March 1, 2007
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ALA Currents is a free newsletter about management trends and innovations
provided exclusively upon request to members of the Association of Legal Administrators.
News & Views
WELLNESS IN THE WORKPLACE
According to a recent study by Principal Financial Group, employee wellness is on the rise.
The Principal Financial Well Being Index revealed that, in the past year, fitness facility
use has nearly doubled, with 60 percent of employees taking advantage of this benefit when
it is offered. A whopping 79 percent of employees participate in on-site health screenings, and
65 percent have implemented personalized action plans for high-risk conditions, up from 45
percent in 2005.
Implementing wellness programs can greatly benefit employers. For instance:
- 52 percent of employees say wellness programs offered through their employers
encourage them to work harder and perform better.
- 54 percent say having wellness programs in place makes them want to stay longer
with their current employers.
Employee advantages were even greater:
- 58 percent say they and their families would benefit the most financially from
wellness programs.
- 38 percent cited reduced personal health costs as one reason they would be
willing to sign up for a wellness program.
- 61 percent believe employer-sponsored wellness programs can be successful
in combating rising health-care costs.
The Principal Financial Well-Being Index is a quarterly study to identify
trends in consumer financial well-being, retirement planning, employee benefits, and
workplace trends. For more information, visit Principal Financial Group.
THE WAR FOR TALENT AND STARTING SALARIES
This article was developed especially for this issue of ALA Currents and is copyrighted by
Altman Weil Inc. For more information, visit Altman Weil’s Web site.
By Ward Bower
wbower@altmanweil.com
Starting salaries for new law school graduates approach $150,000 in large firms in some
U.S. cities, resulting in fully loaded compensation in the range of $180,000 to $200,000.
Combined with the per-lawyer overhead in large, big-city firms, the total cost of a new associate
is approximately $400,000 per year. How can this be justified? Quite simply, by the intense
competition for top graduates of top law schools.
Consider the numbers. There are approximately 40,000 new law school graduates annually,
as there have been in each of the past 20 years. That number is not expected to increase
substantially in the near future. But, according to U.S. News & World Report, the top 20 law schools
average 340 students per graduating class.
Thus, the top 10 percent to 20 percent of the graduating classes of the top 20 law schools
equates to roughly 700 to 1,400 students. On the buyer side, the top 20 law firms (AmLaw 100)
average 105 new hires per firm, according to the NALP Directory of Law Schools, – for a total of
2,100 – 1.5 to two times the cohort of graduates in the targeted range. Supply/demand imbalance
clearly is a problem.
On a larger scale, we can compute that the 216 law schools in the United States producing the
40,000 new graduates average just fewer than 200 graduates per class. If the AmLaw 200 firms
hire an average of 50 new grads each (half the class size of the top 20 firms), they are hiring
10,000 new lawyers (25 percent of the total pool). Thus, even if the targeted law schools are
expanded to include the top 100 schools, AmLaw 200 firms will hire approximately 50 percent of
their graduates, hardly the level of selectivity most profess to seek. That is the reason starting
salaries have escalated – to attract the better credentialed of that group.
Even without growth in the size of top law firm recruiting classes, starting salary
increases can be expected in an attempt to deal with the supply deficiency. But the significant
growth in the size of large law firms, driven by the current rate of 50 law firm mergers a year, is
likely to increase the size of recruiting classes, exacerbating the supply/demand imbalance and
adding upward pressures on salaries.
The beneficiaries of this phenomenon are clearly law students at top schools who rank lower in
their classes, as well as top graduates of law schools not currently ranked in the top dozen or two
national schools. Better ranked regional and local schools also can be expected to benefit. Anecdotally,
some law firms have been pleasantly surprised by the performance of some new hires from the top
of their class at “lesser” law schools.
What long-term effects will this phenomenon have? Creation of new law schools? Expansion of
class sizes in existing institutions? Or, will law firms continue to react to the supply/demand equation
by pushing starting salaries even higher? Currently, there may be no other choice.
