Showing posts tagged biglaw

DLA Piper: Bringing the Curve to Biglaw - Above the Law

1) The point of a business is to make money. If people are doing a good job, they are making money and contributing. If everyone is making money and contributing, everyone should get rewarded. 10% should not be expected to fail.

2) This is a great way to kill off work/life balance. Pit associates against each other in a death match where only the top 20% get any real reward and we get rid of the bottom 10%.

3) This is a baldfaced attempt to reduce overall compensation by providing a guaranteed out for 10% of associates so fresh blood can be brought in. That and the other effects of the curve seperate this from other lockstep-killing models.

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Both types of law firms serve the public. The fee structure of a large law firm makes those firms unreachable for most individual clients; these folks need smalls. A large company with millions of dollars on the line looks for a brand name, the vetting of associates and partners, and the ability to quickly put together a team of lawyers to tackle major litigation or a huge transaction. It is not an accident that there are thousands of small firms and that there are big firms with over a thousand lawyers.

Eric Cooperstein writing on Lawyerist.

This takes my back to my favorite law school class: Law Firm as a Business Organization. The class was based around this same idea: that the most fundamental split among lawyers was those who have people as clients and those who have organizations as clients.