Competing via culture: How to give clients a true one-firm global service

---

FIVE THINGS YOU WILL LEARN FROM THIS MASTERCLASS:

1. Why productive working relationships increase competitiveness in the legal market

2. How mentoring and collaboration significantly increase success in lateral hiring and client succession

3. Which types of values to embed in your firm’s culture to enable mentoring and collaboration

4. How to assess whether your firm’s culture enables or prevents mentoring and collaboration

5. How to introduce or strengthen a mentoring and collaboration culture

 

Law firm leaders are increasingly fighting a war on two fronts: the battle for talent and the battle for clients. Many are struggling to explain what distinguishes their firms in a crowded legal marketplace. Those that can offer a compelling proposition to both lawyers and clients will undoubtedly take the lead in these dual, interlinked campaigns.

The ability for professionals across the globe to work together in a productive way has, over the years, become a critical factor of law firm performance and success. Much has been researched and written about teams in professional services firms, raising the level of knowledge and awareness about the dynamics and value of collective work.

This article looks at two other angles of how lawyers work together to win the war for talent and clients: mentoring and collaboration. It is based on two research projects, one led by Harvard Law School's Center on the Legal Profession and the other by the Institute of Mentoring. By collecting and analysing hard data, supplemented by interviews and other qualitative evidence, we have been able to uncover fresh insights about the types of professional relationships that allow lawyers to work most productively. Our research, combined with hands-on work with law firms around the globe, has helped us to develop an approach which hinges on lawyers teaming up to share their experience, expertise and wisdom to increase performance and productivity.

Mentoring is increasingly recognised in the legal profession as a business driver and one of the essential competitive advantages to win the war for talent. Although other professional service industries started to address the talent issues that the increasingly complex and hypercompetitive business environment stimulated about 15 years ago, the legal profession has only more recently woken up to the talent and leadership challenges.

Mentoring is increasingly recognised as a critical success factor to attract, integrate, develop and retain the best talent. The distinction between mentoring and coaching matters because, although mentoring and coaching have common tools and techniques, mentoring, in its European definition, has a broader focus on long-term development.¹ By enabling a significant increase in the number and quality of mentoring relationships, law
firms can use one of the most effective ways to invest in talent.

Collaboration between partners in law firms has also become essential for developing and maintaining competitive advantage. As clients' problems become increasingly complex, firms have been responding by creating more narrow practice areas and encouraging their partners to specialise. As a result, professionals' expertise is now dispersed across different practice groups and offices. Yet, the only way to address these complex problems in a world of narrow expertise is to get experts to integrate their highly specialised knowledge into a joint solution that is superior to any single contributor's potential. Our research shows that, when professionals do successfully collaborate, their clients are stickier and more profitable.

Neither mentoring nor collaboration is an end in itself. Rather, both of these processes are essential to developing high calibre, committed lawyers who are more capable of providing exceptional client service. Further, our research shows the type of unified law firm culture that supports both of these critical approaches.

This article explains how law firms can integrate mentoring and collaboration into their working practices to most effectively develop talent and win clients. The first part explains the importance of culture in creating a competitive advantage through mentoring and collaboration and describes the values and behaviours which create a culture that actively encourages and supports both crucial activities.

The second part explores the outcomes that introducing or increasing mentoring and collaboration have both on the individuals and the firms. It focuses on
two critical stages of the lifecycle of lawyers: the integration of lateral hires and the client succession process. The latter takes place when a senior lawyer hands over a client to a junior partner, such as when preparing for retirement.

Both lateral hire integrations and transitions out of firms combine elements of mentoring and collaboration. We offer examples to illustrate how the best firms successfully integrate the two processes and derive from them superior business outcomes.

In the last part of this article, we provide a step-by-step framework for fostering a culture which enables mentoring and collaboration to take
place in the law firm context.

---

HOW MENTORING AND COLLABORATION WORK IN LAW FIRMS

Mentoring

Mentoring in its modern approach has significantly moved away from its traditional usage. Traditionally, mentoring involved a senior member of the profession providing advice, guidance and protection to young lawyers so that they could then become established and reputable in their own right.

Over the past two decades, mentoring has evolved to be much less directive and more developmental. Mentees are now the ones who drive and manage the mentoring relationship according to their needs. Peer mentoring, reverse mentoring and group mentoring have also broken the traditional assumption that only senior people can support the development of others in a significant way. They have put the onus of talent development on a much wider number of people across organisations.

