A law firm is based on a traditional ‘up-or-out’ pyramid structure, reliant on significant numbers of trainees and junior lawyers, where over time the talent pool is progressively reduced.
Some reach the partnership pathway, but over time, the majority leave for other firms or roles. While increasingly there are salaried partnerships, senior solicitor or Of Counsel roles, it’s probably true to say that most lawyers joining law firms will have their sights on partnership.
The law firm pyramid structure allows lawyers to receive pay rises related to their increasing seniority and creates an expectation that their careers will progress, both in roles and rewards, over time.
The position in-house is different. Job families follow a corporate model, whereby someone joins in a particular role. For them to be promoted, typically there needs to be a role needing their skills and experience, and a vacancy in that role. The concept that people move up a career structure – and are paid more - simply because they have greater post-qualification experience is alien.
There tend to be fewer steps between junior lawyers and the GC than there would be between lawyers and partners in a law firm. Typically, there will be one group GC, possibly with divisional or subsidiary GCs, and subject specialists or team leaders, but proportionately, there will be many fewer senior legal roles than there are partners in a law firm.
This can lead to team members feeling that their promotion relies on what they may see as ‘dead men’s shoes’ – waiting for someone to leave or retire. They may also feel that they are not developing their skills and experience as they should, as they continue to do the job they joined for, rather than necessarily the job that they could now do.
For example, they may feel that at 5 years PQE they have repeated their first years’ experience five times – or conversely, that they are doing much more senior-grade work but being paid much less.
All this can mean that team members become demotivated because of the flat career progression structure. So, what can you do about it?
Understanding what your team members want?
In today’s employment market, it’s important to realise that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution – and that team members’ expectations and needs may differ wildly.
Some may value flexible working or the ability to work from home. Others may be focused solely on career progression. Some may want to develop their professional skills within their specialism and have no desire to manage a team or legal department; others will see your job as the only one they want.
It may sound a little trite, but it’s really valuable to ensure you are talking to your team members individually on a regular basis – and certainly in more formal annual or six-monthly reviews – which should include a realistic understanding of what they want, and your ability to meet their expectations.
But what might you do to motivate your team?
Motivating your team
Although we talk of motivating your team, in reality, you are motivating each individual, and doing so individually – and that motivation will have started with recruitment. If someone has been recruited into a role with an unrealistic expectation of their career progression, they will very likely leave in relatively short order leaving you with another recruitment problem.
As such it’s worth looking both at how you might motivate the individual, how you might create a sense of ‘team’, and at some structures and tools which you could consider introducing to develop and motivate people. Finally, consider what you might do to adapt the organisation’s progression so that it is more suitable for legal’s needs.
How can I motivate individual team members?
It’s often said that people leave people – i.e. their current boss – rather than organisations.
On that basis, the more you can do to build professional relationships with members of your team, the better. Do you have one-to-one meetings with team members regularly, as well as perhaps the annual or half-yearly review?
In larger departments, do your team members know people from other teams, other senior staff and the GC? Given that practising law is all about the skills and experience that people bring, ensuring that these professional relationships are nurtured and maintained really helps.
If individual lawyers – even at the junior level – feel they know and are valued by the GC as well as their line manager, and that their development and retention are important to them, they are much more likely to stay. Similarly, do you encourage people to build professional relationships across the organisation – with other lawyers, clients, and colleagues?
Focus on the individual’s personal development so that they have a dynamic personal development plan, created and maintained with the individual’s line manager, and if there is one in the organisation, the learning and development team. You can use the organisation’s development programmes – which often legal departments tend not to engage – as well as the formal resources which larger organisations tend to have to help people build their own development programme.
How can I create a sense of ‘team’?
You will also be working hard to ensure that your team is motivated – and that there is a sense of it being a team, rather than simply a collection of individual practitioners. It’s much harder to leave a team of people whom you know and respect, than it is to move if you feel you are regarded as something of a sole practitioner, who happens to be working for the same client as your peers.
That doesn’t mean that you must hold formal team-building activities – some people like them, and some people are horrified by them – but you can try to ensure that the legal team feels, and is treated, as a team.
At the most basic level, you can ensure that there is regular team communication – a regular flow of news and information about team members, who is doing what, team successes and innovations, and client news and appreciation. Knowing how someone fits into a team – and why their role is valued, is important.
