Fearless — A Required State of Being

The global legal services market needs optimistic contrarians: strong people who think fast and clearly, and whose actions are decisive and fearless.

The legal services sector has always had a reputation for being tough. It’s getting tougher by the minute and unlikely to let up.

While disruptive factors are many, the three most daunting are:

• Accelerating advances in generative artificial intelligence that are usurping service-oriented tasks and upending how various types of legal work get produced and priced – all of which is impacting traditional law firm pyramid structures
• A tightening world economy teetering on the brink of recession
• International upheaval created and caused by the current United States administration 

It may be trite to say that “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” but that is exactly what must happen. And because it must happen right now, being fearless isn’t a trait that’s nice to have; it’s mandatory.

Business of Law

“Business of law” means understanding that you’re running a business, not a private members club. However, business of law recently seems to be misinterpreted as perverse or insulting to legal as a profession. It’s not.

Business of law is not based on personal compensation or greed. It recognizes that prudent selection of targeted services, clients, colleagues and collaborators as well as astute financial and operational structures enables successful commerce.

For example, it means that a senior partner who for many years helping clients run their businesses and to my horror asked, “What does variance mean?” will understand its meaning and context along with other financial terms and purposes and apply them to legal practice and the running of a law firm as a business.

Business of law does not mean perversion of legal practice or anything close to it. This includes a recent notion that alludes to capitulating to outside demands and selling out your firm, clients, and selves, which can happen when a law firm is run as a private and privileged club.

Private club mentality with its tendency for overinflated reputation and inefficient operation can lead to instances of mental, physical, and spiritual health issues and accompanying heartbreak, all of which can result in eventual law firm failures, acquisitions, and mergers.

Selling your soul hurts.

Pyramid Rollover

The Internet changed the world. AI is flattening it. Therefore, it’s fair to expect disintegration of the traditional law firm pyramid structure as a result of the triple-threat of genAI, pricing, and continuing transience of the legal sector’s workforce.

AI-enabled tasks are well-suited to be volume-produced and commodity-priced at a firm’s lowest operating levels. Clients, who are also adopting AI, know how this works and are pressuring external counsel to reflect faster speed and lower cost in transactional pieces of their outsourced legal work.

The upshot of AI replacing junior talent most often tasked with rote work—for which clients often refuse to pay—will result in the lowest tiers being lopped off traditionally-structured firms. Juniors that remain are likely to experience higher than ever stress levels, which is apt to result in increased health care claims and departures.

The knock-on effect is that mid-level lawyers won’t have supports that they’re used to but will still be expected to self-sustain and bring in new business. At the top levels, senior lawyers who can retire will do so, leaving those who don’t or can’t retire holding both the firm’s responsibilities and purse strings in fewer hands.

The end result for many of these firms will either be structural cave-ins due to overweighed equity at the top, a compromised centre, and weak support at the bottom—think reverse pyramid—or rollovers that upend the firm like an iceberg when its weight distribution changes.

The former will be collapse and the latter will be disguised as a merger. A number of mega mergers among big and global firms happened last year. Expect this to continue especially in light of capitulation currently happening within the BigLaw tier of firms in the United States.

Selling Souls

A steadily increasing number of U.S. BigLaw firms are under fire from the American president for having ties to his designated enemies or being in his personal and professional bad books. The list has grown daily since March but kicked off with executive orders against Perkins Coie, Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, Jenner & Block, and WilmerHale with security clearances being pulled for specific lawyers at Covington & Burling.

Three of those four are suing. However, notable among them is Paul Weiss that dishonourably distinguished itself as the first U.S. BigLaw firm to commit the equivalent of harikari by caving in to the U.S. administration’s threats and demands, and agreeing to a deal in order to save itself from defections of clients, talent, and potential loss of new business.

Paul Weiss was quickly followed by a succession of BigLaw firms, including Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, Milbank, and more that rather than risk potential of an overall decline in profits chose to fall on their swords and cough up big bucks—headed toward $1-billion at last count—in so-called “pro bono” legal services supporting causes favoured by the president that, according to him, will be used as a kind of slush fund to finance negotiations of tariffs with other countries and support U.S. coal mining. That’s not pro bono, it’s extortion.

Every bit as pathetic are firms in the process of capitulating or that have capitulated proactively. It’s a damn good bet that history will not kindly remember these firms and their selling-out actions, and neither will they be well-regarded in future.

This disgrace is not lost on clients, never mind talent at all levels who you just know will jump ship as soon as possible. Some already have, more are, and others are doing so pre-emptively.

Recruitment is taking a hit as students at top U.S. law schools withdraw applications for summer articling positions and cancellations have happened at on-campus recruiting events. Students say that even though they’re facing crippling debt financing their studies, they’re not looking to sacrifice their moral values.

As for clients, lists are circulating of 500 U.S.-based law firms—none of whom are among the country’s 25 largest—that have pledged to stand fast against authoritarian actions of the American administration. This list may aid corporate counsel and others wishing to spring-clean their external law firm rosters.

Reputation Damage

Law firms that have acted against the current U.S. president—or who he thinks have acted against him—are being punished by cuts to security clearance, reduced access to federal buildings, and the threat of loss of their and their clients’ federal contracts.

Capitulating firms have caused damage to themselves as well as to those who work for and with them. That’s because this witch hunt is apt to extend to entities and individuals with whom these firms do business even if relationships are at arm’s length or in cross-border jurisdictions.

