What if meeting with a lawyer was the best thing that happened to you in a given week? What if future generations don’t understand lawyer jokes because the profession is known for its high moral standing? What if lawyers were rich and revered?
These were the possibilities explored by a September 2011 Lab held in partnership with Akina, a business development consulting firm that mainly serves the legal profession. Partners at Akina launched Generation Generosity, a movement designed to encourage such higher aspirations for attorneys and those who work with them. To help out, Insight Labs gathered lawyers and others invested in the field to discuss what a radically better legal profession might look like.
Following the session, Labs Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson spoke with Alycia Sutor of Akina about what they learned and how it might inform where Generation Generosity goes next. Their conversation touches on the role various types of attorneys might play in the movement, the way lawyers are perceived in society, and the potential of the profession to help people and institutions love each other more perfectly.
Andrew Benedict-Nelson: So if you go back in your mind to before the Lab, to August or so, how were you thinking about Generation Generosity?
Alycia Sutor: We were hoping it would be, frankly, a space holder for a movement that would capture the imagination of people who are in the profession of law. We were hoping we could spark a different vision of what lawyers could be, particularly lawyers in private practice. We wanted to create a space for a conversation to begin.
ABN: I think it’s an interesting idea, a place holder movement. I’m trying to think of some equivalent in my experience. For some reason I’m reminded of the feeling in 2004 in the early months of the Howard Dean candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, that feeling that people were constructing something together but they didn’t really know what it was.
AS: That makes sense – the idea is the possibility that life could be different. It wouldn’t have change according to our particular vision – just the same overall direction or orientation.
ABN: So what would you say you learned from the Lab about how you will make that kind of change happen?
AS: We learned that we don’t want to offer people the choice of whether there is a problem with the status quo or not. Ultimately, we got to that, but it took a long time and everyone ended up agreeing we need something to be different than what we have today, so let’s stop debating that.
The other thing we learned is that this is going to require a lot of small conversations. This has got to happen organically and with flexibility because individual environments will need to apply broad principles that support big aspirations to their own unique contexts. The more places we can bring people together around this conversation, and the more outlets we can use to reach people, the more likely definitive actions will be to take root that can cause a major shift.
Another thing we’ve seen since the Lab is that there seems to be a groundswell of support and longing for a greater vision of the legal profession. As a result of the Lab, a number of articles have been published on blogs and in print media that have gotten significant response in the legal community. It affirms to us that we were spot-on, that there is an issue and a problem here, but that people have yet to find a sense of how to attack it. So we are going to be pulling together a future series of conversations to see what solutions could look like.
ABN: What are some of the other things you think you learned about the methods you’ll need to employ to make this movement happen?
AS: From the feedback in the session, I think we learned that this isn’t going to be accomplished by asking the firms in the AmLaw 200 to change first. We’re going to look for small pockets where change can happen easily and quickly. We’ll be paying attention to the managing partners of smaller firms, like some of the people in the Lab – Mike Moynihan of Freeborn Peters or Bryan Schwartz of Levenfeld Pearlstein.
Third, based on conversations that Tim had with his editor at the Journal, we think there might be an opportunity to bring in in-house counsel in this movement. These are people who already exposed from their work in corporate environments to the notion of helping other people develop into the best versions of themselves…how to empower, equip and inspire others to a vision that is bigger than any of the individual interests in an organization.
One of the things we articulated in our blog post after the Lab is that a number of dichotomies seemed to emerge in the session that need to be further explored and blown up, like being a good lawyer is antithetical to being a good human. Also,the current process used to create lawyers is really, really good at breaking people down. We acknowledge that there is a place for tearing people down – that it is part of the cycle of learning. But you do that in order to rebuild people into something better. Right now there is no rebuilding going on. So we think in-house counsel could be a great bridge to connect to organizations that have learned how to build people up and could give law firms better models.
Think what we could do if we get together the in-house counsel from companies like Gore-Tex, Google, Zappo’s, Southwest – highly engaged organizations.
ABN: Well sure, those organizations are like the “it girl” companies. They’re like Pippa Middleton – if they make any change in their outfit, everyone notices. And it’s not because Zappo’s is necessarily the greatest model for anyone’s business – people seemed interested in them regardless of their particular relevance.
Were there any particular moments or exchanges from the Lab that reinforced these particular points or were valuable to you in other ways?
