Trends in Employment Flexibility and Remuneration of Employed Lawyers

I recently started a new engagement with a substantial and long-established legal firm in a major regional centre in New South Wales. It quickly became apparent that the firm had no part-time professional employees, and I commented on how unusual that was these days, especially for a firm of that size.

The seismic shift in gender composition in our Legal Profession, coupled with societal changes in people’s expectations of work-life balance, has meant that a huge gamut of non-fulltime roles has become very normal across most firms.

It is not at all unusual to see roles in which a person works less than five days a week, and is located some of those days at home and some in the office, or at client locations. Hours per day also vary greatly, with 4 being about the lower end of the scale and ten the highest I’ve seen in recent years.

The strong trends towards more flexible working arrangements will continue for the foreseeable future for categories of employees that are in demand and have market power. Where there is an over-supply there is much less ability to drive terms, but smart employers should be looking at attractive working arrangements, and at reducing the need for expensive premises, wherever possible.

Some firms have no traditional office at all, with everyone working "on the go".

Firms need to be able to cope with the change in the workforce and its expectations, and establish individual guidelines for employees’ inputs, and remuneration systems that work well for employer and employee.

One of the biggest areas of waste I observe in firms is in failure to utilise human resources properly, and particularly the all-too-common inclination to remunerate professional staff based on fees collected.

This focus overlooks the obvious facts of time delays in billing/collecting fees as a result of team member inputs, and also that it is not only inputs that directly produce fees that are important for achievement of a sensible business plan.

I am still encountering far too often firms that are basing remuneration on simple formulas, often as out-dated as one third of collected fees!

The approach is fundamentally flawed for most circumstances, and in my experience will limit rather than grow the fees volume, and firm profitability.

Systems involving more common sense can achieve the genuine Win-Win, in which employees get work/career satisfaction along with higher than market remuneration, while the firm gets higher than traditional inputs, and outputs.

Planning and goal-setting around a combined package of actual/probable fees and quality involvement in other agreed firm activity leads to better fee volumes and happier professionals.

In the past 26 years I have not observed market pressures forcing my client firms into backing away from this more sophisticated approach to planning utilisation of professional staff, and it pays big dividends all round.