In the legal profession, the traditional aspects of mentoring are taking longer to be replaced by the more progressive elements, but there are some indications that this is about to change.

Collaboration

Collaboration involves expert lawyers working together to integrate their specialised knowledge in order to tackle complex, sophisticated legal problems that none of them could sufficiently resolve alone.

The increasing demand for collaboration as a business driver stems from two competing forces. On the one hand, lawyers need to increasingly specialise in narrow areas of their profession in order to claim true expertise over a domain. On the other hand, as clients have globalised and confronted more sophisticated technological, regulatory, economic and environmental demands, they’ve sought help on increasingly complex problems. The only way for narrow experts to solve broad client problems is by collaborating.

But, don’t confuse collaboration with cohesion or cross-selling. Cohesion involves a broad set of ‘play nice in the sandbox’ sort of behaviours that provide glue for a firm’s partners to act like a true partnership. There are plenty of firms where lawyers are friendly and genuinely like each other, where they play golf and even socialise with each other’s families outside work, but nevertheless lack a single instance of true collaboration on client service. Cohesion eases collaboration, and collaboration can help to build a more cohesive firm, yet they are distinct.

Further, collaboration is absolutely not cross-selling. Firm leaders often push partners to cross-sell, but partners have surely heard what general counsel uniformly report to me: clients hate to be cross-sold. Specifically, they hate when their adviser who handles one domain ‘offers’ introductions to other partners in the firm who can provide service in their own narrow domain (for instance, the tax expert who proposes his real estate colleague to do strictly real estate work).

This sort of traditional cross-selling risks appearing more self-serving that value-add for the client. Instead, what clients want is for their advisers to understand their issues deeply enough to offer sophisticated advice and to line up the right team to deliver it – no matter where in the firm the needed experts reside.

1. Culture and values

First, let's consider the importance of culture in creating competitive advantage through mentoring and collaboration.

Any lawyer who walks into a new law firm quickly perceives the level of formality, support or competition that exists between people in that environment. It is an instinctive sense that we develop though experience because we have to adapt to a particular culture in order to be able to work within it.

Our research shows that it is culture that enables, encourages or prevents mentoring and collaboration to happen more than processes; processes only support culture when they are aligned to that particular culture.

"Within a few days of having integrated my new firm," recalls a senior associate at
a magic-circle firm, "I knew that the types of professional relationships in that firm didn't foster the support and collegiality that their values proclaimed to. It was obvious that I would have to walk my way through that environment and create my own circle of support and guidance in order to develop well".

Surprisingly to some lawyers, clients care deeply about the degree to which their external counsel collaborate with colleagues in their own firm.² Jennifer Daniels, chief legal officer of Colgate-Palmolive Company, recently explained her point of view at a conference in New York: "Colgate is a huge business, and nearly every problem I have is multidimensional. So I'm always thinking, how do I manage the complexity in solving that problem in the most efficient way?"

She continued: "I've found that the most productive and efficient way to solve a very complex problem is to have deep collaboration between a team of my outside lawyers with my in-house team and the business team so everyone understands the problem. Having those teams and all those people engaged together, we get to a better result than if it's a bunch of specialists each doing their piece of the problem."

Key attributes

There is no need to make a choice between mentoring and collaboration because they mutually support each other and, when well embedded within the firm's values, create one culture.

Mentoring promotes collaboration
by building relationships, increasing trust and encouraging the transfer and sharing of insights, knowledge and experience. Collaboration promotes mentoring by sharing knowledge, facilitating communication processes and reinforcing the value of benefiting from a strong network.

The elements involved for both mentoring and collaboration create one type of culture which is built on the lived values of responsiveness, citizenship and trust.

Responsiveness

In the most successful firms, people feel comfortable reaching out to others within their organisation for assistance or advice, regardless of rank. They feel assured that their colleagues will get back to them promptly and with care for their problem, as it if were their own.

"In my years as a junior consultant at McKinsey," said a former management consultant, "I recall that my supervisor told me to reach out to someone in Texas. That partner got back to me immediately and followed up our phone call by sending me some sanitised documents so that I could see their analytic approach. Only many years later did I realise he was one of McKinsey's biggest billers, a 30-year veteran of the firm, and a world-renowned expert on the topic. But, he treated me and my very basic questions with respect."

