As I drove home from my morning Starbucks run, I was listening to an NPR story about the auto industry. One President of Local Union in Pontiac, Michigan was saying that his local used to have 20,000 members, but now had only 1800. "We went from counting our overtime hours to wondering whether we would even have a job, all in the space of two months," he said, trying to add emphasis to the precipitous decline in the industry. Hmmmmm. Really? Apparently the entire auto industry, union included, needs to be indicted for being blind to the future.
I grew up in Detroit. Unlike most of my friends and cousins, I was not a child of the auto industry. Perhaps that gave me more of an outsider’s view, but it was clear in the 1970s that the domestic auto industry was heading south. And even if the guys who ran the industry were close enough to retirement that they didn’t want to recognize the coming change, the next generation or the one after that surely should have. The claim of surprise is an admission of lack of vision.
The parallels to the current situation in the legal profession are easy to see. Commentators and others (see Fred Bartlit, for example) have been raising warning flags for years about the coming change in the industry. Some commentators (Richard Susskind comes mind) see so far into the future that it’s not surprising most don’t follow. But others who are on the leading edge of the curve (Gerry Riskin comes to mind) predicted precisely what is happening at a time when firms could have reacted responsibly. Few, if any, did so. And now, like the Local Union President, law firm leaders are claiming surprise. Generally their comments include something about who could have predicted the demise of the capital markets? Fellas (because there are few women who run major firms), the bursting of the housing bubble was being discussed for years as were the ramifications. In your zeal to ride the profits per partner wave just a bit longer, you weren’t listening.
Which brings me to the title of this post. In the legal world, who is accountable? In January 2008, I wrote about attending a leadership meeting with managing partners of some of the largest firms in the country. No one was preparing for what happened. Even this summer during the run-up to the ACC Value Challenge launch, leaders of major law firms were being dismissive of client concerns about value and cost. The arrogance was stunning. But not as stunning as the blindness to the economic fall-off.
There have been many stories about lay-offs, the large law firm euphemism for terminations. Strange, though, that there have been few stories about Managing Partners being laid off. Indeed, only Cadwalader comes to mind. Seems to me, though, that partners ought to hold someone to account. The essential traits of leadership are vision and accountability. Both seem to be in short supply in our industry.