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Best Practices for Recruiting and Retaining Candidates
As companies bring more work in-house to control costs, and legal departments compete with law firms for qualified attorneys, employee retention and recruitment are more important than ever for senior corporate counsel. By emphasizing corporate reputation and a team-oriented environment, some law departments are wooing new attorneys as well as laterals who may be discontented with their law firms.
Legal departments understand that their reputation for a quality of life better than that in law firms is attractive to many candidates, particularly women. A study by the Defense Research Institute found that one of the chief reasons female attorneys move in-house is to attain better work-life balance. Once on the corporate side, women attorneys do not necessarily work fewer hours, but they feel better able to juggle the demands of work and parenting or other personal obligations.
Source: Survey of 300 lawyers among the largest law firms and corporations in the United States and Canada. The survey was commissioned by Robert Half Legal and conducted by an independent research firm.
To a certain extent, “balance” seems to be relative. Better on Balance? The Corporate Counsel Work-life Report, a report prepared by the Project for Attorney Retention, found that in many legal departments, “full-time” means a 50-hour workweek. Although this is hardly a light schedule, many in-house attorneys interviewed for the report said they find the hours manageable, especially since they rarely have to come into the office on weekends. Lawyers also reported greater flexibility in the start and end times of their day, and some leeway during the workday if they need to leave the office to attend to personal matters. Better on Balance? also notes that legal departments encourage more varieties of flexible scheduling than law firms do, including flextime, compressed workweeks and job sharing.
Another talent management best practice meets both individual attorneys’ desire for balance and legal departments’ cost-cutting goals – the use of project attorneys. A discovery manager at a major corporation, for example, says that her department has significantly reduced costs associated with document reviews by using a core group of contract attorneys to perform e-discovery and ESI reviews.
As is the case at law firms, corporate legal departments are expected to provide ample opportunities to their employees for professional growth and career advancement. Formal training, mentoring, reimbursement for continuing legal education (CLE) or courses taken in pursuit of an MBA or advanced finance degree, onsite professional instructors and access to online seminars and training programs are all effective ways that legal departments can help their attorneys hone critical skills. To keep their most valuable attorneys, law departments can create ascending career paths or arrange for lateral movement into other areas of the company so that attorneys can expand the scope of their abilities.
Pressures in the Relationship with Outside Counsel
Recent steep pay hikes for law firm associates have prompted worries among legal departments that outside counsel will increase their hourly rates to cover the raises. General counsel have begun objecting to charges and evaluating service levels from their outside firms, reflecting pressure from their own companies for better management of legal spending.
An Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) survey showed that in-house attorneys are adopting more sophisticated approaches to dealing with outside counsel, including closer budgeting and cost controls, more rules and bolder requests for value-added services. Alternative billing plans are among the cost-management measures being adopted by law departments. According to the ACC survey, those legal departments that use alternative fee arrangements prefer flat fees rather than retainers or contingency fees.
In addition to better managing outside firms’ legal fees, law departments are bringing more work in-house in an effort to control costs. Such “in-sourcing” has not only saved money, but also enabled legal departments to reduce turnover and provide staff attorneys with challenging work. Law departments also are leveraging technology to save money and time and boost efficiency.
For their part, law firms need to demonstrate awareness of their clients’ cost pressures, whether this means staffing matters as leanly as possible, seeking early resolution of cases, providing greater financial transparency, giving early warning of price increases, offering bundled rates or automating the billing process.
Setting aside the issue of price, the desire for solid, strategic legal advice is common among legal departments. This is particularly the case when it comes to a corporation’s compliance risk. Clients value outside counsel who can grasp the company’s compliance issues and help with meeting reporting requirements, especially in instances where the rules are changing or ill-defined. The ability to handle compliance risk across geographies and industries also is critical, as is providing specific, rather than generic advice and insights about the client’s potential exposure.
In general, law firms can improve the relationship with in-house counsel by listening to their clients, understanding the cost pressures they face and being proactive about alerting the client to possible risks and issues.
