The modern law firm: not all partners are created equal, data and billings rule
The traditional law firm pattern is that the Partners at the top are “rain makers”, and its their job to find and bring in new business. That’s it.<p>In the middle layer, we have Associates. The senior Associates work closest with the Partners, and supervise the junior Associates. But they’re too busy learning how to “make it rain” and supervising clueless junior Associates to do any real work.<p>The junior Associates do most of the real work that involves stuff where a law degree would help.<p>Below that, you have legal secretaries, etc...<p>In essence, the amount of real legal work you do goes up as you go further down the stack, but also you get lower pay. All the money the Partners make has to be paid for somehow!<p>In essence, it’s a Ponzi scheme. And you know who the only people are who make any real money in a Ponzi scheme, right?<p>There are law firms that get rid of the unnecessary overhead, and where you have Partners doing real legal work, but charging the same rate as the larger firms do for their junior Associates. And those Partners are still taking home a much higher percentage of what they bring in, because the firm has much lower overhead.<p>Those Partners choose to work this way because it gives them more control over their work-life balance. They’re done being the General Counsel of some financial services company with over 22 trillion Euros of assets under management, and want to have some time they can spend at home on occasion with their spouse and their cats. Or travel for pleasure, or any of those other things “normal” people might want to do.<p>Get rid of the Ponzi Scheme law firms. Find one of the smaller firms with a high concentration of very talented lawyers who don’t want to have to deal with the “big law firm” kind of shit.