AS: I think of when Bryan Schwartz asked if it was really important for lawyers to be respected or revered. The notion that he was willing to give that away so easily or write that off as impossible – that to me crystallized the problem. Why is it that lawyers don’t think they can both be revered and do their jobs well?
ABN: How did you feel when he said that?
AS: That it was wrong. That it wasn’t how it was supposed to be. That once we cave into that belief system we’re headed down to the bottom.
ABN: When I interviewed him before the Lab, I asked him about a lawyer that he revered, and he didn’t have one. He said the qualities that he would like to see in lawyers were more like the qualities of his father, who was an engineer. Then he talked about how he hoped that would be achieved in the future. So he seemed to me like a person who would want to be respected, but not for the things we normally imagine lawyers being respected for. I wonder if the problem more generally is that lawyers don’t know what they want to be respected for.
AS: Yes. Often, they have this idea that they need to be jerks to be respected. But I see lawyers called to a higher calling. I think they can help people be the best version of who they really are. I think they should leave people in a better condition than when they came in and asked for help. I’m not just talking about serving a financial perspective or being made whole within the confines of the law. I’m talking about lawyers helping others be better people.
Another moment that has a similar effect on me was when Coco Soodek said her goal was to satisfy her clients’ objectives, which to her meant getting the business outcome that they wanted. But I think that the law and lawyers sell themselves far too short when it comes to their own potential. It could be that and it could be about more than getting the right litigation outcome or making sure the deal is closed. I may lose some lawyers here, but it could be about nurturing people and companies so they walk away from a litigious transaction with a superior viewpoint.
ABN: You know, as you ratchet up the level of aspiration, you say, “Maybe I’ll lose some lawyers here.” But I don’t know that that has to be the case. My point of comparison is the medical profession. I would say the normative model is approaching each patient with an ideal of human health. You never help a patient to smoke more effectively, no matter how much they might want to do it. There are some situations, like sports medicine, where you take particular objectives into account – if you were treating a quarterback and your only goal was to prevent their injuries, you would just tell them not to be a quarterback anymore – but in general you are working toward this ideal, or at least a norm, of human health.
So in a way it strikes me as odd that lawyers would use their clients’ wishes to override that ideal vision of legality, or justice, or whatever the profession’s ideal is. It seems odd that lawyers would assume that their clients’ stated objectives are the best they can do, instead of using those stated objectives as data points to help them move toward a greater goal (like a physician does with a patient’s stated symptoms).
Tim Tosta actually said something to that effect in the Lab. He said that in his work as a zoning lawyer he can help parties reach outcomes that they wouldn’t have thought of if they had all simply pursued their pre-conceived interests. I thought that was really inspiring.
AS: Everything that Tim said resonated 2,000 percent with me. Lawyers can be so literal that they forget that there is a greater goal behind what they are trying to accomplish. It’s only incidental that they are lawyers. What they are really trying to do is heal people through legal mechanisms. They can show love for other people and show them how to love each other. But that requires seeing them as whole human beings, not just parts of a transaction.
ABN: I’m fine with love. To me, that’s a fairly practical term. But I think another way of stating it might be that you are putting people’s relationships in order in the name of growth, through the means of legality.
AS: Yes, that’s exactly what it is.
ABN: I wonder if that’s why we’re so collectively dissatisfied with the way lawyers treat liability. It’s as if they’re listing all the ways your relationships with others could go wrong. It seems like there is a missing component of saying, “Here’s how you could make these relationships work so you don’t have to deal with all these nasty things I just told you about.”
What else struck you from the Lab?
AS: Tim at one point asked us to consider what we will find important at the end of our lives. In what way will you have impacted the world and made it a better place? I think that shifts people’s perspective to a higher altitude. So often we get so focused on what we are trying to accomplish technically that we lose the level of meaning and purpose.
ABN: We find in many Labs that even though it’s not logically coherent, people often put tactical problems ahead of forming a strategy. They say, “My boss will hate this, so I won’t even propose it.” And they put a lot of tactical effort into strategies they actually think will fail, or situations where they can’t see the strategy at all.
I’ll be honest – I don’t have a good answer to Tim’s question. Do you?
AS: When I’m 90 years old, if I’ve lived a successful life, I will have affected and impacted people so that they could be the best versions of who they were when they lived. I will have helped them see that and helped them become that – and brought hope to people who might not have seen that if I had not been there. I think there is much that has gone wrong in this world, and if I can be an instrument to help redeem some of that in any small part, I will feel like I’ve lived a successful life. That’s where this desire for Generation Generosity to reconcile, redeem, and change the profession of law comes from. It’s very personal.