Some conversations are difficult to have for a pressured mentor, who is prone to filter incoming ideas through the lens of his own experience (because that is his comfort zone and helps to lower his own anxiety).
In order to be responsive, lawyers need
to be supported and comfortable in their own professional development.

Citizenship

Professionals with this value typically believe 'what goes around comes around'. In other words, they are willing to contribute - their time, contacts and knowledge - generously, without calculating direct returns. They act with faith that building up their colleagues' capabilities is the right thing to do and trust that they may ultimately benefit from this in an indirect way. They don't keep score or mentally track reciprocity.

In mentoring, this means that lawyers who feel that they can contribute to someone's progress in a certain context naturally reach out to that person without expecting that it will promote their own career or advancement. Professionals in that type of culture know that, by involving colleagues from other departments/offices in a client's matter or providing guidance to a colleague, it will ultimately best serve their clients' or their firm's interests, without calculating whether it will benefit their own interests or career.

Trust

Both collaboration and mentoring hinge on trust between partners. Competence trust means that partners have faith in their colleagues' capabilities so that the knowledge they employ with clients or pass on to mentees is consistently high quality.

Relational trust implies that people have faith in each other's characters and motives - reducing fears that a fellow partner will take advantage of an invitation to join a client by trying to take over the account or, worse, take the credit but do no work at all. Relational trust is also critical to people being willing to reveal their true concerns or seek advice on sensitive issues, free from concerns about how their mentor will use that information.

In one law firm, a partner agreed to do a big cross-border M&A transaction and realised that she couldn't do it alone. To help her with the workload, she went to a partner she trusted. His personality and work style was similar to hers and, first and foremost, he didn't have a sizeable ego. The original partner wasn't worried that the new partner would try to steal her client.

"I thought he'd do his part very well to the full satisfaction of the client, but also interact in that he wouldn't take away the project from me. I trusted that he'd be working in the client's interest," she reflected.

The two ended up working together seamlessly, each individually doing what he or she could do best, interacting closely the whole time.

For mentoring in the law firm context, the trust element is, to a large extent, linked to confidentiality and how sensitive career or personal information is treated. In firms that have a culture which enables productive mentoring relationships to be built, there is a common definition of mentoring and of its rules around confidentiality; it allows mentees to feel comfortable in reaching out for guidance across the firm and beyond.

2. Business benefits

In this section, we first discuss some of the general benefits that a culture which supports mentoring and collaboration can provide both firms and individuals. We then focus on two areas in which such a culture can have the most impact on a firm's ability to align talent and clients' needs to significantly increase its competitive advantage: the integration of new talent and the transfer of experience and clients when a partner leaves the firm or the profession.

General benefits

For law firms

Firms that have mentoring embedded in their culture and performance management processes can:

• improve performance;

• reinforce values and culture;

• significantly reduce turnover;

• build leadership skills;

• increase the number of women and minority-group lawyers achieving partnership; and

• achieve greater success in change management processes.

As shown in the empirical work conducted at Harvard Law School, the financial benefits to firms of multidisciplinary collaboration are unambiguous.³ These include:

• higher revenues and profits;

• greater client loyalty;

• more complex work - with less risk
  of commoditisation;

• better ability to weather a financial downturn;

• faster and more reliable integration
  of lateral hires; and

• a distinctive value proposition for attracting and retaining millennials.

The more practices that are involved in serving a client, the greater the annual average revenue the client generates
(see Figure 1). Clients might view any
given lawyer as fairly fungible (except
for those with uniquely specialised
expertise - but how many can really claim this?). But, they will find it difficult to find substitutes for entire cross-practice teams.

 

Further, cross-specialty work is likely to be less subject to price-based market competition. Whereas clients view single-specialty legal expertise as a commodity that can be bid out and sourced based on price, they know that cross-specialty work is more sophisticated and harder to accomplish effectively. They're willing to pay for it. As the CFO of a major multinational told us, "margins rise with complexity".

For individuals

Research shows that the most successful people across industries refer to the influence of one or more mentor(s) the most; there is no contradictory evidence that this is not the case for lawyers too. Mentoring enables lawyers to take responsibility for their own professional development, as well as to feel engaged and included in the firm's development. Lawyers with mentors feel closer to the firm's culture and values, as well as more nurtured and supported in
their own career progression.

