March 15, 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

ROBERT HALF LEGAL IDENTIFIES IN-DEMAND LEGAL JOBS

Increased demand for legal services is fueling steady hiring activity in the legal industry, according to the 2007 Salary Guide from Robert Half Legal, a leading staffing service specializing in positions in the legal field.

“Opportunities abound in a variety of practice areas and industries,” said Charles Volkert, Executive Director of Robert Half Legal. “Corporate governance requirements, new business initiatives, and rising caseloads have increased the demand for skilled, experienced attorneys, paralegals, and support staff. Legal professionals with backgrounds in compliance and regulatory issues, litigation, intellectual property, and real estate are particularly well positioned to take advantage of the current job market.”

Following are five in-demand positions identified by Robert Half Legal in its 2007 Salary Guide:

• Licensed attorneys (5+ years of experience) – Candidates with experience in high-growth practice areas such as corporate transactional law or commercial litigation are highly sought.
• Corporate attorneys – In-house counsel knowledgeable about regulatory and compliance issues are needed by legal departments responding to continuing corporate governance mandates.
• First-year associates – Competition for recent graduates has intensified at large and midsize law firms as they tap an ever-shrinking pool of candidates to bulk up their staffs in response to increasing caseloads.
• Paralegals (3+ years of experience) – The hiring of experienced paralegals is expected to remain strong at midsize and large law firms. As attorneys focus on enhancing revenue and improving client service, paralegals are being called upon to assume tasks such as preparing for trial, conducting in-depth research, and interviewing witnesses and experts for court appearances.
• Legal secretaries – The need for experienced support staff is expected to remain acute as a growing number of professionals retire from the profession and fewer students apply to legal secretarial programs.

The Robert Half Legal 2007 Salary Guide is based on an analysis of the thousands of job orders and placements managed nationwide by account executives with Robert Half Legal.

For more information, visit Robert Half Legal’s Web site.

STUDY: SHORTAGE OF WOMEN IN CORPORATE LEADERSHIP POSITIONS PERSISTS

Catalyst recently released its 2006 Census of Women Corporate Officers, Top Earners, and Directors of the Fortune 500, which reveals the persistent shortage of women in corporate leadership positions. From corporate officers to board directors, women are significantly underrepresented at the highest levels of business, according to the study. The following is a summary of the study’s findings:

Corporate Officers and Top Earners:

• DOWN: Catalyst’s study found that women held just 15.6 percent of Fortune 500 corporate officer positions, down from 16.4 percent in 2005.
• DOWN: The number of companies with three or more women corporate officers decreased.
• STAGNANT: Women are still more than twice as likely to hold staff positions, whereas men hold roughly an equal percentage of line and staff positions. Line position experience is essential to advancement to the highest levels.
• UP: Women in top-paying positions rose to 6.7 percent from 6.4 percent in 2005.

At the current rate of change, it could take women 47 years to reach parity with men as corporate officers of Fortune 500 companies.

Board Directors:

• STAGNANT: The study found that women held only 14.6 percent of all Fortune 500 board seats, compared to 14.7 percent in 2005.
• DOWN: Women of color held only 3.1 percent of director positions in 2006, down from 3.4 percent in 2005.
• DOWN: The number of companies with one or two female board directors decreased. In addition, more companies had no female board directors. (Of note: A greater number of companies had three or more female board directors.)
• UP: The percentage of women who chair nominating/governance and compensation board committees increased to 14.7 percent and 10.0 percent in 2006 from 14.2 percent and 9.0 percent, respectively. (Of note: The number of women who chair audit committees showed a two percentage-point decline, from 10.2 percent in 2005 to 8.2 percent in 2006.)

At the current rate of change, it could take women 73 years to reach parity with men in the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies.

For more information, visit Catalyst’s Web site.

