The good eggs need clout

Lessons learned from the whole Lewis Brisbois & Barber Ranen mess

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably saw the crazy story that emerged last weekend about a pair of law firm partners caught saying all sorts of terrible, vile things in their work emails. If you missed it, I would highly recommend checking out this overview from the LA Times, and David Lat’s well-written, comprehensive summary of everything that happened.

Over the past week, the scandal generated a ton of reactions across social media. I won’t rehash them here. Instead I’ll focus this article on the underlying dynamics of the legal industry that were revealed. I gave a quick preview on social media earlier this week:

Rule 1: Law firms will go to great lengths to protect and cater to their rainmakers

Rainmakers get special treatment. That’s not exactly news.

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In fact, it’s a phenomenon that I’ve written about extensively in the past (see here and here). But this whole Lewis Brisbois / Barber Ranen drama takes it even farther. Because rainmakers don’t just receive economic rewards. They get to do whatever they want. Which happens to include saying some absolutely terrible, vile things about other people.

Lewis Brisbois claims that they discovered these emails *only after* reviewing them upon Barber and Ranen’s departure. I don’t believe it. Certainly *some* of the firm’s senior partners were aware. After all, the comments were shared via work email—which shows a level of comfort Barber and Ranen had that this type of behavior was acceptable by others at the firm.

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I have a theory

About why this happened at Lewis Brisbois, and why certain firms are more susceptible to this kind of thing. As I’ve written before, firms value rainmakers so much because they’re critical for distribution.

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You need these superstar partners to bring clients & revenue to the firm. That’s why rainmaker income has risen dramatically over the years.

However, Lewis Brisbois primarily focuses on insurance work, an area that consistently experiences pricing challenges. It’s got elastic demand. There’s lots of competition in this practice area, and low cost providers are starting to make their way into this market. I mean, are you surprised to hear that LB has the lowest revenue per lawyer among the AmLaw 100?

These factors suggest that Lewis Brisbois might have struggled to provide sufficiently generous compensation packages to retain rainmakers in comparatively lucrative practice areas at the firm.

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Such as in labor & employment—Barber and Ranen’s practice area.

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When you can’t offer a valuable employee enough money to retain them, you have to offer them something else. Very often, that something else includes the freedom to do whatever the hell they want. Maybe that means autonomy or never having to come into the office. In this particular case, it seems to also mean the freedom to say all sorts of vile things out in the open.

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And even then, LB wasn’t able to keep these partners from leaving and opening their own firm!

This is all speculation, of course.

But I’ve seen this dynamic play out in many places in my career. Any firm that’s too reliant on superstar lawyers to bring in revenue is at risk of having a culture that tolerates this type of behavior. I’m not saying it’s all law firms. But it’s … a lot of firms.

More than you might think.

For example, I saw it happen firsthand back when I was a plaintiffs’ lawyer. In the class action world, each firm has one superstar lawyer who has the resume needed to be appointed lead counsel in these massive class actions—cases involving hundreds of millions of dollars. These lead counsel positions are *incredibly* lucrative, often generating 7 to 8 figure fees for the attorneys.

Having the resume to win lead counsel position in one of these cases is massively valuable, and gives these lawyers enormous internal power. That sort of power enables them to do virtually whatever they want to do.

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To be clear, none of what I’m saying excuses Barber or Ranen’s conduct in any way. Nor does it absolve Lewis Brisbois of all responsibility. The reason I’m writing about all this though, is to help explain the incentives and dynamics behind why discrimination is tolerated at many places you might not expect.

It’s not because these firms are filled to the brim with bigots and bad eggs. It’s because the good eggs just don’t have enough clout. Which brings me to the second unspoken rule.

Rule 2: If you're junior and can't find an internal sponsor, it might have nothing to do with how good you are at work

One of my biggest realizations after I left Biglaw was how important it is to have the right sponsor to help you succeed. A sponsor, unlike a mentor, is someone who takes a personal interest in your advancement at the firm. They don’t just give advice, they help you get valuable training, key assignments, introduce you to clients, and perhaps most importantly, advocate for you to other seniors, behind closed doors.

No one really talks about the importance of sponsors, or what they do, publicly. Instead we get a whole bunch of articles about “how to succeed at a law firm” that discuss the importance of doing good work. To the extent there’s any mention of building relationships with senior lawyers, it’s all vague descriptions of mentorship which is very different than sponsorship.

As I explained in Being a good associate is overrated:

The most important factor to making partner is having a strong sponsor who provides valuable work assignments, advice, and support. Not excelling at the basics. However, the true impact of the sponsor is often not obvious to partners and rising stars, who may attribute their promotion to other factors such as paying close attention to detail or doing grunt work.

