20% of UK Managing Partners want to leave the law*
*According to the largest-ever research program in the UK legal profession, it appears that as the Beatles sang “money can’t buy you love”
I am not certain that the numbers would be different elsewhere in the world but at least are informed by recent and credible statistics.
The Lawyer.com article: Twenty four per cent of lawyers want to quit said in part:
"Although the City [London] has seen a series of hefty salary rises and increases in partner profits, the rise in earnings has not contributed to overall happiness."
I speculate that there are three reasons for the responses of the Managing Partners (whom I believe have one of the toughest jobs on the planet):
1) they are frequently under-trained and undereducated in management;
2) they lead people who too often have little desire to follow
3) they have tasted a life that is a departure from the grind of finding work, recording hours and billing clients and they seek an environment that will value their learned managerial and leadership skills.
Your thoughts?
Your three reasons for lawyers wanting to leave the law are right -- but there's more. The competitive nature of legal practice today has no tradition or precedent in the profesion prior to 1977, and so no management training. As the profession grows, traditional structures of law firms and legal practice have been become increasingly obsolescent. In corporatinsm, managers rise through the ranks, and learn their management skills on the way up. In law, managers arise from the ranks of rainmakers and good lawyers, and senior managers too often have no opportunity to learn mangement skills at first hand. The profession is in flux, and so -- to quote a book I read once that you wrote -- managing lawyers is like herding cats. And one of the frustrating things that many law firm managers learn very quickly is that they may be great lawyers, but that doesn't make them competent managers. Managing may be an art form, but it begins with many defined skills, tempered by experience, and just because you're a lawyer doesn't mean you can manage lawyers.