WINNERS BY MARKET SEGMENT
Large national firms (over 500 lawyers)
GOLD: Corrs Chambers Westgarth
BLUE: Mallesons Stephen Jaques, Freehills, Allens Arthur Robinson
Mid-size firms
GOLD: HopgoodGanim, McCullough Robertson
BLUE: Herbert Geer
Firms with under 100 lawyers
GOLD: Curwoods, Cooper Grace Ward
BLUE: Thynne & Macartney, Wotton + Kearney, Carter Newell
New Zealand
GOLD: Russell McVeagh
BLUE: Chapman Tripp, Buddle Findlay
2010 Gold Employer of Choice firm Bell Gully conducted its own engagement survey and advised ALB that it would encourage employees to concentrate on this internal survey. Insufficient results were therefore received from within this firm to make any assessment of engagement, although external respondents rated the firm well.
It feels like 2007 all over again. If law firms managed to enjoy a respite from the pressing imperative
to retain their talent during the GFC – and it is questionable whether this pressure abated at all at the
top level – there is no doubt that the old challenges are back. New international entrants are eyeing off talent at the senior associate and partner level; younger lawyers are cautiously optimistic about trying
their luck overseas: the mid-tier is becoming increasingly aggressive.
The ALB Employer of Choice awards are a coveted prize in the quiet years; in the boom years it is an important barometer of where a firm’s fortunes – and indeed its lawyers – could be headed.
Gold surplus?
The Employer of Choice survey is an ALB reader survey where respondents are asked to rate firms by six criteria: remuneration, knowledge management and IT, quality of work and clients, work/ life balance, professional development and training and overall quality of employment brand. The firms with the highest overall ratings across these criteria are designated as ALB Employer of Choice firms. These
results are broken down by firm size to allow the identification of the top brands in the large firm, mid-size, small firm and NZ markets.
Last year saw the introduction of the Gold Employer of Choice award. The original purpose of this award was to single out the top firms in each market category. This was an easy task where the category was clearly dominated by one firm, however in certain instances it has been difficult to separate the
top two firms. The Employer of Choice survey is not intended to be a “first past the post” competition and there is little utility in distinguishing between firms which have recorded similar results. Accordingly, ALB has awarded Gold status to two firms in the mid-size and boutique firms where there was only an insubstantial difference in the scores recorded by the first and second ranked firms. The same problem did not arise in the NZ and large firm categories, where Russell McVeagh and Corrs Chambers Westgarth finished significantly ahead of the nearest rivals.
The same principle applies to the rankings of firms against each criteria, where certain firms are represented as having tied. This should not be taken as meaning that firms (rather improbably) recorded exactly the same score – rather, it indicates that ALB was not able to identify a significant difference in the performance of the firm based on the survey results.
A function of size
As always, the Employer of Choice survey results are broken down by firm size to allow the identification of the top brands in the large firm, mid-size, small firm and NZ markets. However, we have also provided a list of firms ranked by raw score against each criteria, which gives an indication of how firms performed in relation to firms outside their category. Even a cursory glance reveals a clear message: the smaller the firm, the higher the level of employee engagement.
These results are a function of expectation. The fact that Curwoods, for example, achieved the highest raw score against the “compensation/ benefits” criterion does not indicate that Curwoods necessarily pays the highest salaries in the market – rather, it indicates that lawyers at Curwoods were the most satisfied that their remuneration was a fair indication of their worth. Whether or not boutique firms are in fact objectively competitive on salary with their larger rivals remains to be seen, although managing partner Scott Kennedy maintains that this is very much the case. “It’s not just a question of being able to match the big firms, it’s a matter of necessity,’ he says. “You have to be in the ballpark and offer the other features that are attractive in a small firm - in terms of work environment and other cultural issues, that’s easier to manage in a small firm, but you still have to be competitive on salary as there’s such a shortage of lawyers at the moment.”
Smaller firms clearly have an advantage when it comes to building a closer knit team. “It’s a more cohesive culture,” says Kennedy. “The bigger the firm, the sheer weight of numbers means that it’s hard to keep in contact with all the staff - it’s just a matter of logistics. Studies have shown that there’s a certain number of people you can get to in terms of interacting together – I think it’s around 150 – once you start going beyond that size you got people spread over different floors and it’s harder to physically see people and know everyone in the firm.”
At 95 lawyers and 240 team members overall, Brisbane’s Cooper Grace Ward is clearly pushing the upper limits of the “small firm” category, but managing partner Chris Ward is keen to maintain the small firm collegiality. “We can still convene what I call a “townhall meeting” and eyeball 240 people – I do believe that it’s a significant advantage that we’re all in one space and everyone can see what everyone else in doing,” he says. “I’d imagine that if there were an extra 50 lawyers, there would be different dynamics.” Ward is particularly proud of the firm having won a Gold Employer of Choice in the wake of a recent merger with local firm Bain Gasteen. “We added 50 to 60 people - it’s a compliment and we must be doing something right – we were very conscious that the merger could have brought some unhappiness if not handled right,” he says.
