North Korea in law firms and alternative project management
Remember this moment from “Swordfish”? “Stanley needs to guess the password to the Department of Defense database. For 60 seconds. With a gun to his head. While the girl under the table is forcing him to have oral sex.
I have long wondered why law firms treat their lawyers the same way: billing 11 hours a day, being always available, dropping one task and making another more urgent, and asking your partner for lunch after all.
For those who haven’t watched, Stanley cracked the password. Made it to the deadline. The result of oral sex has been delivered.
But I have questions. First, how many similar projects can Stanley complete in a day/week/month until he gets to the 27 Club? And second, did Stanley enjoy oral sex?
Oh, come on, no one asks for anything like that
Look, Google offers employees 20% of their working time to spend on creating something new and cool. At the WIX office in Tel Aviv (and now also in Kyiv), employees can come with their dogs. Anadea has made a kindergarten for the children of its programmers opposite its office in Dnipro.
You couldn't drink coffee at your desk in the office of one of the top (at the time) law firms on my CV. Tea/coffee time was twice a day. If someone was caught drinking coffee for the third unauthorized time a day, they could be called “to the seventh floor” and get lit up.
You can imagine my shock when I went to Deloitte on the first day, and on the partner’s table was … an unfinished yogurt package. There was a coffee machine on every floor, and for several weeks I was flooded with a variety of drinks. Not because it doesn’t work without them, but because I checked the system. It turned out that neither the number of approaches nor the time spent at the machine interested anyone except my attentive kidneys.
My second culture shock happened about 6 years after the first. I visited a friend in the Kyiv office of GlobalLogic. I rode a scooter (I ride a skateboard like a half-empty milk tank, and you know, it was necessary to put on roller skates for a three-piece suit), and played ping pong and table football. Each floor is like a separate world: a Japanese meeting room, a Silicon Valley floor, a jungle. There were darts, gym, and programmers loitered in shorts and slippers.
The office was half empty, and in response to my questioning expression, Andriy said with his facial expression that it was only 11 in the morning, and no one had come that early. And he also noted that plus or minus everyone didn’t give a damn if you were in the office: the main thing is that you write code well. But he already said it with his voice.
It was a juicy and heartfelt spit on everything I knew about office work. Therefore, now it is at least strange for me to see that law firms, in contrast to the changed reality, are trying to attract talented people with job descriptions like we will torture you, keep you 26 hours a day, skin you, and even pay well.
Do you want proof? Here are the first vacancies that caught my eye:
Work under pressure
Remember how you answered HR’s question during the interview about your readiness to work under pressure and within tough deadlines. I am sure you answered as honestly as you responded to the question “why did you apply for our company in particular”.
I knew a few consultants who could bill 2300 hours yearly and not go crazy. I was proud to know them for a while and wanted to be like them. Then I stopped drinking both Burn and maté.
For most people who fall into the meat grinder called “work under pressure”, this is just a temporary inconvenience that needs to be endured so that later with good experience and bags under the eyes (at best, at worst — only with an entry in the CV) or in industry, or in a company that has finally abolished the slave system.
The minority gets promoted to signor/counselor/partner and becomes an overseer in a legal juvenile detention center.
A lawyer should always have a notebook ᷅\_(ヅ)_/ ᷄
A few years ago, when I had already done a fair amount of work with the IT business, I was introduced to the owner of an incredibly large ticketing service. When he discovered I was a lawyer, he said he hated lawyers because they always had notebooks. I immediately hid mine, but this did not improve the dynamics of the further conversation.
This story has kept my habit the same, and I prefer a notepad and multi-colored pencils to any of your Evernote or OneNote. And what was my horror when I heard from a living and sane person, not a communist or a clergyman, but a whole lawyer, this phrase:
“In the office, lawyers should always be with notebooks in order to accept the task from the head at any time.”
I suspect you will blame me for exaggerating the North Korean nature of some law firms. Therefore, I will try to cite all the facts known to me from the life of legal consultants and corporate lawyers in the direct speech of their direct Juche:
“My lawyers come to the office at 8:30. And running out of breath to the turnstile at 8:30 — this means being late. At 8:30 you should already be at the workplace, ready for work tasks.”