Management Innovations
BACKLASH BUILDING AGAINST “CONTINUOUS PARTIAL ATTENTION” SYNDROME
Linda Stone, a former executive with Apple and Microsoft, notes that “continuous partial attention” is
becoming a way of life, thanks to the myriad handheld electronic distractions that govern many of our
waking moments. Stone notes that although continuous partial attention sounds a lot like multitasking,
it springs from a different impulse: “When we multitask, we are trying to be more productive and more
efficient, giving equal priority to all the things we do. ... Multitasking rarely requires much cognitive
processing, because the tasks involved are fairly automatic. Continuous partial attention, by contrast,
involves constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events and activities in an
effort to miss nothing. It’s an adaptive behavior that has emerged over the past two decades … and it
connects us to a galaxy of possibilities all day every day. The assumption behind the behavior is that
personal bandwidth can match the endless bandwidth technology offers.”
Stone notes that while the phenomenon in itself is neither good nor bad, in excess it can cause harm.
A study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard found that people who attempted to respond to a barrage of
messages all day while working experienced a temporary 10-point IQ drop over a day’s time. Stone
concludes that a backlash against “the tyranny of tantalizing choices” is developing, leading people to
embrace technologies like TiVo or refuges like yoga and “quiet cars” that protect against information
overload. “As businesses respond to this backlash … they can differentiate themselves by offering what
their employees and customers increasingly crave: discriminating choices and quality of life.”
Harvard Business Review, February 2007
PRIVATE INFO, PUBLIC INTERNET
Few people stop to think about the implications of their personal information zipping around
the Internet – especially information that might be considered intimate or private.
University of Buffalo Assistant Communications Professor Michael Stefanone points out that Google,
for example, logs and saves copies of all the information it encounters each month.
“Never send an e-mail you wouldn’t want to be seen on the front page of The New York Times,”
suggests Stefanone, who teaches a graduate seminar on Privacy in the Information Age.
A wealth of personal data is also generated through common electronic transactions like credit
card purchases and toll-booth scans, and all contribute to the store of your personal data others
can mine for their own purposes. But it’s not just about marketing. Could health-care providers increase
your insurance premiums, for example, if your credit transactions reveal a lot of fast-food purchases? The
intersection between computers and humans isn’t all threatening, Stefanone says. He cites a project that
used handheld mobile devices to enhance museum tours. Infrared scanners in the wireless devices
detected artwork as patrons walked by, bringing up instant background info. Visitors could also tag certain
works as favorites and have more information about the art e-mailed to them.
University of Buffalo Reporter, February 1, 2007
Building Buy-In
RETURN ON IDEA
By Paul Trout
Have you ever considered the return on investment (ROI) of an internal decision? It’s tough to do so,
partially because no money is being exchanged.
Marc Lemieux, Director of Global Accounts at Alcan Packaging in Montréal, Québec, Canada, recently
discussed the differences between building buy-in internally and closing sales externally and why he believes
that, within companies, the term “ROI” should stand for “Return on Idea.”
Q: Tell me about your role at Alcan Packaging.
A: My role is to coordinate our customer strategy with sales leaders
across seven business units. None of them report to me; the difficulty I face
is each reports to a different individual!
Q: How do you see the differences between selling externally vs. building buy-in internally?
A: In any sales situation, there are always two angles that you need to consider. First, there’s
the rational side. On this side, you need to understand the rationale and logic in buying something and
understand the value proposition. Secondly, there’s the emotional side, which is addressing what
personal need the purchase is fulfilling. Selling is always a mix of the two. To succeed in closing, you
must address both issues.
Q: How would you go about uncovering both the rational and emotional sides?
A: Internally, the emotional side comes into play more because it’s all about the question, “what’s in it for me?”
Getting buy-in internally is more difficult than selling to a customer because it’s all about the
emotional side. Internally, people will consider questions such as:
- “What’s in it for me?”
- “What are the risks?”
- “How am I going to look?”
- “What will this decision do to my position and my status?”
You really have to make sure that you’ve answered all of these questions to
understand the emotional side of buy-in. If you don’t address these issues, it’s
unlikely anyone will take a risk with your idea, partially because of the higher visibility
of decisions and politics. In every company, people are ambitious, so visibility and
politics become key decision points.
Q: Selling externally is an easier sell than getting buy-in internally. Why?
A: In external selling, the rational side will play a bigger role in the decision than the
emotional side. You still need to touch on the emotional side, but for whatever reason
customers will accept change better because buying something from the outside usually
makes an impact on the organization, rather than an individual.