Capitulation is the result of fear and cowardice around possible ramifications that may or may not happen. It is why administrative actions are happening at a dizzying speed in order to keep a trumped-up class of “evil doers” on their back foot. This is also why it is telling that while 500 U.S. law firms joined an amicus brief backing Perkins Coie, only eight of the 100 largest U.S. firms signed on while the country’s major players did not. 

Muzzling the media and creating insecurities around free speech, undercutting universities and other educational forums, and hobbling the judiciary and challenging the legal system to the point of compromise—some of whom surrender before or at the opening shot—are symptoms of how an empire dies.

Why anyone—American or otherwise—is shocked at this blatant display of authoritarianism is a mystery. People will tell you who they are. Believe them. The current American president has been in the role before and, for decades, has told the world who he is. Yet more than half of Americans actively voted him back into office or inactively sat back and watched it happen.

Former U.S. president, Barack Obama, criticized actions being taken against American law firms and universities. He encouraged taking a stand, saying: “We’re at one of those moments where it’s not enough to say you’re for something. You may actually have to do something and possibly sacrifice a little bit. So, if you’re a law firm being threatened, you might have to say, ‘Okay, we will lose some business because we’re going to stand for a principle.’“

And therein lies the crux of the problem. Core principles for many law firms are two-fold: finance and fragility. Many firms operate according to pocketbook principles where they are effectively enslaved by their own success as well as trapped by financial aspirations of higher year-over-year revenue targets and expectations of profit per partner (PPP) payouts. Combine this with the very real factor of law firm fragility that belies powerhouse facades and swaggering behaviour. Barnacle-like adherence to pocketbook principles is often a major factor of law firm failure.

We are seeing the ugliness of pocketbook principles play out before our very eyes every day right now and it is a horrendous spectacle for everyone concerned.

Getting Gutted

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are also being impacted in North American markets, legal and otherwise. While dismantling of DEI programs began in the U.S., this tactic is creeping into Canada, Europe and globally.

Twenty U.S. law firms being questioned by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are planning to refuse to hand over information pertaining to their client’s diversity initiatives due to concerns over confidentiality. That they’re even being asked is a Big Brother tactic straight out of George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four where “Big Brother is watching you” is a stark reminder of oppressive surveillance and control exerted by the government. In the novel, the state is fictional. In our world, it’s real.

DEI is a critical component of positioning in the modern global legal services market. This is because, historically, traditional law firm talent and, oftentimes, leadership has tended to favour those who are male, pale, stale, and straight. DEI programs and processes are designed to enable remedies for change by removing measurements and influences of the past along with personal and professional bias.

By choosing DEI action or inaction, law firms signal and adopt both a market position and corporate reputation for which they are judged by clients and talent, current and prospective.

There are firms in Canada and elsewhere that are stalwart in their support of DEI as a foundational pillar of strong business. In contrast, half-action, throttling back or program pausing isn’t the choice of champions regardless of market pressures, and whether any of those pressures are real or perceived, or convenient and invented.

Powerful Quitting

Never suffer in silence. That was advice given to me many years ago by the founder of a company with whom I worked for a very short time in a role where I hated every single second and yet was determined to power through. Her advice resulted in my immediate resignation and departure. Both of us were happier because we gained freedom: me to  pursue other interests and she to find my replacement.

“Hire slow; fire fast” is a management adage that also works. I know this from managing both small and large teams in legal and corporate settings. I also fired myself thrice before the age of 40 from roles where the fit turned out to be uncomfortable to the point of just plain wrong, and personal and professional principles became unaligned to the point of painful. Each time, I sensed trouble in the first half-day, was gone in three, and every departure was a gift I gave myself.  

The key to leaving well is to depart with grace and, most importantly, walk out with your head up. Life is too short to feel trapped and be unhappy. Quitting for right reasons is liberating. No one will die and you will be fine. In fact, you’ll be better than fine. I was, still am, and have never been happier.

Optimistic Contrarians

Confidence is the belief in your capabilities and how you convert them into actions. It is also about your capacity to overcome challenges. Confidence is the core of fearlessness. Fearlessness is mandatory and will be for the foreseeable future as life in legal becomes tougher to navigate, never mind survive and, hopefully, thrive.

The hijacking of the U.S. legal services market and its global repercussions means that legions of legal and professional talent at all levels worldwide as well as a myriad of clients must remain clear-eyed and thinking long-term. Closing your eyes and ears to this craziness will not make it go away. Most importantly, actions must happen swiftly and decisively before continuation of asinine authoritarian, frenetically oscillating, and schizophrenic behaviour becomes a new normal.

The world needs optimistic contrarians: strong people who think fast and clearly, and whose actions are decisive and fearless. Each of us is much more influential than we think and one hundred times more powerful than we believe ourselves to be. That power must be united, harnessed, and used for good.

We also need to retain our senses of humour and the ridiculous. Forty years ago, my mother overheard two men—one a sober whippersnapper, the other an inebriated knight of the road—in heated conversation outside a Toronto grocery store. The sober whippersnapper said, “If you didn’t drink, you wouldn’t be in the state you’re in.” The inebriated knight snapped back, “Whadaya mean ‘what state I’m in’; I’m in Canada.”

Humour in dark situations can be lifesaving and bridge-building. Even so, I’ve been described as fearless for as long as I can remember. That’s because for me being fearful is both a waste of time and depletion of energy. The power of fearlessness is best put to use working alongside others to find and execute improvement solutions for those I love, like, live and work with, and may never even know.

Professionally, I don’t have a dog in this fight. Personally, as a proud Canadian wrapped in the flag, I have a country. Like all those threatened by bullying behaviour—within the legal sector and in general—I am, and we are, fearless.

We will remain so. Bring it.