Regardless of societal changes or law interpretation, professional attorneys have a reputation for maintaining core values while navigating the complex field of legalities. Values of being best in class, putting in long hours and aspiring to climb the corporate ladder have been bedrocks to attorneys. However, as the baby boomer generation retires, those core values are shifting, and the legal industry is undergoing internal changes. The next generation of legal professionals bring to the industry a different culture that is focused on flexibility and work-life balance. Partnered with demand for flexible work schedules and the ever-growing use of AI technology, the next generation of lawyers in Nevada will likely be strikingly different than the last.
Recently, a group of attorneys met at a roundtable sponsored by Nevada State Bank and held in Las Vegas to discuss these changes in their industry and the outlook of law in Nevada. Connie Brennan, publisher and CEO of Nevada Business Magazine, served as moderator for the event. These monthly roundtables bring together different industries to discuss issues and solutions.
What Challenges Does This Industry Face With Finding Talent?
Charles Gianelloni: The biggest challenge facing our market is the ever-shrinking talent pool.
John Steffen: For years attorneys would call me and say they needed another attorney in an area of law and I could find someone within a week or two that was talented and worked hard. Now, they are hard to find.
Michael Bonner: The issues that are of constant concern are the talent pool and dealing with the changing culture and approach that young lawyers in particular have to not coming to the office, and the ever-changing compensation wars, which continue to drive a lot of decisions. The Las Vegas market is its own unique one. We are constantly trying to set compensation that properly attracts and then properly retains based on performance. It is an ever-changing battle.
Dana Dwiggins: The big firms have made salaries that are nationally based, and we struggle with that as a smaller firm. People want to start out at the big salaries and that makes it a little extra hard to attract talent.
Stephen Rice: The biggest issue facing small firms is that we are on the other side of the table from the large firms a lot of the time, and if we are doing large, sophisticated transactions we need the talent pool that allows us to do that. We try to compete with large firms to attract talent and to keep them in terms of compensation and also in terms of a path forward.
Gianelloni: We have expanded what the next step looks like for an associate. We try to find somebody with a big brain, and then we try to work with them on their “I have to have a massage at noon [attitude].” We have more people moving into a council role instead of a partner role. We have had to create multiple flex time schedules. If somebody wants to be an attorney and they only want to work 1,500 hours instead of our billable requirement of 1,900, we have a dozen programs that we have added to try to keep the people that are really smart and doing a good job, even though they are not necessarily on the traditional track that we were all on.
Samuel Schwartz: There are people who want to work hard and want to achieve, they just do not want to do it for more than eight hours a day.
Dwiggins: I blame [the shift in work culture] on millennials. We are the generation that had to work hard to prove ourselves, and now we have to work hard because they do not want to. When we all start to retire, it scares me to think what our legal practice is going to look like, because there will be these attorneys that did not work hard and did not make names for themselves.
George Ogilvie: The bar examiners are very worried about the public being protected by attorneys that do not know what they are doing and did not receive proper mentorship. For that reason, the Nevada State Bar is implementing a clinical aspect of the bar exam.
Schwartz: Availability is the best ability. If you are not available, it does not matter how great a player you are, I can’t put you in the game. Availability is an important part of being a good lawyer. If you can get young folks who will make themselves available for eight hours a day, then you are going to tackle it. And then they will work hard and you can train them. Get them to show up for 40 hours a week and when they get a client and suddenly start to make a little more money, they want to work more. They have to learn. That is the hard part.
Dwiggins: It is not only finding good talent that is an issue, but finding attorneys that actually want to work. This whole work-life balance is taken to the extreme. We have 16 lawyers, and every partner is out billing the associates this year, with the exception of one.
Has It Been Difficult to Get Attorneys Back in the Office Since COVID?
Mark Ricciardi: One of the things that still is a challenge is encouraging and educating lawyers on the benefits to being in the office. This is still a national problem. We see a lot of younger lawyers who could do much better on skills development by being there to be mentored, to learn how to develop business, and to see how to interact with clients. So many of them, even when they can’t walk yet, think they are going to sit at home and learn how to do stuff. That has been a challenge. We are making inroads, but I think it will be a challenge for a while.
Michael Feder: My biggest issue is associate training and mentoring. Since the pandemic, it has become more difficult with so many people working remotely. We need to find the time to make sure our younger generation understands that our legal community litigates hard, and we litigate what is best for our clients and we also have great camaraderie amongst everybody.
Steffen: For the most part, the partners are outworking the associates, and it has created a very difficult environment with remote working. It is not only the mentoring and training, but it is also the camaraderie that the firm has. It used to be that you would go into the office, and it would be a lively environment. Everyone would come in and chat with each other and meet, and you do not have as much of that now. It creates an unsettling feeling in the office.
Gregory Gilbert: In the Nevada offices we are used to being around each other more often so the working remotely concept lasted until it did not need to. But if you were to take a city like Denver or Washington, DC, it is harder to bring people back in. But the pendulum is swinging back to being in front of each other and working together. It is an apprentice model, so you have to learn and in order to do that, you need to be around each other.
Dwiggins: We require [our associates to work at the office] for the very reason of trying to train these individuals. You can’t do it from home.
Feder: It varies by the associate. There are some who want to only work remotely. In our office, we pretty much told people if they did not want to come in then we would take their office away because real estate cost is a big expense. But then you have those who are doing exactly what we all did and they stand out that much more. Those associates are going to events, going to client meetings, and they are in the office every day. We see them without even requiring it. Out of sight out of mind, but in sight, in mind and that is where certain people are starting to stand out.
Schwartz: We are all struggling to find good talent, keep them and train them. It is hard to tell them to be in the office all the time when they can go just down the street to one of our neighbors who is offering the same or more money and requiring them to only come in once a week. That is an issue the market has to sort out a little bit.
