Law firm MBAs

By Melissa Hardee, Director, Hardee Consulting

Most firms see the need for commercial awareness and business management skills in their lawyers, partners and non-partners alike. Some particularly enlightened firms even recognise the need for these skills in their business support staff. Long gone are the days when, to be a successful lawyer, all you had to know was, well, the law – if that was ever the case. After all, firms still had to be successful and profitable, even if they may not have been referred to by the grubby term ‘businesses’ – they were ‘practices’ after all.

Today, the only preparation a solicitor in England and Wales is required to have for participating in and running a business is seven hours of management training through a compulsory course prescribed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. The ‘more’ has to be added by firms themselves, and the dilemma for firms is just what that constitutes and, most importantly, how much more.

The ways in which firms develop commercial awareness and business management skills in their people are many and varied. One trend has been to go for the holy grail of an MBA, although not necessarily an MBA in the traditional sense. Increasingly prevalent is the mini-MBA – a training programme which has been given the MBA badge, usually because a business school has provided a bespoke programme for a particular firm.

At least one firm has made a virtue out of necessity, sending the trainees it deferred for a year on full-year MBA at the firm’s expense. Another approach has been to bring in the involvement of a business school to provide something more bespoke, or even send people to the business school itself.

It begs the question of whether calling something an MBA will turn it into one (the saying ‘a pig with lipstick is still a pig’ comes to mind). The reason a firm might want to use the MBA label is because it thinks it will add a certain cachet to its training programme. This may be for reasons of staff recruitment or retention (for example: ‘join Bloggs & Co and you can get an MBA’). These are genuine business objectives and not to be ignored.

However, if the mini-MBA is not in fact a ‘real’ MBA it may not fool anyone – certainly not potential or current staff – and the ruse may backfire. Equally, putting people on a seven-year training programme that will ultimately result in an MBA may be unrealistic – not everyone may stay at the firm for seven years.

But, as sexy as it sounds, is an MBA really the answer? A law firm can waste a lot of money if it gets it wrong: like a lemming, it’s jumping off the cliff just because other lemmings are. As with any training, or for that matter any investment that a business makes, it must be for the purpose of achieving its business objectives.

Strategic decisions

So, the starting point for a firm should not be: ‘we need everyone to do an MBA’, but rather: ‘what business awareness and management skills do our people in their particular roles and at their particular career levels need in order to support and take forward our business?’

Start at the top: the most obvious candidates for management training along MBA-type lines are those who are about to become a managing partner, senior partner, head of practice, or head of office. In fact, even members of the firm’s management board or committee should be considered. In other words, those with responsibility for running the firm need to have the same sort of training that someone running a successful multi-million pound business would usually need.

Whether this should be a full-blown MBA or not is another question, as the investment in terms of time and money of putting a new managing partner through an MBA programme would have to be borne out by the benefits to the business. Where the firm has directors of finance, HR, marketing, knowledge management and so on, there is already a lot of management expertise on board and a full MBA for the managing partner would probably not need to be undertaken. If the managing partner already had an MBA, however, that would be something – perhaps in another age.

For partners who are not in management roles, the training needs to be focused on commercial awareness and on the skills that they need to run not so much the firm as their own practices successfully. For non-partners, the emphasis needs to be placed on understanding their role in and contribution to the business.

When alternative business structures come into the market from October 2011, UK law firms will be dealing with far more commercially savvy competitors. Whatever the training is called, there is definitely a case for focused training for lawyers in commercial awareness and management skills as never before.

melissa.hardee@hardeeconsulting.com