Decision Making

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The jobs of being a leader within any law firm should come labeled with a clear warning: This job could seriously change you and how you behave within your firm!

Over the past two decades, I have had the privilege, through my research, interviews, and hands-on consulting to peek behind the veil surrounding the challenges of becoming a NEW Firm Chair (or whatever title best signifies your firm’s leader).

From candid discussions about the stress involved in looking like you know what you are doing and the huge time demands imposed by your partner’s requests to feeling disorientated by the scale and scope of the mandate, many professionals quietly struggle with the various pressures that accompany their term in office.  In fact, I’ve discovered that the great majority of leaders, in any position of responsibility, are at their most vulnerable early in their tenure.
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Source: “Danny Kahneman on Decision Hygiene,” Jury Analyst, July 22, 2021

Decision hygiene is to product and service selection as testing is to software development.  Skip them at your peril.

Decisions about technology can be noisy affairs.

(Please take a moment to relive one you were part of.)

As Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein masterfully point out in Noise (2021), noise is different than bias. It’s an independent contributor to infelicitous results in professional (and other) judgments. Noise tends to be an invisible enemy. Bias, more obvious, moves decisions in particular directions; noise just adds errors through unwanted variability. Responsible decision-makers seek to minimize both.

The Noise authors provide vivid examples of judgments in which noise plays a role, including some in law, like judicial sentencing decisions, which have been shown to turn on such things as the outside temperature or whether the local city’s football team won its most recent game. Contexts like insurance underwriting can operate like lotteries. As the authors say, “wherever there is judgment, there is noise” (p 12).  We are all noisy.
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The perceived pluses are numerous and easy to spot. In contrast, the risks are more subtle and potentially fatal.

Interestingly, there is a pronounced trend toward firms adopting a shared leadership model, with perhaps the most recent example being the elite litigation firm of Quinn Emanuel.  See Karen Sloan, “Litigation giant Quinn Emanuel beefs up leadership, elevating DC, NY partners,” Reuters, May 13, 2022 (noting that 900+ lawyer firm “has shaken up its leadership model, installing two prominent litigators as co-managing partners and shifting namesake Los Angeles-based founder John Quinn from sole managing partner to the newly created role of chairman”).

If your firm has potential office, group (e.g. “our Global Litigation Practice”), or firm leadership candidates who would be great in the role but are reluctant to give up any of their client responsibilities, the notion of having co-leaders may be an attractive alternative.

Some will advance a number of highly rational arguments for having two co-leaders:
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We are all leaders now.

As corporate leaders, we are all accustomed to operating with our set business strategy and making tactical and resourcing decisions tied to that guiding strategy.  But, as Bill stated in his public service channel announcement, “what was important last week seems completely irrelevant today.” Post 141. How relevant is…