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Key Takeaways
As the battle for legal talent wages on and bidding wars reach new heights, law firms must carefully evaluate and adapt their talent management practices. It’s not enough to increase salary packages and hope for the best. In order to attract and retain legal talent, you must understand what truly motivates them. In this article, we explore the importance of culture, work-life balance, and career development opportunities — and provide 7 tips to help you improve these areas.
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Law firms across the globe — but particularly in the US and the UK’s “Magic Circle” — are in the midst of a vicious talent war. New hires are hard to come by, and lawyers' loyalties are easily swayed.
This has driven some law firms to inflate salaries in order to prevent talent from walking away. Indeed, in recent years, average lawyer salaries in the US have increased by almost 20%.
However, while lucrative pay certainly influences retention, it’s not the only factor legal professionals consider when deciding whether to stay or go.
More money, more problems
While Magic Circle firms in London pay considerably more than firms in, say, Bristol or Manchester, they demand much more from their employees. In a regional firm, legal trainees can expect to work an average of 38 hours per week. This number jumps to 50 in a Magic Circle firm. That’s an additional one and a half working days every single week.
It’s no wonder, then, that 21% of Magic Circle trainees feel their hours are too high (compared to just 3% of trainees in regional firms) — or that they experience greater levels of stress.
The question is: is the money worth the pain?
What influences lawyer retention?
When considering what legal professionals actually want from their next career move, these are the top 6 influencing factors:
- Opportunities for promotion
- More interesting work/more responsibilities
- Better work-life balance
- Clear career progression
- Better benefits package
- Better working culture/relationships with partners
Notably, financial incentives don’t even make it into the top 3 leading factors. So, while money is important, it isn’t everything.
If you want to attract and keep the best legal talent, you need to provide more competitive workplace experiences, benefits, and opportunities. Here’s how.
Law firm talent management: 7 tips for boosting retention
1. Onboard trainees effectively
Just because a new hire has shaken a few hands and signed a work contract does not mean you’ve won them over completely. Loyalty takes time to build. And you should make a conscious effort to nurture it from day one.
Your onboarding process sets the scene for your new hires. It demonstrates what type of firm you are — both operationally and culturally — and how you value and support your employees. Get it wrong, and you could face a disengagement problem sooner than you think.
To onboard your new hires effectively, you must:
- Provide them with clear, step-by-step tasks for their first weeks and months
- Share helpful resources, including roles and responsibilities, SOPs, policies, e-learning courses, and how-to documents
- Introduce them to your partners and teams and, if possible, organize group meetings and social events
- Assign them a mentor to provide support and answer questions during their onboarding phase
- Set them up on your digital platforms and systems, with hands-on training if needed
2. Build compelling career pathways
Over a third of associates say career development opportunities are an important incentive when deciding whether or not to stay with a firm.
But not every trainee or associate has the same end-goal. Recent data suggest that only a quarter of associates want to make partner in their firm, with many being put off the idea altogether.
Your career development opportunities should reflect this. Instead of focusing exclusively on partner trajectory, create e-learning pathways centered around specialization and skills development. Branch out opportunities horizontally as well as vertically.
To ensure these learning experiences are as accessible and valuable as possible, build them via a comprehensive learning management system (LMS). The right LMS will allow you to:
- Build multimedia courses to support different learning styles
- String modules together into clear, step-by-step pathways
- Assign subject matter experts as tutors
- Test employee knowledge
- Automatically award certifications upon completion
- Keep an automatic record of user training
The self-service nature of an LMS encourages your legal professionals to develop their skills autonomously. All while giving team leaders clear, data-driven insights into their progress, which can be useful during 1:1 meetings and career development conversations.
3. Enliven your firm’s culture
Today’s trainees and associates don’t want to work for stuffy, old-fashioned law firms. They value strong cultures, fair working practices, and clear diversity and inclusion commitments.
If you’re lacking in any of these areas, it may be time to dig deep and make some adjustments. For example, reworking your messaging and value documents, implementing culture-driven schemes (such as volunteering days or company retreats), and collaborating with external partners and charities.
That being said, every firm has a culture. Sometimes, all you need to do is give it a platform and celebrate it.
Internal communications are crucial for this. They elevate your commitments, hammer home your values, and give your culture a distinct voice. They’re also more likely to strengthen employee buy-in and increase their sense of belonging.