Bigger firms
McCullough Robertson is one of the heavyweights of the Queensland market. Chairman Brett Heading says the firm works hard on maintaining a small firm feel, although he readily admits that this is more easily said than done. He also points out that scale is an advantage when it comes to the quality of work: “The larger you get, the larger the client base and the more diverse the work – at the end of the day, lawyers want interesting work and challenging work,” he says. “I’m not saying that boutique firms can’t get quality work – but bigger work does require bigger teams and it’s a matter of having sufficient capacity to handle the work which excites people – big M&A, big ticket litigation, infrastructure and so on.”
Technical excellence comes at a price and top tier firms carry the burden of meeting some hefty top tier expectations as to how the workplace will operate. “High achieving people are very demanding on themselves and demanding of those around them - as they should be,” says Russell McVeagh CEO Gary McDiarmid. “So it’s easy to get grumpy and disengaged when you’re dealing with high achievers. You have to work very hard to make sure you’re doing the right thing, individual to individual.” The Russell McVeagh approach is heavily focused on building the right culture from the graduate level. “Top quality people brought in at the graduate level and groomed to be top quality senior people is the
only way to maintain excellence,” says McDiarmid. “By all means, recruit quality laterals when they come up but the majority of people should be developed through your own system. We invest heavily in recruitment and technical training, but we also invest in leadership and teaching our leaders to lead well.”
Chapman Tripp managing partner Andrew Poole says that getting communication right has been one of his firm’s priorities over the past year. “We spent a lot of time in 2010 creating opportunities for our staff to speak to us, to tell us what’s working for them, and what needed improving,” he says. “As part of this, we conducted another firm-wide engagement survey and we are now actively working with each of our teams to identify and implement initiatives to improve how we do things based on their feedback. These include implementing a new system for measuring performance and giving feedback.”
Queenslanders dominate
Brisbane firms have dominated the 2011 Employer of Choice survey - Cooper Grace Ward, McCullough Robertson and HopgoodGanim all secured Gold status while Thynne & Macartney and Carter Newell were not far behind. It is a remarkable result given that Brisbane firms clearly had major distractions to contend with during the survey period, which partly coincided with major floods in the region. Perhaps the floods even had a positive effect on morale as people united in adversity. “While events like that are just dreadful in terms of the magnitude of the personal loss, people have to bond together to make do with the difficulties that are confronting them,” says HopgoodGanim’s Bruce Humphrys. “In our firm we had most of our staff working remotely as we couldn’t get into the building - the efforts people went to make sure they were still working and to look after their mates was particularly inspiring and indicative of the way the whole community went.”
Flexible work conditions
A common theme amongst all Employer of Choice firms was a commitment to flexible working conditions. Law firms have long been notorious for what HR managers have dubbed “presenteeism” or the imperative to be in the office for the sake of appearances. “Law firm have a cultural bias towards being seen in the office,” says Gary McDiarmid. He believes the focus on the attendance hour and billable hour is misconceived. “Why on earth focus on the billable hour and the attendance hour when it’s the result for the client that counts? We don’t talk about billable hours at all – we totally focus the sort of work, who we do it for and what we expect to get from that,” he says.
Bruce Humphrys says that workplace flexibility goes beyond simply having a policy and says that the sensitive implementation of policies is also important. “It’s particularly traumatic for a person about to take a fairly lengthy stay away from the office on, say, maternity leave to have a sense of value of themselves in the organisation,” he says. “There’s more to it than simply giving people time off – it’s about continued engagement with the office when they leave, involvement in CLE programmes, the opportunity to do work where we’re caught short in writing articles for example – they often jump at the opportunity because they want to get back into swing of things anyway.”
Firms also made the point that flexible working conditions should not be perceived as something relevant only to junior staff. Brett Heading himself departs the office before 3pm twice a week to spend more time with his children and HopgoodGanim’s business development and marketing manager Kathryn Ruffin is another example of a senior professional with a flexible arrangement, working full time but with one day each week worked from home. She says that she has encountered resistance to such arrangements while working for other law firms and was pleasantly surprised by the HopgoodGanim approach. “It enables me to balance a very senior position within the firm with my family commitments,” she says. “Mothers naturally put a lot of pressure on themselves to do both a good job and be a good parent, often not feeling like they are achieving either, which may ultimately affect their performance. The flexibility I receive at HopgoodGanim helps me to take some of the pressure off and, in fact, I believe my day at home is even more productive than many of my days in the office, as I have the quiet necessary to get on with strategic matters."