Rice: We have to be flexible. In order to keep talented people, you have to try to accommodate their different goals. We have attorneys who want to work hard and want to do a great job, but tell us we can’t expect them to get out there and meet people and go to functions and attract business because they are not comfortable doing that. We make that work. We have had to be more flexible than my firm was when I first started.
How Important Is Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (Dei) for Your Firms?
Ogilvie: Most of us are 60 plus and when we were in law school, it was a far more male-oriented class. As those who rise to the level of managing partners, it takes a while. The next generation of managing partners will be far more diverse than what you see around this table.
Bonner: There are a number of large corporate clients that tell you to not send a pitch team unless they have a certain diverse makeup. They have certain criteria against which the firm is judged. Our firm has a whole group that is led by a woman who heads up our DEI program internationally. We are rated by lots of agencies on this. From the day I joined, [the firm has always been] focused heavily on diversity efforts, but the world and industries have now required it. Given what just happened in the election, I do not know if there is going to be a change in that. But many of our clients insist on [diversity], so it is important.
Ogilvie: For us culturally it is critical to give young, diverse employees and colleagues, whether they be staff members or associates, an understanding that there is a path forward for them. They have a voice in the firm. Since George Floyd four years ago we have undertaken various dramatic steps in DEI, and it has benefited us culturally. It has also benefited us in business generation. Clients, particularly large corporations, have DEI programs, and examine firms on what their DEI policies are to ensure that your culture matches their culture. If you do not match, they go elsewhere.
Has Your Fee Structure Changed for Clients?
Steffen: A little bit. But it is easier said than done. Some clients want a fixed fee, but there are not very many things that you can do a fixed fee for. Maybe a simple contract review, an eviction or foreclosure would be appropriate for a fixed fee. But for the most part, clients want to have a success fee, so maybe you will lower the hourly rate a little bit, and then there is a contingency component if you are successful. Some of our national clients want a budget for the discovery period, a budget for pretrial and budget for trial. We are having to navigate all of that and having to change.
Gilbert: The difficulty that we all have is, how do we charge for the value of what we are providing? If I hire Mike Bonner for an hour and he says it costs $10,000, I am going to pay that because an hour of his time is worth it. It is weird to say to a client that my rate should be based on an hour, when really the hour that I am providing is worth much, much more than that. That’s a struggle for us right now.
Bonner: The profession is its own worst enemy in that we have created the billable hour mindset for all of our clients. It has become so widely accepted and used in most areas of practice that it is hard to get away from it. We have a group within the firm that structures alternative fee arrangements and we find oftentimes after you make a couple of proposals, [the client’s] just say, “Give us a 10% reduction off your hourly rate and you are hired.”
Is Artificial Intelligence Being Embraced by This Industry?
Bonner: We have engaged a number of technologies and are working with different technology providers, but it is the early days of AI. There are mixed experiences with it. We are waiting for it to be improved. As an aging baby boomer, dealing with artificial intelligence is something I have to learn and a lot of our lawyers are baby boomers or just below baby boomers. But firm-wide, it is something we are looking at hard. Clients will demand more efficient, cost-effective services once they are available more broadly through AI or other tools. They will come to law firms and insist on that. We are all going to have to figure it out.
Gianelloni: It is a required tool. We have clients now approaching us and say they tested some of the AI platforms, and they can do a pretty good job of summarizing a deposition in three hours so that is what they will pay us for. That is one of the things that has forced us to start testing every platform. We are going to have to use it whether we like it or not. My biggest concern is that we are so personal with our clients and with everything that we do, and it impersonalizes the process, or at least there is a danger of that. That is hard because I sell me, and I think everybody in this room does that. It is a little harder to sell me and a computer.
Dwiggins: I find it scary in some regards, especially with cyber risks and making sure you have adequate insurance and constantly changing your MFAs (multifactor authentication) and having multiple. AI is being utilized to get around MFAs. I’ve had a couple of cases this year, and I am familiar with a handful of banks where wire fraud is occurring. A client will email wiring instructions, and you have to tell them that you do not take it that way. You have to do a share file, and then you do a verification. You have to go through all these extra steps now because it is being misused.
Gilbert: It is threatening because it is threatening the way that we do things and the way we are comfortable doing those things. But that does not change the fact that it is absolutely here. The younger lawyers that we are all struggling to understand do not look at this as a threat. They look at it as a normal part of their day. We have to figure out how to change our practice to embrace them.
Ricciardi: In this world of data security, where everyone is getting sued pretty much every day, more and more companies are being very cautious about letting a law firm put their documents or their depositions into an AI system for any purpose unless you happen to own the whole landscape, which is hard to do on a small scale. That is going to limit and slow things down a little bit.
Gilbert: There is a natural push-pull between the way we have done things in the past and the way we view things in the future. I tend to think about AI as not when it comes. It is absolutely here. There are programs that allow us to do things faster, that will make the way that we practice law today a distant memory in the next ten years. I think that the law firms that succeed will be the law firms that embrace it at a firm level and a at a lawyer level, because some of this stuff is absolutely fantastic, and it allows us to be better lawyers and not do certain things that we used to spend a lot of time on. Yes, there are economic impacts. Yes, clients have different views of what value is, but it is absolutely here. We need to, as an industry, figure out how to embrace it and make sure it is appropriate. It allows us to do our jobs the way that we should so we serve our clients and do not commit malpractice. But whether it is creating faster contracts, predicting outcomes in trial courts, understanding how statistics function in a number of given situations, AI, absolutely will enable all of us to do that better, faster, stronger, and quicker, which we will have to figure out.
