Firms send employees back to school

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Business and leadership training seen as a way to boost client service

Lawyering always has meant lifelong learning: keeping up with case law, regulations and statutes, as well as new developments in legal technology and continuing legal education.

Some lawyers, however, have added a new facet to their professional growth. For partners at the state’s three largest Milwaukee-based firms, it’s back-to-school time to learn about what business clients really want and need, to know how to serve them better.

Sharon Abrahams, Foley & Lardner LLP’s national director of professional development, said large law firms across the nation started training partners in business and leadership skills just within the past few years.

She said one of the firms setting the trend was Reed Smith, which partnered with the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business executive division in 2004 to create “Reed Smith University.”

“It’s all because of the new economy, and client demand,” Abrahams explained, noting that the American Association of Corporate Counsel’s “Value Challenge” to the private firms also has fueled the push for more partner education. “It made lawyers say, ‘We need to understand our clients and their businesses better, to serve them better.’”

David Krutz, managing partner at Michael Best & Friedrich LLP, said, “It was really a reaction to the specialization of law. Attorneys are now so focused on one substantive area, which is great and provides a lot of value for clients. But these [programs] allow the attorneys to step back and say, ‘What’s the broader view for the client?’ To help them on the true strategy level, and not just answering legal questions.”

The coursework

Quarles & Brady LLP has followed Reed Smith’s model fairly closely, with 24 partners recently earning certificates in executive management through the firm’s “Partner Development Program.” Quarles collaborated with the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame to develop a customized executive-education program. Over the course of nine months, the attorneys participated in a variety of business, organizational development and leadership courses.

Meanwhile, at Michael Best, a handful of new partners annually participate in a weeklong, intensive “Foundation Management Program,” Krutz said. The course is taught by the firm’s network, Lex Mundi. They concentrate on the business side of law and the responsibilities partnership brings.

In addition, every year for the past seven years, about a dozen Michael Best partners have attended the WJF Institute, where instructors focus on client service, and client-focused strategy development during a three-day stretch.

Like Michael Best, Foley’s training is all internal and presently consists of three curricula, Abrahams said.

The first is business development, where the focus is understanding clients’ businesses better. Occasionally clients are invited to participate on panel discussions, for example. The second is leadership training, which is very similar to what’s offered at many business schools, Abrahams said. It’s a yearlong program that includes the completion of a project chosen by each attorney. The third topic is business training about the legal industry — essentially, how firms make money — but much of the subject-matter translates to other industries.

Partner-education courses should be outcome-specific, so that discrete goals are met after a program ends, Abrahams said.

She also favors interactive learning over lectures. At Foley, they recently examined a case study where the partners were asked to identify the business, not legal, issues. “We had 50 lawyers in the room thinking like business people, not lawyers,” Abrahams said.

Positive reviews

Krutz said he’s participated in both of Michael Best’s programs and said they were very beneficial. With WJF, he learned a great deal from the facilitated discussions with colleagues within his firm with whom he typically doesn’t work, and likewise with Lex Mundi he learned from attorneys outside his firm.

Corporate services’ Ryan Van Den Elzen, a member of the inaugural class completing Quarles’ program, said it already has paid off in terms of better servicing clients.

“Ultimately, it helps me provide better legal advice,” he said, “because I can see through some of the questions they’re asking, and through their business perspective what they’re really trying to accomplish.”

His law partner, Jessica Franken, an intellectual property attorney, said one of the more valuable exercises was a sophisticated simulation of running a business. It included making hundreds of decisions.

“It was every possible decision that you could ever possibly make to run a business,” Franken said. “It was a great opportunity for the group to see sort of the unrelenting pressures that businesses face today. There’s always a decision, and always short-term results that you’ll be accountable for. This was set up in a way for us to experience that in almost real-time.”

The program “gave everybody who participated a new set of tools, to the extent that they didn’t have them and frankly, it’s not a set of tools a lot of lawyers have,” she continued. “It also gave us the opportunity to develop a common vocabulary, which never hurts, within an organization for a critical mass to have a common understanding of business principles. It’s useful for us as we advise our clients, and it’s useful for us in running our own business.”