Whistler Partners, alongside partners from Foley & Lardner, Orrick, and Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, provide even more insight into how to start originating in the final part of this two-part series.
We’re back! In part one of this two-part series on origination with Whistler Partners, we touched on how to identify and leave a lasting impression on your future clients, as well as how to take control of your own career path to ensure that you’re getting client exposure. Again, we recommend diving into that before you proceed. In this part, we speak to our interviewees about overcoming your billing rates as an associate, networking best practices, and the role of a good recruiter in helping you navigate all this. So, without further ado, let’s get straight into it.
More Money, More Problems
As we mentioned in part one, a significant obstacle for associates to overcome is their billing rates, and unfortunately, there’s no two ways about it: “If you’re at a BigLaw firm, you’re expensive,” Whistler recruiter and former Much Shelist partner and BARK general counsel, Matt Miller admits, “you just are,” but “no matter what, you have to be honest,” Whistler senior recruiter, Wolf Konstant warns. He goes on to explain, “If you’re a young partner or associate with small clients that you think your rate’s going to be a challenge for, get in front of it. That’s the most important thing. If you’re moving firms because your current firm isn’t making it easy to originate, discuss it with the firm that you’re interviewing with. I think you’d be surprised. Firms I work with all the time – especially firms that work with small clients or startups – have rate flexibility.” This can be done through providing discounts for a fixed period of time, and then gradually bringing rates up – just to ensure that clients aren’t deterred from working with you for pricing reasons alone. Even so, “we’ve all seen plenty of examples where people move to a firm where their rates go up, and they’re actually able to retain their clients,” Konstant contemplates, so “if you do good work and people appreciate that, they will usually be willing to pay you.”
"Sometimes, switching firms is the only way for you to get the clients you want.”
You have to be mindful when handing out discounts though, as Miller cautions: “You’ve got to be careful about the discounts you give because that will affect your realization rate, and at some firms, your compensation.” It’s a tricky tightrope to balance, so “sometimes the answer might be that you should make a change. Like, just be honest: $2,000/hour? My clients don’t want to pay that. Sometimes, switching firms is the only way for you to get the clients you want.” Part of handling all this is managing your expectations; Miller continues, “Do you want to be a service partner – working on other people’s stuff because the rates are too high for you to originate, or are you willing to give those discounts? Are you willing to take the hit on origination, or do you need to be somewhere else where the rates are more favorable for you to grow your practice and then go back to a bigger firm later for support?”
Associates need to have a general awareness that “if you stay at an Am Law 20 firm, it’s just harder to have clients of your own,” founding partner Sean Burke points out, “All you have is this rolodex, and then you’re at the mercy of the economy. You basically have to bill 2,500 hours or more as a service partner. It’s incredibly hard work and talented people may eventually be rewarded, but there’s so little impact you can have other than doing that.” Those at these firms are oftentimes “backed into a corner if they don’t move by the time they’re a senior associate or counsel. Their only options are to be a service partner at another Am Law 20 firm; take a class year haircut or step back in terms of title; or go somewhere else and start at square one because they don’t have a book of business.” Interestingly enough, “the people who make a strategic move earlier have a better chance at having a book that they can point to. There are firms that cultivate people earlier in their career,” but “there are some firms that are better at that than others. It’s a tough analysis that involves looking at the firm, the group within that firm, and even the specific partners they’ll be working for” Burke concludes.
Decisions like this aren’t made lightly, so keep an eye on the market before you make any drastic choices: “What we’re seeing right now is that firms have these institutional clients who have so much money that if you raise the billing rate, they don’t care because you’re getting them great results. They can afford it,” illustrates Miller, “But what happens to all that other work? You start seeing a bunch of other firms pop up that maybe weren’t on your radar ten years ago because now, they’re suddenly able to get these All-Star lawyers who wouldn’t go there before but will now because the rates are easier to originate with, and they can deliver the same quality of work.” Understanding this as a key consideration is important because rates at white shoe firms aren’t coming down – not by a long shot – though some people are blinded by ego. People often think, “I’m at this big fancy firm and the brand name is everything, but you’ve got to shed that,” Miller nods.
