Cultural screening: Steps to ensure your laterals are a good cultural fit

Law firms talk a lot about culture, and indeed the most oft-cited reason for the failure of lateral hire partners is poor or even wrong cultural fit. Of course, culture varies widely - and wildly - from one firm to another. The myriad reasons why someone might not fit into a law firm make it very complicated to disentangle factors that the person can't do anything about - race, gender, sexuality, social or educational background - from those that are dependent on personality, such as being insufficiently entrepreneurial or too aggressive with co-workers.

While firms may flatter themselves that the reason for their lateral hires not working out is purely economic, the plain failure of many, if not most, law firms to accurately gauge a partner's contribution to revenue and profitability, for instance, makes it difficult to say for sure that dherence to coolly rational measures tells the whole story.

Even if law firms were nailing all of their metrics, most would privately admit that rejecting a failing lateral hire - usually at around the two-year mark - is more of a gut-feel, impressionistic decision than anything else. And where a lateral simply ups and leaves, there is rarely a great deal of post-mortem analysis undertaken with regards to cultural fit.

Defining the problem

Part of the problem is that culture in law firms is often like the proverbial elephant: 'I'll know it when I see it'. As such, judging who to bring in is largely a subjective issue, though the interview process gives the firm multiple bites at the culture cherry.

Stage one is an interview with one or two partners, occasionally a non-lawyer such as the chief executive or HR director. When conducted by partners, this most often has the character of a cosy fireside chat, with CVs rarely fully explored before the meeting itself, and a general lack of standardised questioning.

Most people feel they are pretty good at interviewing, but various studies show that this is simply not true. The inclusion ?of chief executives and HR directors in interviews does however seem to add ?a cooler head to proceedings and can ?result in a more 'culture-neutral' hire, ?though whether that in itself is desirable ?is quite another question.

Pass this stage and the candidate is on to a generally more technical meeting with a couple of more people, usually including one of the partners who were in the first meeting. Beyond that, there may be several more meetings, a business plan and, often, a more informal social occasion, known apocryphally by legal recruiters as 'death by drinks'. Then there is the proposal to the management board - many of whom will have met the candidate by now - and the lateral is in.

Certainly, if your partners are your firm's cultural arbiters (and who is more qualified?) the more of them who can meet the candidate during the screening process, the better. You may however decide to stop short of one leading US firm, which states that a candidate will meet 45 to 60 partners during the hiring process. While this may seem excessive, the firm prides itself on having a highly collegiate culture; a candidate can be blackballed by a single partner.

Cultural norming

Human beings being what they are, interviewing of this kind - especially if the candidate is exposed to 60 partners - will tend to result in the recruitment of people who conform to existing organisational norms. That will, in turn, reinforce the cultural status quo, creating an environment which can be very difficult for people not possessed of certain characteristics, or indeed who do not come from a particular social or educational background.

It was long said of one magic circle firm, for instance, that in order to succeed there, you had to be a 'blue or a blonde' - referring to the firm's seemingly unerring tendency to promote Oxbridge sporting stars or Aryan beauties. By contrast, other well-established firms have the reputation of being composed, variously, of ?Oxbridge-only lawyers, 'grammar school lads' or only Jewish partners.

Ironically, some of the most financially successful law firms in the UK are widely perceived as being essentially monocultural, or at least heavily biased to a particular cultural polarity. Diversity, as desirable as it may be as a political objective, or to create a broader ?platform to spot business risk, does ?not necessarily pay off.

The advantages of hiring to a fairly narrow set of cultural parameters are fairly obvious: partners have a common frame of reference, a common register in the language they use and, in many cases, an overlapping network of contacts. They are also likely to gravitate towards clients who have a similar background. Given that the legal profession essentially 'seeds' its own client base - the vast majority of in-house lawyers having trained in private practice - sticking to such narrow cultural parameters might not appear to be such a bad idea.

It is far less obvious what the advantages of diversity in a partnership might be, aside from the fairly nebulous notion that the universe of potential clients is diverse. This however depends on which clients you decide to target. Indeed, a push for diversity can end up with some fairly ill judged, not to say patronising, outcomes. One firm used to send its sole Asian partner on every pitch to a client in the public sector in a large corporation on the basis that there might be someone 'of colour' on the panel.