“We have decided that lawyers should smile every morning when they say good morning. At first everyone resisted, but now they have stopped and are smiling.”
“We have decided to work in Bitrix”. “How did you solve the problem that people do not like to use CRM systems?”. We forced them. Introduced a rule of three penalties. For the first time, a symbolic fine. The second time, 10 times more. What they have for the third time — I no longer listened.
“Order on the table — order in the head.”
“Employees should go in for sports. All our lawyers are hardy, like special forces.”
“We have a list of must-see films that every employee should watch.” From HR of the notorious Ukrainian monopolist Megapolis, I heard that there was not just a list of mandatory motivational books and books on personal effectiveness, but there was also a clear sequence of reading them.
“There must be discipline.”
Add in the comments if you met other excitingexciting things :)
Jar of stones
One Sunday morning, I came to the office to finally write objections to the lawsuit. It was a complex matter; it was necessary to come up with something like that. Because on a working day, it did not work out. Sunday and an empty office were just right for this job.
At the entrance, my partner met me and said: Oh, Gadomsky, it’s good that you came. On Monday morning, he says, our managing partner is flying somewhere there, and he urgently needs a certificate on a court case that we conducted a hundred years ago, and no one remembers the details, and no one knows where it is. But this is all very responsible and important and, of course, should be done by Monday morning.
The possibilities of a lawyer, even if it is a superman who does not need to sleep, eat and have sex, I imagine as a vessel. The employer is struggling to fill this vessel to the rim: they invent KPIs, and add a mandatory marketing load, training, and small messy assignments. And they also hire an HR, who helps to tamp it all tightly into a vessel.
In the ideal world that the partners and HRs have built for themselves somewhere on the ring of Saturn, this vessel is indeed entirely and very harmoniously filled. There is even some room for air. But our world, unlike the rings of Saturn, could be better. Therefore, behind clumsy management and a cloud of secondary urgent tasks, a lawyer either needs to catch up on deadlines or the quality of their work falls to the level of lawyers from ads at trolleybus stops. Well, either the vessel bursts without explanation.
On knowledge workers
Michael Dubakov from TargetProcess wrote a great article about brick and balloon companies. I’ll steal some thankless statistics from him.
“Over the past ten years, the average GDP per capita has grown 10 times. That is, 50 years ago, on average, one person had $ 1 thousand, and now it is $ 10 thousand. It has become 10 times cooler to live in.
There is also an increase in education. If 50 years ago there were only 40% of the literate population in the world, now it is already 80%. Not a bad trend. We have more and more knowledge workers and fewer manual workers.
So far, robots have not replaced everyone, but soon this will happen.
According to experts, the number of workers in intellectual professions will reach 80 or even 90% in the coming decades. That is, all existing companies will mainly consist of knowledge workers. And there is a particular problem with this.
They are such difficult people — these intellectual workers. They are programming, programming… And then they suddenly think: why do I live, what am I doing here, what benefit do I bring to the world?
And only sometimes do the needs of the company coincide with the need for self-realization of such employees.
The trend is obvious: we are moving from a production society to a knowledge society. In production, everything has long been clear. Once Taylor came with his scientific management, and since then, the productivity of manual workers increased 40 times. And the robots will come — I don’t know how much this will grow. Probably hundreds of times. Everything is simple here.”
Scrum in legal firms
Jurisprudence is less and less an art (as we were told at the university) and more and more a stupid business (as we are told by partners who received legal education in absentia), but legal work is still stably intellectual work. And creative.
What is the deadline for a mathematician to prove Fermat’s Theorem? How many statements of claim, responses, petitions, and appeals can a lawyer write per day? How many texts did Joyce write per day? Can a lawyer do the due diligence on Ukrposhta at the same time as writing an article in Esquire and preparing an opening speech (a.k.a. report) at the IBA Annual Conference?
