Instead Of Job Perks And Swag, Firms Should Just Offer Associates More Money

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Over the course of my career, I have worked at a number of law firms, both big and small. Although I recently opened up my own shop, I have prior experience as an associate at firms that offered an array of job perks and other incentives. Even though firms may think that job perks increase morale, my experiences demonstrate that the best way to motivate attorneys is to simply pay them more money.

One common perk at firms is free food, and several of the firms at which I worked offered free food to attorneys and staff. This job perk was apparently provided to boost morale and show associates that the partners cared about their employees. One of the small shops I worked at had bagels and pastries every Friday, and this was a welcome treat. The bagels were from a pretty awesome New York City bagel shop, so the food definitely met my standards. I regularly had two or even three bagels when they were offered on Fridays, since that firm paid associates low salaries, and I wanted to make up for the income gap by consuming free food! In addition, the firm had happy hours after work on most Fridays, and they would buy premium beer and snacks for attorneys at the office. Again, I had my fill of the free drinks and snacks in order to make up for my low salary at this firm.

However, the real issue with morale at that shop was compensation. The firm did not offer bonuses when I was there, and this was a sore subject among associates. In addition, the firm did not reimburse associates for bar dues, CLE expenses, and other costs associated with being an attorney. Of course, the firm probably didn’t spend an exorbitant amount of money on free bagels, snacks, and drinks, but this cash might have been enough to pay the bar dues of attorneys in the office. Paying for this expense or boosting compensation could have greatly impacted morale, and firm management should have considered doing this other than offering smaller job perks.

Sometimes, offering free food or other perks can actually backfire on partners. I once worked at another shop where the firm provided free pizza to associates on Fridays. This would have been a great treat, but office management regularly ordered pizza from the worst pizza shop in the entire city where we worked. I have absolutely no idea why we ordered pizza from this place — maybe the officer manager was getting a kickback for our order, or maybe the pizza was just super cheap. The complaints got so bad that we later alternated between this bad pizza place and a decent pizza shop that made pizza I didn’t need to pour garlic powder on to make palatable.

However, this compromise actually hurt morale at the office! The associates began referring to days we got pizza from the crappy shop as a “bad pizza day” and days we got pizza from the good pizza shop as a “good pizza day.” Whenever we complained about the food situation, or once suggested that we get healthier options every now and then, office management threatened to cancel pizza day entirely. This whole situation affected morale, since not considering our protests about the pizza selection proved that there was dysfunctional management in the office.

One of the biggest gripes at that shop was that nonlawyers had immense power over the attorneys, and the office manager controlling where we got pizza played into this narrative. Whenever there was a “bad pizza day,” we would regularly have tons of pizza left over that would be thrown out, since few people (except for cheapos like myself) were interested in wasting calories on the crappy pizza. If firm management devoted resources to compensation, instead of pizza days, I bet they could have better incentivized associates and avoided the office politics that came along with Pizza Fridays.

Another job perk that many firms provide to associates is swag with the firm’s logo on it. I’m not talking about pens, note pads, and other chotchkies that no one would ever consider to be a job perk. Rather, I’m talking about the more substantive items that firms provide to associates in order to both promote their brand and provide a gift to attorneys.

I have seen some amazing firm swag over the years. Probably the coolest item I’ve ever seen was a pretty sweet smartphone speaker dock with a top firm’s name emblazoned on the front. However, most of the time, firms are lazy with swag, and these items don’t really provide value to attorneys.

I once worked at a firm that went crazy with swag, and gave each associate a hat, golf shirt, vest (which made me feel like Marty McFly!), water bottle, water bottle koozie (but people called it a wine bottle koozie), smartphone charger, lunchbag (who would use this — we’re not school kids!), backpack, and probably some other crap I can’t even remember. Of all of these items, only the backpack (an expensive Tumi bag) really provided substantial value to associates. The backpack also helped attorneys protect their firm computers, and I got some nice compliments from other lawyers while wearing this bag. However, if firms do not provide useful swag to attorneys, they should just chuck the swag and pay associates more money. This will have a much greater impact on morale than gifting associates chintzy items.