By contrast, when people buy-in internally to a decision, there’s more of an impact
on an individual versus the organization. Individuals often don’t want to change, so they
push back.
Q: Is that because when you’re selling internally there’s more of an exchange of
ideas and externally there’s an exchange of money?
A: Yes. In external selling, the ROI relates to a financial transaction, so you can
quantify the benefits. On the internal side, a lot of the decision criteria are intangibles.
When selling intangibles, it’s hard to define the ROI, and that’s why the decision-making
criteria are more focused on “what’s in it for me and how is it going to improve my situation?”
Q: If ROI stands for “Return on Investment” externally, maybe ROI could stand for “Return on Idea” internally.
A: That’s exactly it.
Q: If you were looking to quantify “Return on Idea,” what criteria would you use when seeking buy-in?
A: At the initial stage, I would want to know where each decision-maker and influencer
wants to take his or her career. I’d ask myself: What are their aspirations? Once I understand that,
I can relate my idea to them and say, “this is how my idea will impact your career and where you
want to go.” So, a lot of it is what’s in it for the individual.
Q: What if you find that you can’t identify what’s in it for someone else?
A: I haven’t come across a situation where there isn’t anything for anyone. There’s always
something for someone.
Q: When thinking of the savviest building-buy in person you know, what characteristics does he/she possess?
A: I would say it’s caring. It’s making sure people continue to feel good about a decision by showing
you care that it’s meeting or exceeding their expectations. The whole issue of following up and making
sure that what you’ve said is really happening is important.
Internal credibility is absolutely key because when you say, “this will be the impact,” you want
them to believe you. Those who are making an internal decision then are more likely to say, “I
believe him because he has a great track record.” Internally, people will hold you highly accountable
for your idea.
Q: What are the characteristics of the best external salesperson you’ve ever met?
A: There’s one individual that comes into mind. He could understand human nature quickly.
He could also create a strong business case. He was also very persistent. It’s interesting because
that person was by far the best salesperson in the organization and yet, when he was put in an
internal management position, he had a difficult time.
Q: Why?
A: Because he took a rational perspective instead of an emotional one. He was too persistent.
He wasn’t patient. He couldn’t see that internal buy-in was achieved differently than closing a sale
externally. He couldn’t understand the resistance to change because he couldn’t understand others’
personal motives. You would think because of his great selling abilities externally, he could do well on
the inside, but he came across as arrogant.
Q: It sounds like he was persistent to the point of being annoying.
A: Exactly. The other thing is that a lot of good external salespeople want to work on their own;
they have their own agendas. If you put them in a team, they’re less effective.
Internally, there’s more of a team environment. If you look at great leaders within companies,
they value the team. They usually give people a lot of space and empowerment; people will always
want to work for these leaders because they give a lot of freedom of action. They grow as individuals
because their leaders find ways to help them succeed both internally and externally.
Paul Trout is a Partner with Akina – a firm that helps clients improve their sales, marketing,
and leadership effectiveness. This column is an excerpt from a book he is writing on Building Buy-In.
He encourages readers to submit case studies, learnings, or questions about Building Buy-In, which
may become part of the book and appear in a future column. Contact him via
e-mail or by phone at (312) 224-8028.
Peer Points
ALA Management SolutionsSM is a free service provided as an ALA
membership benefit. The professionals who staff this help desk explore resources
and share information about hot law-office management topics like the one addressed
here. If you have a question, call ALA Management SolutionsSM at (847)
267-1252 or e-mail infocentral@alanet.org.
SECURITY MEASURES FOR LAW FIRMS
Recent headlines about a deadly law firm shooting in Chicago have left many
administrators wondering if their law firm spaces are vulnerable to intrusion by
dissatisfied clients, disgruntled former employees, or even strangers with malicious
intent. Is the security guard in the high-rise lobby a sufficient deterrent to those
seeking to steal the firm’s computer equipment or harm firm personnel? What
measures can you take to keep your firm’s people and physical assets safe?
This study focused on what can be done to improve the physical security of
a law firm’s office space, not on preventing incidents of violence. To read more
about those issues, please request the study
“Violence in the Law Office Workplace.”