Our research shows that lawyers who collaborate by sharing the work they originate end up with significantly bigger books of business than those who tend to hoard work. Analysing millions of data records that span outcomes over a decade showed a clear causal pattern. We found that rainmakers who systematically involved other partners in their work grew their books of business in subsequent years far more than their colleagues, on average. This pattern held even after controlling for other factors that are likely to affect individual billings, such as one's office, practice
group, organisational tenure and previous year's billings.

We've now replicated these findings using data from multiple law firms that vary in size, geographic scope and compensation system. Law firm leaders might be interested to know that these results are similar in other professional sectors that we've studies, including accounting and consulting.

Integration of lateral hires

Several law firms have introduced a formal mentoring programme as an integration tool in their onboarding process for lateral partner hires. But, a very small percentage of partners have actually taken up the offer and benefited from the guidance and experience of a mentor when they have arrived at a new firm.

This low take-up can be due to a number of reasons; one is that the firm's culture may not allow trust, citizenship and responsiveness behaviours to be shaped. Another possible reason is that mentees and mentors have not developed the skills required for productive mentoring relationships to be built.

Given the high rate of unsuccessful lateral hires movements in law firms
(20 per cent of laterally-hired lawyers are no longer with the firm a year after joining and 50 per cent have left within five years⁴) as well as the cost (the average cost of a failed lateral hire is £100,000⁵ for just the recruitment costs and resources, which doesn't take into account other negative effects which are difficult to quantify, such as the impact on the firm's image and market credibility, strategic drift or morale problems), it is surprising that not more attention is paid to supporting the creation of mentoring relationships. These are a cost-effective way to provide a new partner with the intangible knowledge and skills that it needs to navigate the firm's culture, politics and unspoken rules and values.

"The message we send to the market," said one managing partner about the firm's mentoring programme for lateral hires, "is 'look at the support we give you to make you successful upon joining'. And, since laterals value that, we've been able to attract higher-calibre candidates."

At Harvard, our analyses of firms' client and personnel records demonstrate that collaboration is essential to ensuring that lateral hires become successful and productive post-move - or else their flight risk is radically higher. For laterally-hired partners to be successful at their new
firm, the evidence shows that they have
to be sufficiently integrated with incumbent partners and clients within the first
18 months, if not sooner.

Of course, the exact number varies by firm and practice. But, our data confirms that if a partner reaches the year-plus stage and hasn't convinced at least a couple of the incumbent partners to work on clients she brought with her, and if she hasn't also been invited to join the account team for a couple of the firm's existing clients, there's a very, very high chance that she'll leave within the next year or so. Collaborating brings lateral hires up to speed with firm practices, allows them to get to know their colleagues, and, most importantly, builds trust between lateral hires, their colleagues and new clients.

Combining mentoring with a collaborative environment creates the highest chances of a lateral hire being successfully integrated (see box: Best practice for integrating lateral hires).

---

BEST PRACTICE FOR INTEGRATING LATERAL HIRES

• Assign a skilled mentor to every lateral partner to foster responsiveness, citizenship and trust.

• Hold formal roadshows for laterals to present their client work to offices, practice groups and sectors.

• Provide a budget for laterals to visit colleagues (even for exploratory conversations) and set the expectation that they will use the full budget (appropriately) within the first six to eight months. Then, follow up.

• Immediately upon their entry to the firm, work with laterals to develop a strategic client service plan that identifies specific opportunities for them to involve incumbent partners. Leaders should facilitate those introductions and make it clear to incumbents that they are expected to participate.

• Invite lateral partners to mentor strong associates.

• When the lateral partner has settled into the firm (after 12 or 18 months), assign him/her a committee or a role.

Client succession processes

What happens to the wealth of experience and to the client relationship when a partner leaves a firm or retires? Experienced partners' transition out of firms is a topic that law firms have recently started to pay more attention to. Although mandatory retirement is increasingly seen as ageist and unacceptable, some firms still require partners to retire as early as
in their fifties.

The transition process (either when partners are asked to leave in downturn periods or have reached the firm's retirement age) is often a painful phase that they have to go through with hardly any support from their firm. Some partners are lucky enough to be offered a role as consultants, but all the others have to navigate on their own.

Beyond the psychological turbulences that their partners go through, firms are also becoming conscious of the huge experience and knowledge that leaves the business when partners walk out the door. They take with them often decades of skills and wisdom that they have rarely been able to successfully pass on to their firm's next generation of partners.

Introducing a formal structure for retiring partners to transfer back some of the most valuable skills and knowledge is a priority that any law firm should start working on. One of the first and easiest steps to do that is to give all experienced partners the role of mentor, preferably not through a rigid programme, but rather by providing them with the skills and abilities to be effective mentors.