Management Innovations

DEFINING THE FUTURE OF THE WEB

In a recent New York Times column, John Markoff sparked a debate when he suggested that the Web is morphing from “2.0” to “3.0” status. While Web 2.0 was never clearly defined, there’s some consensus in the industry that it focused on several major themes, including AJAX, social networking, folksonomies, lightweight collaboration, social bookmarking, and media sharing. So what’s different about Web 3.0? Tech entrepreneur Nova Spivack says the next phase would see the focus of innovation shifting back toward underlying infrastructure upgrades that ultimately will make the Web more connected, more open, and more intelligent.

Gone will be the “siloed” approach to content repositories, and in its place will be what might be called “the intelligent Web,” which will focus on a third generation of Internet-based services, including the semantic Web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies. The point, says Markoff, will be to “emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.”

KurzweilAI.net, December 18, 2006

DAZZLED BY NEOPHILIA

We are so dazzled by newness that we’ve lost the power of skepticism, indeed of reason itself, author Simon Jenkins says. The result of our neophilia is a grotesque overselling of the new, to the detriment of what is tried and tested. That’s hardly a new phenomenon, of course. “Steam power was hugely expensive in resources and manpower, and for most of its life was probably less efficient than horse power. At sea it wiped out sail long before it could economically and safely replace it.” Jenkins cites other examples, like weapons technology. That “hasn’t transformed warfare, it’s merely wasted stupefying sums of money, while soldiers win or lose by firing rifles.” The computer is not a stunning technological advance, he writes, “just an extension of electronic communication we’ve been using for over a century.” Rather than transforming most people’s lives, he says, the Internet has merely helped us do what we did before – only faster. The reality is, we don’t live in the age of technological revolution at all, he insists.

It’s actually the age of technological stasis – we just don’t realize it. “We watch the future and have stopped watching the present,” he writes. Research and development do not equal economic progress. The idea that civilization must innovate or die is rubbish, he concludes. “Nations are not sharks that must move to breathe.”

Guardian, January 24, 2007

Building Buy-In

EXECUTING IDEAS
By Paul Trout

What compels me to write this column – to communicate my ideas so that an idea within you is sparked? I could be doing something else – or nothing – on this quiet Sunday afternoon. But here I am.

I’m writing because I believe my idea is worth more than “just thinking about doing something about it.” I’ve already told myself that the 49 or so columns that I’ll write over the next two years will be able to be stitched together to create a best-selling book that will help change the way people think about building and cultivating internal business relationships. Admittedly, it’s a grand and bold idea. But instead of letting this “big idea” whirr in my head and heart until it burned itself (or myself) out, I’m executing.

But if I didn’t execute, would my idea still be a good one? Or would it be a bad one? Some would encourage; others would caution. I’d argue strongly that investigating what a good idea is worth by executing against it is a good idea.

In the physical-psychological plane, ideas are electrical energy that manifest themselves as possible solutions to problems. As such, ideas can be motivating, challenging, demanding, and big energy drains if nothing is done about them. After all, who hasn’t had a “good idea” that they’ve sat on, dreamed about, longed for … which still sits unexecuted?

“Good ideas” that are not executed upon or dismissed outright are bad ideas. Anthropologists would argue that all of civilization was built upon humans executing on one another’s ideas. So, it is the action against ideas that is valuable, not the idea itself. Ultimately, the fulfillment or demise of an idea releases energy that can be used to other gains.

Execution begins with ideas, but ideas – in and of themselves – are worthless. That’s why it makes sense to decide in short time frames whether your ideas are ones that you should do something to further investigate or decide to do nothing and let them go so you can move on.

In my opinion, one of the largest “energy drains” in our lives comes through excessive contemplation of ideas. There are three conditions when excessiveness is likely to occur:

1. thinking about doing something you’ve never done;
2. figuring out how to change something you did before; or
3. yearning to move beyond a past failure.

“Wait,” you say, “I have dreams! Thinking about these dreams is what moves me forward!” I don’t question you. Your optimism to get a promotion, live in Maui full time or ‘be happy’ is absolutely great. What I do question is: What are you doing about it? “Energy drains” start when you don’t execute against your dreams. So, move on boldly or do something. Pick.