ABN: It’s a personal question.
So tell me what you think about this. I think it’s safe to say that during the Lab we encountered some of the habits of thinking or ways of behavior that you think are holding back the legal profession. That’s not to say the participants weren’t doing it right – they’re talking about redesigning their own profession, which is inherently uncomfortable. And in a way, the fact that these problems came up in the session confirms that they’re real. But I’m curious to know whether you agree with me and what you think some of those habits of mind might be?
AS: I think there is the habit of always seeing what’s wrong instead of seeing what could be right and moving forward from an appreciate perspective. That’s how the practice of law currently works – you look for the loophole, the piece that could cause risk, the thing that could go wrong. You protect from that and build around it. That kind of thinking is antithetical to generative work. We saw some of this in the room.
Also, lawyers are paid to have an opinion on something. So they have to have an opinion on something whether it really matters to them personally or not. You have to get through all that clutter, because they bring the same level of tenacity to everything.
ABN: Well, most of the time, that’s what you want them to do. In their defense, it seems really difficult to ask lawyers to not think about tactical problems when that’s what they’re paid to discover all day. It would be like asking physicians to think about what they would do in a world without disease. Presumably there are many things they could still do to help all of us improve our health, but in the world we actually live in, they spend most of their time doing disease management.
AS: Not to mention the fact that they would probably be scared about how they would make money. There’s an innate fear that kicks in.
ABN: Let’s say that you had an e-mail list of all the lawyers in the country, and you could communicate to all of them a few main points about this Lab. What would they be?
AS: That the dichotomy between human and lawyer doesn’t have to exist. And life doesn’t have to suck! You can love what you do without leaving your profession. But it requires a collective rethinking of what the profession of law is about. All of that is possible, but it will require people to take ownership of that decision and take the next step, regardless of the part they play in the system.
And we’re moving on from here. The train has left the station. This is something that is happening – we’re providing a place for people to re-think the profession. One of the best things you can do right now is to acknowledge that you want something to be different and talk about it. Then think what you can do about it today, what small impact or action you can take to stand up for what you believe is right.
ABN: Now let’s shift the “To” line of your e-mail a little bit. Now you get to send it to every business person who has frequent contact with lawyers, but isn’t one. What would you tell them about the Lab?
AS: They get to be part of the solution as well as the beneficiaries of the change. They have to be part of the solution, because they are the ones who are in the position to call out when things aren’t right and to shout even louder when lawyers are doing it right
This was actually one of the pivotal moments of the Lab for me. Jeanne Hammerstrom, CMO of Benesch Friedlander, said that there are a lot of firms who are doing a lot of things right, like her firm, and empowering their people. We in the legal marketing and business development profession are in a great position to recognize those things and call them out. We can create platforms and channels to showcase lawyers and firms making the right choices And there are many other people who surround the profession of law who can give encouragement, let light in, call things out, hold people accountable, share examples.
The profession suffers from a great deal of insularity. It tends to focus on knowing what it knows and that’s it. But, frankly, there’s a whole lot we don’t even know we don’t know. That’s why it could be really terrific to let in fresh light by tapping into in-house counsel to build connections to other kinds of companies and leaders, particularly the ones that have figured out a way to create companies where clients want to buy, where great employees want to work and where amazing leaders are serving something bigger than themselves.
ABN: I imagine this dream panel of CEOs of those high-profile corporations getting together and saying, “Hey, we’d actually like to reboot the legal profession, because it turns out you guys aren’t collectively giving us what we want or need.” I’m guessing that’s not too far from what they think. What do you imagine such businesspeople saying?
AS: I’m sure you would hear things like they want lawyers who are not exclusively worried about getting things right all the time. They want people who have the ability to be instructive, not just informational. They want advice and wisdom
One thing we didn’t talk about in the Lab is that technology is going to have a huge effect on this aspect of the practice of law. Right now there is transactional work that is being valued at the same dollar level as the true wisdom work.
