In his new book Failing Law Schools, Washington University law professor Brian Tamanaha cites a remarkable statistic. American law schools, he reports, produce 45,000 new graduates each year; but recruiters expect only 25,000 job openings annually through 2018. Leave aside for a moment the implications of this mismatch for the legal education industry: what should your law firm do with this information?

The traditional response would have you rubbing your hands in anticipation: a glutted market oversupplied with new associates should drive down starting lawyer salaries for years to come. More likely, however, this imbalance will soon self-correct with smaller classes and fewer law schools; and in any event, first-year associate compensation hardly follows normal market rules. The larger question is: why are you still recruiting from law schools at all?

The base of the law firm pyramid is constantly narrowing, with leverage now down to about 1-to-1 in the AmLaw 200. More work formerly performed by associates is flying out the door to temp agencies, contract lawyers, legal process outsourcers, and other low-cost providers. Most studies of lawyer profitability suggest that associates don't break into the black until their third year of practice. Given all that and more, why are you still placing so many orders with the nation's lawyer factories?

It's time to rethink your approach to new lawyer recruitment. If you want competent lawyers to perform lower-level work, the market is already flooded with them. If you want future partners and leaders, it's virtually impossible to detect them in second-year law school anyway. Here are some brief suggestions for doing things differently:

• Identify a handful of schools whose curriculum, standards and philosophy you like and restrict your recruitment there.
• Limit your incoming first-year class to less than half its current total; break the habit of over-buying associates to reduce your risk.
• Position your firm as a highly exclusive recruiter: you don't hire many associates, but those you do will enter and remain on the partner track.
• Recruit for much more than grades: learn to identify candidates with business experience, emotional intelligence, leadership skills, cultural fluency, etc.
• Design a leadership and business development program tailored to your culture and business, a Partnership Academy within your firm.
• Focus on undervalued assets: experienced lawyers ready to flourish into champions. Big-name partners have already peaked; look for tomorrow's stars, not today's.

The standard objection is that without heavy first-year recruitment, where will tomorrow's lawyers get the experience they need? With respect, that's not your problem: your job is to build a streamlined powerhouse leadership team for the 2010s and 2020s. And in any event, law schools, which continue to defiantly ignore your market needs, will never change their behavior unless you change yours first.  Contact the Author, Jordan Furlong.

As consolidation reduces the universe of available merger partners, waiting for the perfect candidate may take a long time. There are times when a "fixer upper" - a firm without direction or that has profitability problems - may represent an appropriate opportunity for a growth oriented firm that has its act together.

I fear that some, otherwise rational, law firms have lost their sense of reality when they consider merger partners. Late last year I received a call from a nice 200 lawyer Midwestern firm seeking to do a merger in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. Their criteria for firms they would consider was that the firm could not be larger than 100 lawyers, had to have profitability at least at the same level as theirs - preferably higher- and had to be willing to "be acquired" (adopt the Midwestern firm's name and compensation system). Oh, and the candidates should have a strong corporate practice representing publically held companies. Sure - and I want to marry a Victoria's Secret model.

According to an old golf story, Byron Nelson and Sam Snead were standing on a driving range watching two amateur golfers practice. Both of the amateurs were 10 handicapers, but one had a beautiful golf swing that was virtually perfect in form. The other's was an ugly swing with all sorts of hitches and faults. Snead said to Nelson, "Boy, if I could only work with that guy, I could get him to be a scratch handicap in a week." "You mean the one with the nice swing?" asked Nelson. "Nah," replied Snead. "If he's only a 10 with that swing, he's as good as he will likely ever be. But just think of what I could make out of the guy with the ugly swing."

The moral is pretty simple. If you are a law firm that has sound management, reasonably strong practices and a partnership that supports continuous improvement, you may be able to negotiate an attractive merger deal with a firm that has some problems. Of course, you have to be able to make some objective business evaluations of the value of the practice strengths of potential merger partners, their culture's willingness to accept change and your ability to mitigate risk in doing the merger.

But, with some vision, taking on a firm with an ugly swing could provide your firm with quick access to geographic and practice markets that would otherwise take years to develop. Contact the Author, Ed Wesemann.

Managing time in a law firm isn't only about billable and non-billable hours - it is about creating a dashboard that allows lawyers to elegantly drive client expectations relating to time-frames and costing.

The sad state of time tracking in law firms.

I asked Todd Gerstein of Smart WebParts (www.smart-webparts.com) what his latest data on this subject looked like... he said: "Less than 40% of all timekeepers keep their time contemporaneously; the silent majority (60%) reconstruct their time when they prepare their timesheets."  He went on to say: "The compliance numbers are just terrible.  Most of the time 80% of the partners are not in compliance.  Associates are not  in compliance 35-45% of the time."

Todd said this about Month End Cut-Off:  "We measure the amount of time that is put in after the month end cutoff... which is at risk for billing and collection realization problems.  It is not uncommon to find 5-7% of time (wip value) at risk to miss the billing cycle.  It also seems to be one of the issues that sets off managing partners."  

Ramifications:

If the loss of inventory is not bad enough (cash in the door),  there is a much greater and more sinister ramification of the messy and inadequate timekeeping practices. In this modern era of Legal Project Management, it is imperative that lawyers who lead teams understand on a daily basis where their projects stand in the context of two vital metrics:

Time to completion as compared to the client's timeline expectation, and

Cost to completion as compared to the client's budgetary expectation.

Destroying the Client Relationship

The ability to communicate variances and projections with clients on an ongoing basis affords the law firm its greatest opportunity to maintain high levels of client satisfaction,  and from time to time, to obtain variances with the client's blessing.  Most law firm lawyers do not have a dashboard.  They fly blind.  The failure to accurately track time distorts the picture and ultimately annoys the client.

Recommended Steps:

1. Stop the theft now: Stop tolerating sloppy time recording practices by individuals.  It is not charmingly idiosyncratic: it is theft, theft from the individual timekeeper, theft from the firm, and yes, even theft from the client who deserves accurate information.
2. Provide the best tools and technology: Todd Gerstein's system puts your existing systems to work for you making the time tracking process easier and more accurate.  If you have a better way fine... but you need to compensate for the human foibles that make the current processes inadequate.
3. Train: Tracking time well is an essential skill... help your people acquire and improve that skill.
4. Keep the client in the equation: Time tracking is not only for your internal management... it is also for the benefit of your clients who are happy to pay money for value but hate surprises.  Create systems that make it glaringly obvious when your lawyers are not tracking their time accurately. 

For more information about our legal project management capabilities, resources available to improve timekeeping, and information about software now under development for top law firms, feel free to contact me.  Contact the Author, Gerry Riskin.