All told, I understand why firms think they can spend a small sum of money on job perks and swag, and that this relatively minor investment will go a long way toward improving morale. However, the best way to incentivize associates and increase morale at a firm is to simply pay attorneys more money.

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

Zimbabwe Under Emmerson Mnangagwa – The Zimbabwean

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Tinashe L. Chimedza penned this piece in response to Op-Ed: This is how Zimbabwe has changed since I became president: Emmerson Mnangagwa

Two years ago Zimbabwe’s National Army carried out a putsch that removed President Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Once the coup was carried out Zimbabwe’s parliament began a process of ‘impeaching’ a President who was already under ‘house arrest’. The global spin on that putsch was that this was a ‘military assisted transition’ and there was a global silence to accept this narrative because a lot of people, especially Zimbabweans, were just desperate because of the collapsing economy. South Africa too proved to be a key decision broker and the presence of hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans in South Africa swayed the political class there to say ‘anything but Mugabe’ and this was shared by global power especially the British.  It is reported that the British embassy to Zimbabwe played a critical role to ‘package’ the putsch as a ‘military assisted transition’ and the propaganda worked for while.

The world was made to gulp a narrative that there was a ‘democratic’ and ‘legal’ process under way in Zimbabwe. But since then, by any measure, Zimbabwe’s politics and economics have worsened.. The reason is very simple. The men (and few women) who now rule Zimbabwe had stayed so much in the shadow of Mugabe yet they were the real crude power that kept the old man in power and when tried to purge them by firing the Vice President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, they had to strike back to defend their interests.

What happened in the November 2017 was a repeat episode of what happened in the 2008 election when Morgan Tsvangirai won. The military is now firmly in charge of the politics and the economics in Zimbabwe.  The mess that this has created has now cascaded into every facet of Zimbabwe’s political economy and this is happening with disastrous challenges in health, in the economy and the country has descended into almost a military state.

Recently the government announced they were firing hundreds of striking doctors. There has been an impasse for almost two months and the hospitals have become almost death traps with the absence of doctors. For almost two months the medical doctors, the few that are there, have had a long dispute with the government over salaries and conditions in the public hospitals. The crisis became so acute that women are having to go to ‘backyard’ untrained ‘midwives’ to give birth.

Zimbabwe’s referral hospitals, largely built many decades ago, have become almost ghost like places. Whole wards lie abandoned, sometimes citizens have to bring in clean water and some hospitals have said they are closing mortuaries. In Masvingo, 300 km to the south of Harare, women have been giving birth by candle light and sometimes using phone torches as light.  Missionary hospitals can not cope and some have issued statements begging patients not to come and camp outside, sometimes for weeks.  One doctor broke down when interviewed and citizens have to resort to forming independently funded initiatives to support the major hospitals.

Recently the Minister of Finance tabled a proposed budget before the National Assembly. The proposed budget bill shows declining revenue, a contacting economy, foreign aid continues to be significant in the budget and the government has retained an intermediate money transfer tax as a source of revenue. But there is more of the mess. The Parliamentary Public Accounts committee unearthed billions of unexplained expenditure and the response of the Ministry of Finance was to issue a ‘law’ pardoning irregular expenditure, without accounting, over ‘Us$10billion’.  This is an equivalent of almost 3 national budgets.  The public finance system is in shambles and this is deliberate because the central bank then uses a ‘preference’ system to allocate subsidies worth billions to businesses linked to the political elites.

Elsewhere the country’s pension system has almost collapsed and at the centre of that are managers and elites linked to the ruling party with estimates that up to US$5billion has been wiped off from pensions. With the chaos in agriculture and mining Zimbabwe also faces a draught which could have been made manageable by proper policies to boost productivity. State and party elites want to superintend over the latest so called ‘smart agriculture’ input scheme, worth billions, so they can subsidise themselves and find a platform to create patronage. All these schemes, of literally looting the state, has serious consequences on the capacity of the state to transform the economy and set Zimbabwe on a path to prosperity. Inflation has been so bad that the state agency tasked to measure year on year inflation has been banned from publishing that number.  One just has to track the rate of price increases and see how income has collapsed.