Five years ago, I read the Agile manifesto but didn’t understand much. I figured it out two years ago (well, how I figured it out — I took a 4-day course at the Kyiv Mohyla Business School and, as it usually happens after business school courses, I started using one of the Agile methodologies — Scrum — in legal practice “since Monday”.
Here are the problems I actually wanted to solve with the help of Scrum:
- lack of time and desire to look at the work from the outside and try to come up with something new, for example: “shouldn’t we write a bill” or “let’s make a video instead of Legal Alert!”
- errors;
- constant overload, working late and on weekends;
- demotivation from overload and the same type of work, the desire to go to another, albeit precisely the same or even worse, but still another law firm.
To make it simple, I wanted to combine the quality of the work of the big four with the freedom of some creative agency.
Armed with Scrum, here’s what we did:
Partners stopped setting deadlines without team approval.
Every Monday, the whole company, including the Lviv office and our remote lawyers, gathers for a meeting. Here we discuss the new tasks that have come up over the past week:
- we form a team;
- discussing new projects and challenges;
- the team determines the amount of time that the task will take, including analytics, drafting, and proofreading of the document (the task is always done by three lawyers: a junior lawyer, a senior lawyer, and a partner).
- We always try to force ourselves to have 15-minute meetings daily to synchronize the status of tasks, but this practice does not take root.
- On Friday, we meet again with the whole company and hold a retro meeting. There we discuss what tasks we did not have time to complete, what prevented us, and how to fix this “something”.
A year later, we stopped estimating the time to complete each task and instead began evaluating the complexity in terms of T-shirt sizes: S (you can make 3–4 of these in a day), M (this is half a day’s work or even more), L (at least one day), XL (it’s not at all clear how much, but at least something needs to be done in a week).
When Monday meetings began to take more than 2 hours, we reduced it to a simple distribution of tasks and team building. Tasks are discussed immediately after the meeting already in teams. We call it “speed dating”.
We stopped taking work from clients, “please do it for yesterday”, or “I have a SPA signing in the evening, please look at the contract”.
It’s hard to say no to a client. The market has taught that a lawyer is always ready to subtract SHA at night because the client suddenly realizes it is too late. But working at night has never guaranteed high quality. Well, the life expectancy of a lawyer did not increase.
But urgent tasks still arise.
Yes, there are, and we allocate 10% of the time for such tasks.
It is clear that we only sometimes fit into this 10%. The lawyer can wait half a day for the trial. Or the client very urgently asks to meet, and the meeting can be delayed, well, you know how it happens.
How we measure efficiency
Several times we missed the plenary, and the whole week was like hellish hell: no one understood what was happening and who was doing what. And this is our system of measurement.
Conclusions and smth about it
I have an undeniable advantage over those who will criticize me: I have tried on myself different approaches to management from none to some. In particular, we work on Scrum for 100 weeks.
Dear reader, if you have decided that scrum is a magic spell, such a one-size-fits-all, — em no. All approaches that I personally consider a mockery of a lawyer, their honor and dignity, this same lawyer can assess the highest grace and their tyrant boss — God.
I sincerely believe that it is a foolish idea to ask a writer, physicist, economist, or lawyer to do something brilliant and at the same time force or even recommend to go in for sports, come to work at 9:00, not to eat meat (or, conversely, eat meat ), or in any other way to oppress the creative person. A creative person will either tell you go to hell (if he/she is creative) or not right away, but after the first nervous breakdown. And if the person doesn’t tell you where to ho, then you have a distorted understanding of creativity.
But I want to draw a different conclusion from this stream of legal poison. The main thing is to always be at ease and adapt in time to the dishes that the changing world puts on this plate.
We work in different countries, in different industries and deal with completely different projects. Some incorporate hundreds of LLCs, others go to the process with twenty petitions and after every second they challenge the judge, still others meticulously copy-paste prospectuses, others cover their client with a patchwork blanket.
To everyone I offended, I’m sorry. To everyone who, despite sincere apologies, considers me an asshole, this is mutual.
✍️ Dima Gadomsky