“BigLaw firms across the board are all NBA-level teams..."
Think of it this way, basketball fans: “BigLaw firms across the board are all NBA-level teams, and out of the NBA there are some franchises that are more storied than others – the Knicks, the Lakers, the Celtics,” Burke expounds, “Associates get caught up in being on the Lakers, but they’re sitting on the bench. You can go to a team where you’ll be a starter, but those aren’t necessarily the storied franchises. But it’s still an NBA caliber firm, and you can have a great career there that you love,” so try not to get so stuck on the name brand of a firm; just because it’s an elite firm doesn’t mean that it’ll serve your personal career goals. Moving to a different firm stands to “have a massive impact on your ability to originate, and your hours are really going to blow everyone away and make you a superstar,” Burke adds. That’s the value in associates spending their early years in the upper echelons of BigLaw: “it’s boot camp!” Looking at it as a stepping stone to move on to something different is useful, as “if you lateral from one massive, powerful firm to another, how are you going to originate?” Moving to a smaller outfit means you don’t have to be an “insane biller” just to survive; rather, you can be more hands-on and form more personal relationships with your clients while building out your book.
To round out the sports analogy, Miller takes it a step further: “As the NBA became increasingly successful, you started getting expansion teams and more teams in new cities you’d never heard of before. The same thing is happening in law right now. You’ve got the core firms and now these expansion teams – other firms – that you hadn’t thought about in years, but now, you can say, ‘Hey, I can go be their starting center, and I’m absolutely going to build that thing. I’m going to be the one that’s talked about for years and who put this team on the map.’ That’s a choice you can make too.”
Finding Your Place
While contemplating your career goals, it does you no good to merely sit idly by. Even if you’re not 100% sure what you want to do, you can still be putting your ducks in a row for when you do, as Gregory Boyd, partner and co-chair of the interactive entertainment group at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, states firmly: “Do not wait until you’re counsel or partner level to start business development. That is a myth. The people I know who are fabulous business generators have always been working on it. I’m not saying they were always good, but they were always working on it.”
Adding onto that, Louis Lehot, partner in Foley & Lardner’s private equity & venture capital, M&A, and transactions practices, as well as the technology, health care, life sciences, and energy industry teams, describes a common phenomenon: “I call it Superman disease.” We hope it’s not contagious… what are the symptoms? “I see it happen in some people where they think they have this red cape on, can jump out the window, and they’ll fly,” Lehot divulges, “In fact, they land straight down and splatter all over the ground. There’s a lot of humility required to do what we do, so I think it’s never too early to be the path of least resistance for the client, to be the person who gets things done.”
"There’s a lot of humility required to do what we do, so I think it’s never too early to be the path of least resistance for the client...”
Additionally, juniors should consider “writing as much as possible for professional publications when you’re young. People write a lot of these 500- or 1,000-word blog posts; the quality is very high, and that’s where most people get their news,” Boyd recommends. He also urges young associates to volunteer for professional committees, “because so many professional committees want senior people on them that are over 20 years into their career do don’t have the bandwidth to do the work. So, if you’re a young person on the committee and you have that bandwidth, then you’re building rapport inside and outside your firm with very senior people who can give you referrals.”
The final item on Boyd’s list is “speaking at conferences if you can.” Panels are another great way to get to know exciting people: “You can be the moderator of the panel,” he proposes, “Even if you’re not on the panel, how hard is it to read questions, right?” (…We would know.)
This is all a form of networking: getting your name out there and narrowing down your practice in the process. There are practices in certain industries that lend themselves better to building client relationships and thus a book of business. Josh Beser, partner in Orrick’s technology companies group, shares his thoughts on this, saying, “One of the exciting parts of the emerging companies practice generally is that there are more opportunities for associates to have direct client contact, and part of that is just that there are often more clients.” This presents opportunities for associates to “become key touchpoints in the relationship early on. They get to grow up with them,” starting as a junior, becoming a mid-level, and ending up senior. Throughout that time, “they get to know the business and the founding team... and often work with that team on their next company.”