Ideally, they would have held this role throughout their years as partner, but it is essential to hold them accountable for doing so during their last five years at the firm. This has the benefit of not only retaining some of their experience and skills in the firm but also giving the partners a responsibility and role which will ease some of the transitional difficulties that leaving a firm creates for them.

---

BEST PRACTICE FOR CLIENT SUCCESSION

• Develop an environment where transitions – both client succession and retirement – are considered normal parts of partnership that are neither threatening nor taboo but, rather, warrant careful attention.

• Identify likely transition points early on and start planning partners’ exits 10 years in advance.

• Equip senior members of the firm with mentoring skills and assign them a formal role of mentor so that they can pass on their extensive knowledge.

• Create mechanisms to hold partners accountable for building effective succession plans into their account and then following through on those plans.

 

Case study 1

White & Case has instituted an innovative programme to proactively address its partners' transitions. Starting 10 years before a partner reaches typical retirement age, the firm begins a series of formal conversations aimed at helping the partner to think about his or her post-firm career. This dialogue not only prompts the necessary self-reflection, but also allows the individual to start taking steps toward reaching his or her objectives.

Few lawyers, for example, understand how much advance planning it takes to prepare for a non-executive director role, but experienced professional counsellors can help with this positioning. Furthermore, knowledge of the partner's intentions helps White & Case to plan for how to transition client work smoothly, effectively and proactively.

One inventive step that White & Case has taken is the creation of Client Council, where a group of senior partners act as an advisory board for lead client partners. The lead partners develop a detailed client plan and are then accountable to the council for how they are delivering against the plan.

According to White & Case's chairman Hugh Verrier, "the Client Council is not just authorising the lead partners to build and broaden the team serving clients, it acts also as a mechanism to monitor and help. The members give the benefit of experience, thoughts, advice. And, to give the process some teeth, the council also give input on compensation for the lead partners."

If the council feels like there are succession issues within the key client programme, it will intervene to guide the transition. It actually has the power to change the lead partners, although this option has rarely been used. Instead, the council works with the lead client partners to encourage them to promote a proactive, smooth succession. Although still in its formative stages, the programme has so
far been successful by combining advice and accountability.

Case study 2

Another law firm that has introduced a similar transition programme actually begins much earlier. Starting just five years after an individual makes partner, the firm offers access to a coaching programme that helps each lawyer to think about their career in more holistic terms. From then on, each partner has a refresh meeting with their coach every five years until they decide that retirement is within the coming 10 years, at which point coaching meetings happen more frequently.

A leader in that firm described how starting the programme early in each partner's career eliminates any stigma associated with it. It's considered a normal, healthy part of partnership, rather than a process designed to manage out underperforming older lawyers. The leader also noted that, although the coach's sessions with partners are confidential, the firm benefits significantly from having lawyers who are more reflective and conscious about their career moves.

Often, the lawyers themselves will approach leaders to discuss their aspirations - say, for a leadership role in the firm, or a desire to temporarily cut back on hours, or to obtain a prominent role in
a local non-profit organisation.

"The programme was designed as a transition programme, but the self-awareness and transparency generated through it benefit the firm throughout
a partner's career," commented the
firm leader.

3. Practical steps

Unlocking mentoring and collaboration potential in a law firm is amongst the most effective ways to tap into talent and to win business. It is, however, something that has to be designed carefully and then put into action persuasively in order to produce the expected results.

Not many law firms around the globe have yet managed to overcome some of the difficulties which are created by lawyers' independent nature and to develop cultures which support mentoring and collaboration
in the most effective way.

The key components of a successful mentoring culture include:

• people have a common definition
  and understanding of mentoring;

• the senior management act as role models and are highly committed;

• the performance system recognises
  and rewards good mentoring;

• mentors and mentees have the skills to create productive mentoring relationships;

• numerous informal mentoring relationships exist at all levels of the firm;

• lawyers accept the expectation to engage in mentoring activities as mentors and mentees as part of their individual development; and

• successful associates and partners attribute their success to what they
  have received from others.

