Baseball, in some ways, is perfect.
If you bat .366 for a lifetime, your name is Ty Cobb.
If you batted .406 in a single year, your name is Ted Williams, and it’s 1941.
For purposes of today’s column, baseball is perfect in another way: We know you earned your job. If you can bat .333 and are serviceable anywhere in the field, you’ve earned your spot on a major league roster. Your qualifications for the job — batting .333 — and your performance in the job — continuing to bat .333 — are identical.
Politicians, naturally, got me to thinking about this subject. The qualifications for the job might include being rich (so you can fund your own campaign) or being reasonably attractive (so your TV ads are enticing) or being able to deliver a memorized speech as though it were extemporaneous (so your campaign events don’t sound stilted) or some such thing.
Your performance in the job, however, is completely unrelated to your qualifications for the job. It’s hard, in fact, to put one’s finger on exactly how one should evaluate politicians’ job performances. Legislators don’t, for example, write laws; that’s all done by staff. And typical legislators don’t generate support for laws; that’s done by the senior folks in leadership. Maybe legislators are supposed to be able to distinguish liberal laws from conservative laws, so the legislator’s record over time means something — although I’d like to believe that a thinking person is liberal on some issues and conservative on others and doesn’t always vote the party line.
In any event, a legislator’s qualifications for a job are unrelated to a legislator’s capacity to perform the job. It’s a mismatch between how you get the job and whether you succeed in it.
How about lawyers?
At big firms, junior lawyers must be smart, conscientious, hard-working, gifted writers, and adept on their feet. Check those boxes, and you’ll succeed while you’re young.
Senior lawyers must attract business. Sometimes that coincides with being smart or conscientious or hard-working or a gifted writer or adept on your feet. But in some ways it’s an unrelated skill.
There’s a funny dichotomy here. If you started at a firm and worked your way up into the partnership ranks, you may well have the skills needed of young lawyers and old ones: You probably earned your partnership in part by being a good associate and maintained your status by generating business. (Some firms might invite into the partnership associates who were inept lawyers but attracted huge amounts of business, but that seems like a dangerous bed to lie in.)
Lateral partners, on the other hand, are judged on a different scale. No one really knows if a lateral partner is technically competent. No one has worked with the lateral for years and seen the lateral develop over time; the lateral’s work product, if any is reviewed at all, may well have been generated by others on the lateral’s team. The lateral’s quality as a lawyer may be suspect; the lateral was judged primarily on the lateral’s ability to bring in business.
This certainly doesn’t say anything about the quality of any individual lawyer. Any individual lateral partner could be good or bad; that probably wasn’t what they were judged on.
But this may say something about the nature of a firm: Where a firm consists primarily of home-grown lawyers, the firm may be better able to control quality in the way the firm prefers.
Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.