While the President has had a great public relations team what is emerging is that the transition in 2017 was a false change.  Zimbabwe actually under military rule and the descent cannot be stopped by opinion pieces but by comprehensive reform.

[i] Tinashe L. Chimedza is a Zimbabwean. He has written for The Elephant, for The East African, for Zimbabwe Briefing and published book chapters and journal papers on Zimbabwe and Southern Africa.

On world toilet day, “Leave no one behind”

Post published in: Featured

Morning Docket: 11.20.19

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* A New York City attorney has been accused of filing over 300 lawsuits on behalf of two clients who had no idea he was representing them. [New York Post]

* Ben & Jerry’s has been sued for allegedly misleading consumers about claims that its milk is sourced from “happy cows.” Wonder if the cows will get subpoenaed… [USA Today]

* New York has joined California and others in suing Juul, the maker of electronic cigarettes, for allegedly illicit conduct in connection with advertising to minors. [NBC]

* Ja Rule has been dismissed from a class action about the failed Fyre Festival. No need to read the article, there will probably be three documentaries about the lawsuit someday. [Billboard]

* A South African lawyer died in a freak accident this week after she dropped a loaded gun in court. [People]

* A lawyer in Texas has been arrested for returning to the firm that had just axed her and firing a gun. [Dallas Morning News]

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

Zimbabwe is open for business, says President Mnangagwa – The Zimbabwean

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Dubai: Zimbabwe is open for business and committed to creating conducive conditions and incentives for investors, Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa said on Monday at the Global Business Forum Africa 2019 in Dubai.

During an interactive session on the first day of the forum, Mnangagwa explained that economic zones are being created in Zimbabwe as the government looks to attract foreign investment. He stressed the importance of developing new initiatives that invest in skills development and human capital.

The Zimbabwean President noted that his country is ready to engage and re-engage with the international community with the government focusing its efforts on revitalising the country’s economy.

“Up until now we have had no support from international institutions – we’ve had no lines of credit for 20 years. Bilateral relations have dried up. We need to introduce a raft of economic reforms to attract global capital. We must create an environment where investors feel comfortable,” he said.

“We have thousands of top brains outside of Zimbabwe — people left because of the sanctions. We want to reverse the brain drain,” he said, adding that innovation hubs have been introduced to harness the potential of youth and foster a culture of entrepreneurship.

He concluded by saying, “I say to the world – come and make money here, all opportunities are opening up – in agriculture, mining and energy.”

The fifth edition of GBF Africa, which concluded on Tuesday, is being organised by Dubai Chamber under the theme “Scale-Up Africa”, the high-level forum brings together heads of state, policymakers, prominent business leaders, entrepreneurs and industry experts from the UAE and Africa to explore new avenues of economic cooperation.

Technology: Search Terms Are Dead. Or Are They?

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The funeral procession for the use of search terms to find relevant documents in electronic discovery started a long time ago. I think it began with Judge Peck’s DaSilva Moore opinion in 2012. So, why is it then that eight years later, search terms remain the number one means for identifying the relevant, non-privileged, and proportional information in discovery?

I asked a few experts in the eDiscovery field this precise question, and here’s what they told me.

George Socha, co-founder of the EDRM and now managing director at BDO:

The reports of search terms’ death are, as Mark Twain supposedly quipped, ‘greatly exaggerated.’ The effective use of search terms (by which most mean, I suspect, Boolean searching) long has been and continues to be a powerful tool with a wide range of highly effective applications. Were we to lose the ability to deploy search terms, we would be severely constrained in our quest to find the data that matters most.

Craig Ball, Texas attorney, professor, and forensic technologist:

Blame it on Google . . . or Westlaw . . . or Lexis . . . or any of the countless places that have conditioned us to use and trust keyword search. Because lexical search reliably shows us examples of what we seek but not what we are missing, it feels like it works.  Of course, discovery isn’t about finding examples; it’s about retrieving as much responsive information as can be found. On that score, keyword search performs poorly, but it’s the devil we know.