ABN: In our earlier interview Deb Knupp mentioned the idea of the lawyer-consultant hybrid, the “lawsultant.” That seems exciting to me, a sort of combination of the technical legal prowess with a more entrepreneurial kind of imagination. But I bet most lawyers hate the “lawsultant” idea. I think of physicians again. If you are a physician marketing foot cream you’ll probably get laughed out of town. But there are MD-PhD’s who have done important research and founded successful companies. They bring the perspective and experience of medical practice to what they do, even if they never see patients.
AS: And for lawyers, that place outside of formal legal practice is also where you can become a trusted adviser, the person who clients want to help them direct and navigate their entire lives. They trust them at that level because the trusted adviser helps them be a better person. Part of the resistance we get is because that may require lawyers to pay attention to some things most of them aren’t good at. They have to pay attention to human emotions. They have to pay attention to the relational impact of actions.
ABN: I think half of the Lab participants I interviewed said lawyers need more emotional intelligence, in one form or another. I also think of what Kel Chin said – lawyers have to not just understand, but empathize with, the goals that businesspeople and other clients hope to accomplish. Business seems like the most relevant example, in that businesses don’t desire to sue each other most of the time. And there are a lot of other things business do want to do that lawyers could probably help them with if they were paying closer attention.
I wonder if this is a tactic you could use to engage lawyers more broadly. I think that if you asked lawyers about the affective things clients want from them, they would give these same answers – trust, wisdom. Do you think it might work to then say, okay, we have a way of actually accomplishing that, but it’s fairly different from what you’ve been doing most of your careers?
AS: It comes down to how we define trust, confidence, advice. We would all name those same characteristics as the objective or goal. But I think I have a different sense of how those things get done from most working lawyers today. For instance, when lawyers think about client service (which creates trust and loyalty) they tend to think it’s about responding within 24 hours. They think it is about making no mistakes in their documents. They think it is about knowing the law in their area of practice better than anyone else. But it is that plus many deeper-level things, like really seeking to understand and meet someone else where they are at as a way to honor other people, like helping someone understand and anticipate how particular actions will impact the relationships they have, and guiding someone to understand how their choices may impact their integrity as a human being,
ABN: With some of the things you just said in mind, I’d like to think about one last group. Let’s say you could send that e-mail we talked about to everyone in the country who has only had infrequent interactions with lawyers, or none at all. What would you tell them about what happened in the Lab?
AS: My first reaction is that I would want to tell them that lawyers are lovable. I’d tell them that this conversation is something that really impacts the world, because lawyers are at the heart of everything. What we’re up to is improving how lawyers view themselves in that world and how the world views lawyers so that everyone can benefit from that impact. We have an opportunity to make a whole lot of things better for everyone.
ABN: This reminds me of something Scott Curran said in the Lab. There are lots of lawyers out there helping people accomplish all sorts of important projects. But you don’t hear about them – everyone instead thinks of lawyers as the ones who gum things up and tell you what you can’t do.
AS: It’s in part a PR problem. We’re not highlighting the right stuff. But it’s also because the lawyers who are bad are really, really bad.
ABN: In our interview before the Lab, you said you feel that lawyers minister to other people through legality. Do you think this experience has added to that idea for you?
AS: I hope lawyers could see themselves as ministers to other people who incidentally use the law to do that. I think that is the highest calling a lawyer can have – when they are helping not just to fix the legal problem at hand, but the human being in front of them. But I’m not quite able to discern what Generation Generosity’s crux of action for that should be quite yet.
ABN: For some reason I think of the Occupy Wall Street folks. They have been widely criticized for not having specific demands or goals, and I understand why people make that critique. Yet on another level that seems like the best possible way to form a movement: get together a bunch of people who are fed up with the status quo and say, okay, we’re here, now what do we do? I wonder if Generation Generosity needs to figure out everyone who is dissatisfied with the legal profession, and how, before deciding on a specific tactic to change it.
AS: That’s exactly where we’re at. Everybody knows that where we are right now isn’t good enough. But we don’t know how to get out of it yet. We still need to pull back the layers and dissect why people are dissatisfied in order to figure out how to make a change.
ABN: I wonder if that was the real value of this Lab: helping us better articulate the nature of the problem we face.
AS: Exactly. Personally, I came out of the Lab with a sense of soberness. It was very clear that this is not something that is going to ignite overnight. But I also came out thinking that the session did exactly what I wanted it to do. It helped us get to the next couple of steps and to a deeper level of clarity about the problem. The more we talk about what happened and create forums for that, the more real it becomes. We started making our movement real – we couldn’t have accomplished that without you.