organization. These skills—which include greater lawyer agility in learning, robust self-awareness and an entrepreneurial mindset—are crucial for navigating the complex and adaptive competencies required in the legal profession.
This is why we contend that leadership development is a fundamental task for today’s law firms because of its significance to the firm’s, and its lawyers’, success. It’s not just about the present, but also about the future. Leadership development allows firms to support their young talent. The most successful firms have recognized that leadership development throughout the organization is critical, especially for retaining young lawyers and building their interpersonal competencies, sense of purpose and healthy productivity.
The complex and volatile condition of the legal profession in recent decades underscores the urgent need for lawyers to develop leadership skills at both the senior and junior levels. Leadership in organizations is about the capacity to respond to change and challenges. Associates and partners must appreciate and recognize that leadership development programs are expressly designed to respond to the firm’s need to change, address challenges, search for opportunities and adapt to changing industry conditions.
The complexity in law practice and the work of lawyers and their organizations is not a recent phenomenon. However, it is escalating and characterizes the contemporary practice of law. Unprecedented financial and economic predicaments, the COVID pandemic, political and civil unrest and significant changes in how the business of law is accomplished have pressured the legal profession to adjust and adapt. Adaptation and the need to seamlessly adjust to challenges have become essential leadership skills in today’s modern law firm. A recent article in the New York State Bar Association Journal noted that today’s “lawyer-leaders must be as agile as white-water guides in treacherous rapids.” Therefore, leadership development is not just a task but the most significant tool for today’s lawyers to align their aspirations for success and happiness with the complex realities of law practice. It is the key to thriving in the modern law firm environment.
When crafting programs for young lawyers to advance their skills and attitudes as legal professionals, there are encouraging signs that the legal profession is shifting its focus to promote the development of their abilities to inspire and lead others, not just their legal acumen or business knowledge. Leadership training programs emphasizing the importance of leadership development to law organizations, and the growing volume of materials on personal and professional leadership development for lawyers, all point to significant recognition of the need for such initiatives. This recognition validates the challenges and opportunities for those involved with the legal profession and makes young lawyers feel understood and supported in their professional journey. In these firms, it is clearly understood that these contemporary law practice challenges are not singular (particular to one individual) but plural (faced by everyone to some extent). As such, attention to leadership development recognizes this situation, paving the way for a more supportive and understanding law firm experience and, overall, a stronger organization.
What does the legal profession stand to gain from this investment in leadership development? Our research demonstrates that a systematic leadership development program increases the law firm’s internal leadership assets. This allows it to identify and support the firm’s future leaders by crafting opportunities for emerging talents to develop and demonstrate key skills and attitudes. Perhaps more importantly, firms making substantive investments in leadership development opportunities produce better lawyers. Lawyers with solid leadership skills perform at a higher level, demonstrate resiliency and deliver more favorable results.
Surveys involving law firm leaders document that leadership skills are critical to the success of today’s lawyers and their firms. These also reveal that firms will be investing less in direct professional development for their young lawyers such as hiring consulting human resources experts, and, alternatively, transferring the responsibility to their junior lawyers to find ways to develop the skills and attitudes that their clients will need to perform high-level legal work.
The surveys also indicate that one principal area that will distinguish the great lawyers of the future is their ability to enhance their cognitive and emotional intelligence abilities for their client's behalf without being forced to do so. This means that young lawyers, in terms of adult learning theory, will need to move through stages of cognitive development from being “socialized” to more advanced levels with the capacity for self-growth and transformative thinking, able to anticipate and address client’s needs without ministerial or detailed direction. It is also anticipated that firms’ attention to leadership will focus on and emphasize the development of greater creative problem-solving, innovation and entrepreneurial outlook, which are skills and perspectives that prospective clients highly value. The most successful firms have recognized the importance of investing in developing these critically important skills and attitudes, especially for junior lawyers. They are realizing the benefits notwithstanding the added development costs.
Further, many firms have concluded that leadership development in today’s law firms is essential to client development, as leadership skills create opportunities for lawyers and law firms to build relationships with clients. Building relationships with existing and future clients is the foundation for a law firm’s long-term success, whether a small boutique or a large national firm. The practice of law is much like practicing leadership: they are both retail businesses integral to the law firm's success and their clients. They are founded on the firm and lawyer’s credibility to work successfully on behalf of their clients. They are deeply connected to how clients perceive the lawyer’s competence, trustworthiness, good judgment and commitment to fully and ethically represent their best interests.
