The cats fall in line

For an avowedly conservative profession, attitudes can change at a fair old pace in law. Diversity, race, corporate social responsibility – these are all issues where there has been a palpable shift in sentiment over recent years.

But on the less emotive issue of leadership there has been an even more radical change, according to a recent Big Question survey, which found the once widespread distrust and resentment of managing partners has all but disappeared.

The results speak for themselves. Eighty-five percent of respondents judged effective leadership to be ‘very important’ to the success of a commercial law firm, while not a single respondent out of more than 150 partners judged it to not matter.

Respondents also believe that there has been a substantial shift among partners’ general attitudes in favour of valuing leadership. And asked to judge the role of management at three upwardly-mobile law firms – Linklaters, DLA Piper and Ashurst – no less than 90% cited the role of their executive teams as a major force in their successes.

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, it’s hard to convey to a general observers what a dramatic change of attitude that is among partners at the coalface in a short space of time. Once, the level of resistance to all things management was so entrenched in law that it gave rise to its own cliche: herding cats.

For one exhausted managing partner who, upon retiring from the law, felt the feline phrase didn’t go nearly far enough. He described the chore of trying to manage partners as more like “pushing a wheelbarrow of frogs uphill”.

Yet apparently such attitudes are rapidly becoming a thing of the past; certainly, it is extremely rare for a Big Question poll to come down so clearly on one side of the argument.

The poll also finds something else interesting: partners not only rate management in general, but they have especially high regard for their own firm’s management, with 46% of respondents rating their firm’s management as ‘good’ while a further 26% judged it to be ‘excellent’. There are not many industries that could claim to have achieved anything like that alignment between shareholders and management.

Not that there’s much mystery as to this rapid conversion. Recent years have shown well-managed law firms repeatedly outperforming those lumbered with less talented executive teams.

What will be interesting now is where these attitudes take the profession. Once radicalism on the part of management was largely stamped out by the struggle to get partnerships to agree to anything. Now, in the age of global competition and the Legal Services Act, some managing partner is going to want to do something (forgive the jargon) miles outside of the box. And the odds that they will be allowed to follow through have risen dramatically.