Beyond the obvious

Beyond the kind of cultural diversity inherent in race and social background, culture also extends to business behaviours, which may also be enmeshed with social and other cultural markers.

Law firms most often like to talk about themselves as being 'collegiate'. This is a term which harks back to the intense college systems of Oxford and Cambridge and the US Ivy League universities, a great proportion of whose undergraduates will have come from private schools.

In law firm cultural terms, 'collegiate' ?is generally taken to imply a lack of hierarchy, a kind of flat structure comprising intellectual-equals who ?respect one another and who are natural team-players; people who are modest, honest, generous to one another and celebrate each other's accomplishments, not falling out over grubby matters like money or status.

If 'collegiate' is at one end of the cultural spectrum, 'eat what you kill' sits at the other, implying an environment red in tooth and claw, where partners are not only responsible for all of their own revenues - and are remunerated accordingly - but where there is a degree of (hopefully healthy) internal competition.

Alas, the waters get very muddy very quickly as one moves away from either end of the spectrum. Most firms, for instance, recognise the need for partners to be 'enterpreneurial', but care needs ?to be taken to mitigate the worst ?selfish behaviours that can go along ?with this trait if one wants to be in ?any sense 'collegiate'.

The simple truth is that all partners are a cocktail of relevant factors, caring to a greater or lesser extent about money or status, prizing to a greater or lesser extent the need to be a great technical lawyer, and being more or less political. Unfortunately for interviewing partners, judging the precise composition of the cocktail sitting in front of them at an interview is very difficult.

The interviewers will, usually unconsciously, pick up on a whole range of cultural markers expressed in the way that candidates perform and speak, what they talk about, how they ask questions and their response to various questions. But, as a huge amount of psychological research demonstrates, this is a very uncertain science.

Lies, cues and anchors

Very few lawyers will lie outright at an interview, but exaggeration - usually of their client following or relationships with key contacts - is very common. Interviewees will often pick up on cues offered by unwitting interviewers telling them what they want to hear.

Liking someone often overrides ?other considerations, and this can produce what George W Bush used to call a "conspiracy of optimism" when it comes to producing a cooperative business plan or getting the candidate through higher-echelon interviews, such as with a distant group head or management board.

Alas, the combination of half truths, cued comments and liking the interviewee can lead to candidates being bundled over the line without some key cultural markers having been uncovered.

One hugely influential marker is remuneration. If a candidate is in a firm with a significant partner bonus pool and where allocation is determined by entirely discretionary means, for instance, there are two things to note.

First, the environment that produced this scheme will be one in which it is important to align oneself with those in power. It is quite likely to be highly political, unregulated to the point that any attempt to cite rules will be seen as bureaucratic, and where there may be significant internal competition between partners.

Second, whatever the partner is ?like as a person, the system will have driven certain behaviours over time. The longer he has been in that system, the more entrenched such behaviours ?will be. The partner will have had to become quite political, perhaps work-hoarding, over time, and may baulk at ?the perceived bureaucracy of a complex, rules-driven system.

A candidate coming out of this environment may have hated it - good reason to leave - but may have been unconsciously patterned to act in a particular way, which can make integration into an entirely different environment ?quite difficult.

Another, not unrelated area, is client relationships. A candidate from a firm with a very fluid client system may find it tough to adapt to the requirements of a firm with sophisticated client relationship management, where a client relationship may not be held by a single partner but, rather, diffused across several or many partners. Billing procedures, business development activities, teamworking and knowledge management are other areas where such candidates may be accustomed to very different conditions.

In general terms, the greater the difference between the environment the candidates are coming from and your environment, the more challenging it will be to integrate them, the more work will be needed and the greater the enduring risks to the hires. This may sound obvious - and indeed common sense is a great guide in this matter - but firms very often do not probe deeply enough into this, assuming that the way they do things ?is the way that candidates will have ?done things.

Mark Brandon is the author of Lateral Partner Hiring for Law Firms: Hiring for Success (www.motivelegal.com)

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