To assist your decision-making, I’ve identified different factors that should be considered to help you clarify whether you should execute or abandon your idea. Those five factors are: Difficulty, Investment, Value, Options, and Time.

To help you quickly identify the likelihood of acting upon or abandoning latent ideas and reducing the amount of energy drains in your life, I’ve developed “The DIVOT Tool.” In golf, a “divot” is a piece of turf removed by a club when taking a shot. This tool is the club that will create a divot in your mind – loosening the tranquil grounds of your mental fairway, driving you one shot closer to your goal. When filling out the DIVOT Tool, consider answers for both yourself and others.

The following chart is an example of how to use the DIVOT tool by running an idea through it that many managers face within their organizations: hiring a marketing vendor from the outside for help.

DIVOT TOOL

• PROBLEM: Need to market the firm more, but there’s not enough expertise in-house.
• IDEA: Hire an outside marketing vendor to help.
• LIKELIHOOD OF PURSUIT: Probable

Why/Key Issue: Hiring someone full-time will take a lot of money and greater management. Doing nothing isn’t realistic, because I have goals to meet. Compromise: prioritize marketing projects and find the most qualified vendor given my budget (less than full-time employee). Identify projects that will provide high ROI to reassure others.

Next Steps: Send out an e-mail to trusted colleagues asking if they know quality vendors who can assist on specific public relations projects. Contact vendors to qualify.

The DIVOT tool ensures organized thinking, which is the antidote to ideas that are “energy drains.” Using it often will give you a lower handicap and make you much more powerful in the clubhouse.

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.

Caucus Insights

This section features condensed versions of recent discussions in ALA’s Large Firm Administrators Caucus ListServe, which is exclusively for people working in firms with 100 attorneys or more.

THE TOPIC: ‘Key Person’ Insurance Policies

We are re-evaluating our “key-person” accidental death policy that names the firm as beneficiary for all shareholders in the amount of $100,000. The policy is intended to protect the firm from the disruption that the sudden death of a shareholder would cause, but the amount was set some time ago and now may not be sufficient, especially for some of our higher-revenue generating shareholders. Do you have similar coverage on your shareholders/partners? If so, is it for accidental death or life coverage? How do you go about determining the amounts to cover these key people?

SELECTED RESPONSES:

1. Each partner is required to carry a $200,000 life insurance policy, for which he or she names the beneficiary of the death benefit, and the firm owns the cash value. Premiums are paid by the firm and imputed as income to the partner. The policy is portable; if the partner leaves, he or she can take it by paying the cash value to the firm. Or the partner can surrender the policy, and the firm gets cash value. This is a required policy. Other Life and AD&D are available as an option, self-owned, etc.

2. We dropped key-man/death-benefit coverage several years ago and changed it to a life insurance policy owned by the individual but paid by the firm. They name their own beneficiaries and can assign the policies elsewhere if they wish. All partners are insured in an amount equal to their prior year earnings.

3. We have key-person life insurance on all shareholders, and the amount ranges from $100,000 to $1 million determined by the Executive Committee. Amounts are based on judgment and reviewed annually as part of our budgeting process and new shareholder admissions on February 1. New shareholders are at the $100,000 level.

4. We allocated a pool of coverage among the most important partners, calculated as a multiple of annual compensation (which is presumed to reflect contributions to the firm, including business generation client account management). There is no coverage for those below the line (where the determined amount is consumed by coverage for those above it). It’s a strange approach, but it works better than $100,000 each.

5. As we got bigger, we dropped key-man/woman coverage for our shareholders and basically self-insured this risk.

6. We carry such insurance in the amount of the partner’s capital account.

NOTE: Approximately one-half of those responding to this question indicated that their firms do not have/carry such coverage.

ALA’s Legal Management Resource Center (LMRC) also has several articles related to this topic. Click here, to learn more.

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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