With a centralized legal intranet, you can house these communications in one easily accessible location. That includes your brand assets, mission statements, partner-written blog updates, company events, and informal discussion rooms. So employees never have to go looking for your culture; it’s already woven into the fabric of your firm and its operations.
4. Celebrate employee wins
Employees that feel valued and respected are more likely to stay.
So, as part of your culture-driven initiatives, make an effort to develop and maintain reward and recognition schemes.
This could be as simple as publicly thanking employees for their hard work, awarding them with virtual badges and certificates, or declaring them employee of the month on the office noticeboard.
5. Make it easier to book holidays
Overworking is commonplace in the legal industry and employees are growing tired of it. So much so, that 71% of associates report “work-life balance” as the most important factor when job hunting.
Annual leave is a key to achieving this balance.
Though you can’t force your staff to take time off, you can simplify the process. An automated holiday planner encourages employees to book holiday days completely autonomously. There’s no risk of requests getting lost or forgotten. Everything lives in a transparent system, with notifications holding team leaders accountable.
Behind the scenes, managers can view a summary of employee-by-employee absence data, helping them unearth patterns that may indicate signs of disengagement.
6. Innovate your services and operations
Administrative bottlenecks, cumbersome manual processes, and disparate tech platforms may seem like small problems in isolation. But these problems mount up.
Over time, these annoyances may result in lawyers disengaging or leaving your firm altogether.
To improve efficiency and keep a firm grasp on your legal talent, scale up your digital transformation efforts and modernize your operations. Focus on areas that cause the most problems — whether that’s information retrieval, legal research, or contract reviews — and devise ways to streamline the work.
To illustrate what we mean in practice, let’s take a look at a relevant case study.
Switalskis Solicitors, a loyal Claromentis customer since 2021, harnesses InfoCapture — our native business process automation software — to augment their internal support requests.
Digitized e-forms give employees one location to request support and provide information in a standardized format. (Rather than a mismatch of emails, phone calls, and disparate folders.) The tickets all filter into one central location where managers and department heads can view progress and keep track of which staff members require more support. As well as simplifying an everyday task, this automated approach directly supports employee engagement, morale, and retention efforts.
Speaking of the software, Gemma Lockley (Senior Associate and Special Projects Lead at Switalskis) says:
“InfoCapture is the only application in Claromentis that has a significant learning curve. But in my view it is well worth the effort. It has huge possibilities in terms of streamlining processes, team collaboration and driving efficiency. I’m still building new IC projects to streamline and workflow processes four years after starting our intranet build. The possibilities seem almost endless!”
7. Provide AI-enabled support
Around 70% of legal professionals already personally use generative AI for work purposes. By “personally”, we mean completely of their own accord. This technology isn’t officially embedded in their firm’s operations; it’s a localized workaround.
To comply with staff expectations and ensure safe, governed usage of AI, provide approved tools of your own. Examples could include policy and document chatbot assistants that summarize contracts, highlight important passages of text, and simplify complex language (such as new regulatory requirements). AI search functionality, embedded in your digital workplace software, can also be a helpful tool for speeding up knowledge e-discovery and preventing costly bottlenecks.
Firms that provide these innovative AI solutions are more likely to retain current talent and attract younger generations of legal trainees.
Law firm talent management, made simple
The talent war isn’t as straightforward as many news outlets would have you believe. Though better-paying firms may appear to have the higher ground, their stronghold is actually quite weak.
Why? Because younger generations of legal talent don’t just want competitive salary packages.
Healthier working conditions, value-driven culture initiatives, innovative tech stacks, and career development opportunities are equally as important.
While your firm can’t transform its culture or operations overnight, there are ways to bolster your image and strengthen your retention efforts in the near-to-mid future:
- Refine and centralize your culture documents and initiatives in a comprehensive legal intranet software.
- Nurture your culture and bring teams together with two-way communications channels, rewards schemes, internal communications, and in-person events.
- Build step-by-step onboarding learning plans and self-service career pathways, and award associates for every course completion.
- Automate typically stress-inducing tasks, and harness intelligent and secure AI functionality where possible.
Eager to fast-track all of these initiatives in one fell swoop?
With Claromentis, you can. Our secure, AI-enabled digital workplace enables you to promote your culture, strengthen loyalty, and provide better, more competitive employee experiences. To find out more — and discover why firms like Switalski Solicitors and Sharkawy & Sarhan can’t do without our solution — book a discussion call with one of our experts.
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