Leadership development programs and initiatives typically require multiple interventions and iterations, depending on the firm’s needs, management’s commitment to associate development and budgets. A firm implementing one of these programs often initiates an academy, or central repository, of the firm-wide responsibility for the leadership initiative. In turn, the academy’s leadership team will champion and lead the planning and programming needs for the initiative. Being part of the academy's leadership is among the most important services that partners and senior associates can be asked to do. Additionally, legal organizations have also sought the expertise of prominent business schools with strong leadership programs and faculty, as well as consulting and training companies, to design the firm’s leadership initiative.
Firm leadership programs share certain common attributes, including 1. the firm’s public recognition of the importance of leadership to the firm and the legal profession, 2. the dedication of appropriate assets (such as training materials, associate and partner time, which is mainly nonbillable) to achieve programmatic goals, and 3. widespread recognition throughout the firm of the purposes of the programs. In this respect, leadership development programs provide a firm-wide platform to promote several attributes of the firms’ leadership programs. For example, it can be a forum for succession planning, seeking to identify the firm’s future, emphasizing collaboration across the firm in support of client’s needs and anticipating and addressing the firm’s ongoing needs for innovation and change.
Many firms implementing leadership development programs for associates underscore the importance for young lawyers to make the time to lead, that is, to find time to practice habits and discipline that enable them to address long-term problems for their clients and the firm. As a result, the firm’s commitment to their associates’ professional leadership development offers substantial benefits in addition to supporting succession planning and hierarchical advancement of partners’ and senior associates’ career paths. It pays great dividends to the well-being of the firm’s most expensive asset—its human talent—providing ways of reducing the expected (and occasionally extraordinary) stresses of law practice, managing relationships, ameliorating work-life tensions and the financial challenges facing the business. It influences and shapes the relationships with clients and the communities served by the law firm and creates opportunities for lawyers and law firms to build client relationships and prosper.
In this respect, a firm’s thoughtful leadership development program can be an essential part of a wellness program designed to permit professionals, regardless of their position or scope of responsibility, to align their personal and professional aspirations with the firm's ambitions and requirements. When the firm can help its people align these two critical aspects of their lives, they are generally more productive, happier and more likely to support their colleagues’ success and create a positive workplace.
For example, intent on keeping their talent through the stresses of law practice, firms often provide pro bono projects for young lawyers and even more experienced associates, outsourcing them to nonprofit and community service organizations, retaining and promoting the social justice reasons for becoming lawyers in the first place. A firm’s leadership development program can explicitly identify service in bar associations as an essential goal of the firm, encouraging its lawyers, especially younger lawyers, to pursue greater meaning in their work as counselors and advisors. This work of the firm’s lawyers cannot financially replace billable time with clients. Still, it helps build more productive lawyers who appreciate the opportunities that the firm is providing them. Moreover, this work for bar groups, nonprofits and other organizations often requires precisely the key lawyer competencies—such as collaboration, teamwork, problem-solving, inspiring creative thinking and public engagement that firms seek for their professionals performing legal work.
Some lawyers may question the importance of leadership development programs as a vital part of a firm’s commitment to its talent. In contrast, many senior partners have told us that such initiatives help with attorneys attending to self-care and that personal and professional wellness “is not a luxury; it is a requirement.” While it is common for legal firms to invest in core lawyer support (such as training, professional advancement opportunities, development of business development skills, etc.), it is still unusual and a missed opportunity for firms to retain and improve performance through investments in leadership, and subsequently health and well-being.
Fifty years ago, it was allegedly a common comment in first-year contracts courses for the crusty law professor to remark: “Look around, look to the person on your left and the one sitting on your right. At the end of the school year, only one of you will still be here!” Over the years, law schools have realized they were investing too much in the first-year curriculum to flunk half the class out. So, too, with law firms’ management of retention and promotion opportunities.
Regardless of hierarchical level, specific practice or organizational context, the newest lawyers to the most seasoned veterans must realize that people will, like fruit on the vine, eventually rot unless they grow. Leadership development is fundamentally self-development, as the individual is the instrument of providing a path forward and unleashing the potential within those they interact with. Developing leadership is the single and most substantive tool for today’s lawyers to align their aspirations for success and happiness with the realities of law practices’ very complex and uncertain environment.