The key components of a successful collaboration culture include:

• lawyers are aware of the full range of services their firm offers and know enough about how those services add value to clients that they can spot opportunities during their own discussions with clients;

• lawyers proactively open up discussions with their clients to understand their underlying business concerns ('what keeps you up at night?'), so that they can identify expert colleagues with the required complementary knowledge to serve their clients' most pressing issues;

• partners contribute sufficient time and energy on clients that are important to the firm, no matter who generated the work;

• awyers spend more time thinking about their clients' concerns and perspectives than worrying about who gets credit or other rewards inside their firm; and

• nobody says 'my client', but rather
  'clients of our firm'.

The elements that characterise a mentoring culture and a collaboration culture can be described in slightly different terms, but these characteristics create a unified culture built on trust, responsiveness and citizenship behaviours.

Assessing whether the elements of culture that support mentoring and collaboration are present is not something that firms have been easily able to do until recently. There are, however, tools and approaches that can provide accurate pictures of the types of working relationships that go on in a firm.

Mapping data onto a network diagram like the one shown in Figure 2 provides an easily-discernable first step to understand different types of working relationships in the firm. The graph is a network analysis from our research showing which partners are approach ing others for career-related advice in a specific firm. Each dot represents a partner and the colours identify the different practices. The larger the dot, the more that person is relied upon for advice. The patterns also show which individuals are 'connectors' across different practices groups and indicate that some partners are fairly isolated (a danger signal).

 

Measuring the quality and quantity of mentoring and collaboration that goes on in a firm is a starting point on the journey of building the culture and processes that enables both to happen. A number of boutique consulting firms have sprung up to help firms and companies to conduct this organisational network analysis, which has become a popular technique in some of the world's most prestigious corporations; you might find that your own clients use a similar approach. These data and analytics equip you to understand where the real gaps are, which individuals may be overwhelmed by requests, who is contributing significantly to the firm by helping others, and so on.

The steps that follow that initial stage involve both profound change and methodic measures that can have lasting impact on how lawyers work together. From our research, we have developed a five-stage process to introduce or strengthen a mentoring and collaboration culture in the
law firm context (see box: Five steps to creating a strong culture of mentoring
and collaboration).

---

FIVE STEPS TO CREATING A STRONG CULTURE OF MENTORING AND COLLABORATION

1. Assess the quantity and quality of mentoring and collaboration currently in place at the firm. Use hard data, because perceptions are often biased.

2. Include trust, citizenship and responsiveness as priority shared values of the firm. Role model them from the top and celebrate people who exemplify those values.

3. Design a strategy to introduce or strengthen mentoring and collaboration that is aligned with other aspects of the firm’s culture and initiatives.

4. Align/introduce light processes to shape the behaviours that build a strong and distinctive culture to support the mentoring and collaboration initiatives.

5. Make everyone accountable for living up to the firm’s values and to the culture (through the performance and remuneration systems, but also through less tangible recognition and rewards for mentoring and collaboration behaviours).

---

 

Critical priorities

The law firms that best navigate the competition and adapt to the 'new normal' around the world are those which place talent development and client service as
their most important priorities. Whereas in the past the ability for lawyers to work together across teams, geographical boundaries and generations was not a
critical factor of success, it has now become one of the most significant predictors and factors of business performance, brand recognition and
law firm reputation.

Rebecca Normand-Hochman is
founder of the Institute of Mentoring
(www.instituteofmentoring.org).
Heidi K. Gardner is a distinguished
fellow at Harvard Law School's
Program on the Legal Profession
(https://clp.law.harvard.edu).

References

1. See Mentoring and Coaching for Lawyers: Building Partnerships for Success, Globe Law and Business
   in partnership with the International
   Bar Association, 2014

2. See https://bol.bna.com/collaboration-panel-origination-credit-days-should-end and 'Collaborative culture: The in-house perspective on collaboration in law firms', Susan Hackett, Managing Partner,
   Vol. 16 Issue 10, July/August 2014

3. See 'When Senior Managers Won't Collaborate: Lessons from Professional Service Firms,' Heidi K. Gardner, Harvard Business Review, March 2015 and 'Why It Pays to Collaborate,' Heidi K. Gardner, American Lawyer, March 2015

4. See 'Poor due diligence plagues lateral hire', The Law Society Gazette,
   14 October 2013

5. See Lateral Partner Hiring and Integration for Law Firms, Mark Brandon, Managing Partner, 2013

6. See 'Make the Most of your Partners' Potential: Foster a Culture to Support Senior Level Mentoring', Heidi K. Garner and Rebecca Normand-Hochman, PD Quarterly, NALP, February 2015

---