Lehot, who also works in EC/VC, notes that “this is the one practice area where you’re going to have client connection probably right away and likely on a consistent basis. If you become the go-to person for a client to get something done, they’re going to call you again and again. Then, as soon as you’ve been doing it long enough to have the experience to know the answers to questions before looking them up, clients will know. Then, they’ll start sending you their next startup, or they’ll refer you to their friend.” This ties into developing your network, as “I’ve noticed that when I have a good client, I’ll probably have three others who are friends with that client. It’s like a mine where you find a vein of gold, and you follow it to wherever it goes,” he sums up.
Partners such as Beser, Boyd, and Lehot play a huge role in facilitating these connections, though, and they encourage juniors to lean on them when need be. Boyd details “I get invitations several times a year from law schools to speak, and I’ll do it if I can, but I often can’t. That said, I will give every single one of those opportunities to an associate, and the associate should take that to use it as practice speaking and getting to know people, getting to know law professors.” Like Lehot says, “it’s about creating opportunities.” Associates must find a firm where “you have enough bats at the plate and enough clients to support you.” Once those opportunities are lined up, the job of a mentor is to “provide structure for the mentee to be successful with the opportunity, and that means you have the technology tools, knowledge management databases, training, good quality colleagues,” Lehot expounds, “You put all those things together, and every opportunity just builds on itself; it’s like a brick in a wall, and you’re just building, building, building.”
“Those let-me-bounce-this-off-of-you conversations are some of the best mentoring moments...”
Attending events is a crucial aspect of this too, Beser says: “Orrick sponsored a conference last fall for emerging consumer brands, and we invited a bunch of the brands. Our associates joined us got to connect with the companies in a setting outside of practice and I think everyone got a lot out of that.” Sometimes when your work output isn’t tangible, “you don’t get the full context of what these businesses are really doing. Getting out of your office and seeing what you’re building changes how you think about the work.” Getting in the office is paramount too though, as “the notion of popping into the office to talk about how you’re thinking about something is really important,” Beser mentions, “Those let-me-bounce-this-off-of-you conversations are some of the best mentoring moments and I think humans are just wired to do that better over coffee than Zoom.”
A Recruiter’s Role
All this talk of making a move begs the question: where do recruiters fit into all of this? A recruiter’s role is to “identify places where you think that person would be a great fit; identifying the firms that are in growth mode; identifying the firms where they really want to upgrade their talent; identifying firms where there’s a partner mentor, a leader who could really make someone’s career; and then, it’s also getting to know your candidate,” lists Burke. Certain candidates “just shouldn’t go to the fast-paced, eat-what-you-kill early-stage startup practice.” Others are “so smart, so good at their niche that they should be thinking about going to a firm that’s only doing the biggest, most sophisticated stuff.”
“You want your recruiter to be like a sports agent who knows what you want and is going to try to find it for you.”
Miller tells us that understanding the candidate and their goals is paramount for a good recruiter: “Make sure the recruiter is actually listening to you. You want your recruiter to be like a sports agent who knows what you want and is going to try to find it for you.” As much as a move can be right for one candidate, sometimes “the best advice is to wait,” especially if “there’s nothing available for what you want. Moving for moving’s sake is no good and can lead to landing a firm that’s just as hard to originate at,” but you’ll never know unless you pick up the phone and speak to the recruiters reaching out to you. “The other mistake lawyers make is, ‘I’m putting my head down, and I’m going to bill so many hours – become a superhero of hours, work like crazy – and my career will just work out.’ That’s not how it is,” Miller reminds us, “You have to be willing to talk to recruiters to get a bird’s eye view of the industry and where you best fit in. Your career doesn’t just happen. You have to make it happen.”