Tom O’Connor, consultant and veteran eDiscovery practitioner:

Tools like technology-assisted review and analytics are still black box mysteries to most attorneys. The lack of standards, a dearth of open discussion, pricing disparities — these all lead to one big ball of confusion. And it’s common to say that law schools don’t teach technology. But the one thing they do teach is search. Every law student is given a Lexis or Westlaw account and they know how to search the internet and their own email. So, they can use a simple, easy to understand technology that they’ve been using for years or a complex, inordinately expensive tool that no one can adequately explain. Do the math.

So, what’s wrong with using search terms? Well, the use of search terms to locate relevant material in electronic discovery is fraught with potential error. Search syntax, misspellings, and the vagaries of the English language all render searches that are not adequately vetted unreliable.

On the other hand, the more advanced tools making use of AI, machine learning, and analytics are expensive, and some tools require nothing short of a data science expert to understand the outcomes.

I took part in a nearly two-year long project with the EDRM, the outcome of which was the development of TAR Guidelines published by the EDRM earlier this year. One of the principal issues we were trying to address and rectify is the reticence of practitioners — lawyers, specifically — to adopt and more widely use TAR tools.  More than once during the debate and writing of that paper the subject of search terms arose, not so much as a substitute for TAR, but as this sort of nagging alternative that prompted more questions than we wanted to answer given the focus of our task.

And so here we are, nearly a year later, and what has changed since the EDRM TAR Guidelines paper was published? Despite recent studies by Research and Markets suggesting that the global legal technology artificial intelligence market is expected to grow from $3.2 billion in 2019 to $37.8 billion in 2026, a CAGR of nearly 36 percent, the use of TAR and advanced analytic tools in legal discovery remains fairly low.

Clearly, part of the problem is education. As Tom and Craig point out above, search is taught at an early age and the use of Boolean search proliferates throughout law school. What’s missing in law school curricula is the mandatory inclusion of advanced technologies like machine learning and analytics tools that would render a newly minted lawyer more technologically competent. With new bar association technical competence and ethics rules arising around the country, it’s kind of surprising that law schools and technology companies have not gotten the message in this regard.

I also feel like there’s a lot of stale if not obsolete information available to practitioners that do not help advance the cause. Consider the recent decision in Nuvasive, Inc. v. Alphatech Holdings, Inc., No. 18-CV-0347 (S.D. Ca.) (10/7/2019), where the parties to a patent litigation got into a discovery dispute about the use of search terms. The dispute stemmed in part from the parties’ consideration of a model order on electronic discovery, fashioned under a local rule, that required the requesting party to identify custodians and search terms and limited searches to five custodians and five search terms per custodian.

That is simply not a way to conduct discovery. Finding that it is the responding party who is best situated to evaluate the means for identifying and preserving ESI, the court held that local model order to be flawed and inconsistent with Rule 34. “[N]othing in Rule 34 requires a requesting party to identify custodians or search terms,” the court ruled. The court also observed:

“[T]he world of electronic discovery has moved well beyond search terms. While search terms have their place, they may not be suited to all productions. Technology has advanced and software tools have developed to the point where search terms are disfavored in many cases [citing DaSilva Moore]. The Model ESI Order, in its reliance on search terms, is obsolete.”

So, the courts need to play a larger role in advancing technology competence as well. They can do so with rulings like this and by encouraging parties in discovery to put aside their partisan positions, actually cooperate in the phase of litigation which no one really enjoys, and make real the “just, speedy and inexpensive” provisions in Rule 1 of the FRCP.

Search terms are not dead yet, but it’s clear there are alternatives that should be explored.

Mike Quartararo

Mike Quartararo is the President of the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS), a professional member association providing training and certification in e-discovery. He is also the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery and a consultant providing e-discovery, project management and legal technology advisory and training services to law firms and Fortune 500 corporations across the globe. You can reach him via email at mquartararo@aceds.org. Follow him on Twitter @mikequartararo.

Dying Industry Pins Hope On Idiots Buying Into An Impossible Trade Deal

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Hedge funds are finding Alpha in the fallacy of a US/China trade accord.