What's Trending in the Business of Law Firms and Hiring
[00:00:00] How much of your views on law firms and hiring changed over the years, if at all? I ask just because I've been reading your articles, watching your presentations for years, and have always been impressed with your knowledge and forthrightness. I'm wondering if the trends you observe and talk about have remained relatively consistent in the past decade or so?
Yeah, I think they have. I don't think much has changed and it's funny. When I started this job over 20 years ago, there were certainly been people before me that used to write columns and newspapers and so forth.
One guy would write about large law firms. He was an associate of Baker McKenzie and someone that I eventually got to know and worked for us for a while. And the thing is, the way the business works has pretty much stayed very consistent.
Society has changed . There's been there's a lot more need for diversity and there's a lot more openness about working mothers and things than there were in the past.
There are some changes for the most part. There's more tolerance for working at home and that sort of thing. But other than that, everything has pretty much stayed the same. Society goes through [00:01:00] trends.
In the 1970s, the country was a very liberal place for a while. And it's in a very liberal place right now but the same trends repeat themselves.
At some, point everything will go back to being very conservative. The only changes that I've seen have been a lot more tolerance. Women being advanced and more opportunities than they had in the past. Just a lot more open-mindedness and less tolerance for certain types of exclusionary behavior.
But the ideas, the law firm is still a business. They still rely on people doing work. They still need people to follow the rules and so forth.
So I don't think other than that, I don't think very much has changed. The one thing I would say in terms of the major trends that I observed is, I think a lot of younger attorneys are more interested in their lifestyles than they were in the past. And working in large law firms is not something that many in many people seem interested in, but they're still extremely interested i the internet.
So that's the only thing that I've noticed, but all the trends of people talking negatively about large law firms wanting to go in-house are very similar.
The [00:02:00] only major changes have just been an increased kind of openness with society and a need for diversity. More types of people. But pretty much the same demands.