Two aspects of workplace security are critical: protecting people’s lives and protecting
their work (or data). As more people spend significant parts of their lives in office buildings,
and as businesses continue to accommodate their resources (employees and information)
in such buildings, keeping their assets safe becomes a major concern. In modern office buildings
with open floor plans, well-planned security is a necessity.
According to the Survey of
Workplace Violence Prevention published by the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of
Labor Statistics, 72 percent of business establishments have at least one form of building security.
Possible forms of security include security staff, physical security such as locked doors, and electronic
security such as metal detectors. Availability of security is reported as follows:
- 52 percent of all establishments have a form of electronic surveillance (alarms, cameras, motion detectors).
- More than 86 percent do not have security staff.
- 31 percent have limited or controlled access (secured entries, locked doors) during
workplace hours; availability of such measures increases with the number of employees.
- In at least 52 percent of the largest establishments (1,000+ workers), available
security includes visitor registration or check-in, employee ID verification, or photographic
screening. More than one-third of those establishments reported the authority to arrest
and/or detain for police arrival, and the authority to seize weapons.
If the office building provides a parking lot or garage, be aware that these areas are
common targets for criminals, particularly if they are enclosed. While the risk of criminal
activity cannot be completely eliminated, good lighting and obvious camera systems
(monitored in real time, not just for recording purposes) can reduce the chance that a
crime will take place. If possible, stairwells should be open or glassed-in to eliminate
potential hiding places. Emergency “help” buttons should be clearly marked and easily
accessible.
The lobby security desk with a sign-in sheet cannot be viewed as anything but
window dressing, although it may deter someone casually looking for possible victims.
A guard conspicuously monitoring a bank of security cameras is better, but that system
can be thwarted by an intruder intent on breaking into your space. Electronic key cards
for doors, elevators, etc. work well, so long as only authorized persons have access to
them.
No matter what forms of security a building management company may offer, law
firms should consider taking additional steps to ensure the safety of their people, work
product, and equipment. The fact that someone has passed through the security features
in the building lobby does not mean that he or she is no threat to your business, or is
welcome in your office space.
Tenant suite security systems can be installed to deter and/or detect intruders. These
systems may include:
- electronic card readers (for entrance to the suite itself, or to specific areas such as the
computer room),
- electronic locks wired to the alarm system,
- intrusion detectors around the perimeter areas,
- reception desk panic buttons (silent alarms), and
- alarm sirens in the firm’s lobby/reception area.
In large offices with multiple floors, and in firms with multiple offices, it may be preferable
to outsource security operations; this allows for continuous, round-the-clock monitoring of the
firm space and allows a firm to benefit from consistent security standards. Having an outside
provider also allows the firm to easily upgrade its security measures.
No matter what form of building and/or suite security is available to a law firm, many
methods exist to help protect its people and physical resources – and the most important
methods involve vigilance by attorneys and staff.
- Know who belongs in your space; confront strangers and (politely) ask how you may
direct them. Notify security or police immediately if someone refuses to leave or causes a
disturbance.
- Have the reception area staffed continuously during office hours.
- Do not permit clients, repair persons (check for ID first) or visitors to walk through the firm without an escort.
- Keep valuables out of sight, in a locked drawer if possible; do not discuss how much cash you are carrying or
storing; keep petty cash and blank checks in the office safe.
- Keep good records on all keys to the firm’s space. Make sure to collect keys and key cards from terminating
personnel, and change locks if keys are missing.
- Report malfunctioning or broken locks and other security features to management immediately.
- Make sure alarms are activated at day’s end, and check storage rooms and restrooms for hidden persons before locking up.
- Outside of normal business hours, be wary of unknown persons trying to follow you into the building; ask them to
use the security phone for assistance.
- Walk away from any elevator if it is occupied by a suspicious-looking person, particularly at night or on weekends.
- Engrave firm property with the tax ID number or other identification.
The ALA Legal Management Resource Center (LMRC) has
several articles from associations, consulting firms and government agencies, as well as ALA sources on facilities
management, including site and building security. Be sure to log in using your ALA username and password for
access to all ALA members-only materials. Review the materials in the Facilities Management Content Area, in
the subfolders for “Health Safety & Environment.”
Special Note: ALA members have free access to the ALA Reference Desk. Send any question on legal
management issues to infocentral@alanet.org. Staff will conduct
personal research on each question.
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