The worst part about these articles focusing solely on “being good at the work” is the underlying assumption—that if you fail to advance at a law firm, it’s your own fault, for not being good enough. This a complete myth, but it keeps getting repeated because the authors don’t want to admit the whole truth.

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Internal relationships with influential partners preserves the status quo

The scarcity of associates with sponsors is a huge reason why Biglaw struggles with DEI. They always start with these large, diverse classes of associates. But none of these associates end up making partner. It’s not because they’re not talented or smart enough. It’s because no one’s looking out for them. No one’s taking bets on them.

Many senior partners just can’t relate to juniors who come from a different background than themselves. So these juniors don’t get sponsors. I don’t believe the discrimination is intended, at least not in most cases. But sometimes, it absolutely is, and you know it because there’s proof of how the partners truly feel. Like when they say terrible things in their work emails.

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I’m don’t have a solution to this problem. I’m not sure anyone else does either, even though a lot of law firm leaders are genuinely trying. They know diversity is good business. It’s good for recruiting, and it makes clients happy.

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In my opinion, the solution will ultimately come from law firm lawyers with internal influence. The rainmakers. That’s part of the reason why I decided to invest a lot of time and energy on business development articles & breakdowns for lawyers. Because teaching lawyers how to sell is one small way I can help the good eggs get the influence they need to drive change in this imperfect world.

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Latest News

• The sanctions hearing for the case where the lawyers cited to made-up cases based on ChatGPT took place earlier this week. Spoiler alert: It did not go well for the lawyers. The judge will issue a written opinion, and I’ll probably write about it more when that happens. I mean, I’ve already made memes and Tik Toks about it.

• Cooley announced this week that it would be delaying start dates for first years in exchange for paying them $100,000. This goes to show how difficult it is to forecast demand for legal services more than a couple years out. Even for some of the world’s most sophisticated firms.

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1. I’ve received some feedback saying “Is it really an unspoken rule that rainmakers get away with so much? Isn’t that common knowledge?” My response: It’s common knowledge for some people—but not all. For example, in the immigrant community I was raised in, I was taught that if you did well on academics, landed a good job, and did good work, success would inevitably follow. It didn’t help that many of the lawyers who spoke to me while I was a law student, summer associate, or junior, emphasized the same lessons: Do good work, good things will follow. This is especially true in the Biglaw world. No one wants to go on the record as saying “who you know is more important than what you know.”

2. Why does this happen so often at firms? Many of them tout their commitment to diversity and inclusion, and emphasize their collegial culture. Personally I believe firm leadership at most firms are genuinely trying. They are genuinely perplexed by why their initiatives don’t translate into a more diverse partnership.

3. A deeper explanation of a firm’s distribution power can be found in the first part of my article This time is different

4. That’s because law firms share profits with all the partners. Some firms are more lopsided than others, but essentially the ones who bring in the most revenue tend to subsidize the ones who bring in less. At a firm full of partners doing insurance work—there’s gonna be a LOT of mouths to feed. Contrast this situation with say, another firm that does lots of high margin work. Their partners presumably generate so much revenue, and excess profit, that they can afford to pay lateral partners huge amounts of money without impacting existing partners.

5. Labor & employment might not be the most high margin practice area, especially compared to say, M&A. But it’s more lucrative than insurance work. L&E also happens to be in a unique moment right now where demand exceeds supply (I recently heard from a known source that L&E hourly rates have been rising quickly over the past few years—likely from all of the employment matters created by macro factors.)

6. Of course, it ultimately wasn’t enough to retain Barber and Ranen—which is why they eventually decided to spin off into a new firm.

7. The rainmaker at my former firm was pretty level-headed and reasonable as far as I knew. He also happened to be a fantastic lawyer. But it was clear that success at the firm depended on your relationship to him, or to one of his key lieutenants. This was a reality I failed to recognize and adapt to, and was part of the reason why things didn’t work out for me there.

8. There’s little incentive to share how things really work. If a partner says they made it solely because they did good work, it looks good to potential clients.

9. For an interesting discussion about how senior people talk when amongst themselves, check out this article “Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk” from Ribbonfarm.” It’s part of a series called The Gervais Principle which uses the hit TV show The Office to discuss corporate politics and dynamics.

10. Relatedly, I made a Tik Tok about Lewis Brisbois earlier this week, and one of the commenters—presumably a client of the firm—said that they’re no longer allowed to use them.

11. How do you become a rainmaker, anyways? Your firm’s partners probably won’t offer you access to their clients to build relationships with. So what you really need to do is get your own clients. Find your own power base, or build one from scratch. Keep searching for it until you find it. Even if it takes you off the beaten path. Don’t just settle for the crumbs they leave at the table. If you do that, those in power will never take you seriously. Because they will never view you as a true partner.