If you don’t have a formal induction programme for new starters, including some form of buddying with an existing lawyer, it is well worth considering. It can cover your legal strategy, your organisation’s goals and objectives, and how the lawyers fit into the overall scheme of things.
Some organisations hold a legal conference or networking gathering – either for the legal team as a whole or with colleagues from the wider organisation and their external law firms. These can be very powerful in creating a shared understanding of what legal does, and how it contributes to the broader organisation, and can be very motivational.
Such arrangements also ensure team members and colleagues get to know one another, which acts as another motivational factor. You could consider other initiatives, such as shadowing or mentoring, which build on those links.
Some structures and tools to motivate
Although it may not be possible to offer upward progression in a flat structure, there are other things you can consider which allow people to gain experience, confidence, and exposure. Could you think about alternative moves into parallel roles, secondments to other parts of the business, or roles in cross-organisational projects? All of those things build skills and can be interesting and enjoyable for the individual, as well as fulfilling a useful role for the organisation.
As your organisation develops, there may also be a need for new legal roles, and maintaining a close watch on peoples’ development can allow them to be filled from within. You may also want to encourage and subsidise people in obtaining relevant additional qualifications, whether specialist legal skills, a diploma or additional degree, or membership of a relevant professional institution such as that of the Chartered Governance Institute for those who may be in a governance, secretariat or compliance role.
Similarly, as you develop how your organisation works, there may well be a need to consider how you use technology, innovation and legal operations, and give people development responsibilities around their role in these areas.
You could also consider creating legal-specific skills programmes for your legal team so that people are learning the skills you need them to develop, and possibly also the specialist legal skills which your particular organisation and sector requires.
Adapting the organisation’s structures to a legal environment
As mentioned earlier, most in-house legal teams work in organisations which don’t have comparable professional services teams. There are likely to be accountants, of course, and other corporate professionals from specialisms such as HR, communications and the like. But most of them will expect to move jobs – and possibly organisations – to develop, and they are unlikely to see the salary progression which lawyers have come to expect in the early years post-qualification to five to ten years PQE.
That can mean that someone recruited on a market salary at their then-qualification level soon finds that they feel they are paid less than their peers elsewhere and will leave. That presents a key issue for you in managing the team, but also a cost to the organisation as you have to recruit and train someone else – and you lose the experience the individual who leaves has built up.
One solution is to adapt the organisation’s structures to the legal environment. This might include, for example, providing for PQE-related progression where there is a formal expectation that salaries increase provided there is progression against defined legal-specific skills and experience goals.
It can also include creating talent pools, where people with potential for senior roles are identified and prepared for those roles, with their next roles identified and managed.
Finally, you might consider creating development roles – for people to learn and develop, where you want to retain and develop particular talent. These could be interim or acting roles, project roles, maternity cover, or even assistant or chief-of-staff roles.
It might be thought that these options are costly and that it is difficult or impossible to ask an organisation to make these adaptations. They indeed have a cost, but it is well worth looking at the business case involved.
Recruitment is costly too – recruitment agent costs are not cheap, in many cases you end up paying the recruit more than the person who left, to attract the right person, and you are likely to have to cover the cost of work externally until someone is in-post. And of course, the recruit will require a period of bedding-in, supervision and induction, and others in the team will be diverted to cover an empty role.
If you add up all these factors, you may well find that the cost of tools and structures to motivate and retain staff is an attractive – and cheaper – option.
But what if someone doesn’t like a flat structure?
You may find that some of your techniques are to no avail – there will, inevitably, be some people who are motivated by status and who are not comfortable in a flat structure. They may work with you for two or three years while they gain experience for their next role. You may find that inconvenient – but equally they may have skills that are useful to you for that period, and you may mutually feel that works for you both.
There is nothing wrong in being clear with one another that that is the intention, and that the motivation for that person may be to move on at that stage. If you have gained from their presence in your team, and helped them to leave with positive thoughts about your organisation and your team, and as an ambassador, then you could see that as much as a success as in retaining someone unhappy in their working relationship.
Some final thoughts
Working in-house provides one of the most interesting and fulfilling roles a lawyer can have. Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of that if people don’t feel valued. In many organisations, you can make a real difference by motivating your staff, and it’s well worth the effort. If you are considering thinking along these lines, there are some CLL resources you may like to refer to below.
Some further resources
CLL Resources
How to I keep my team engaged and inspired?
How can in-house teams create an effective development and retention programme?
Non-legal career roles for in-house lawyers
I’m in mid-career – should I move organisations to progress?