As the years go by, law firms are seeing increased levels of attrition due to lateral hiring. In 2018, lateral hiring rose 14%, and many of the reasons that partners and associates accept lateral movement offers are avoidable. Tracking key law firm metrics, and providing them in a visual, transparent fashion can help you to retain top talent at your firm.
Why Move Laterally?
There are three main reasons a partner or associate at your law firm will accept a lateral move to another firm:
- Lack of appreciation or recognition for the work they do
- Dissatisfaction with compensation
- Low faith in firm leadership
Keeping your lawyers informed by providing them with actionable performance metrics can help to address all of the reasons why you might be losing top talent to your competitors.
How Does Tracking Law Firm Metrics Help?
Using a Business Intelligence tool to provide data transparency to your partners and associates can solve a variety of morale issues. Providing data to your firm’s Practice Group Leaders can help them to identify top-performing attorneys, especially when it comes to billings and collections. Having transparent access to this data can help to ensure that these high performers feel that they are fully informed regarding their performance. This also demonstrates the commitment of firm leadership to make sure that high performers are appropriately recognized, compensated, and rewarded for their efforts.
Data transparency also addresses the issue of pay gaps, or dissatisfaction with compensation, between attorneys. Providing a visual hub of information regarding roles and performance of all partners and associates in your firm can help each individual to better understand their role in the larger law firm environment. When each individual understands their role and performance within the grand scheme of the firm, partners and associates will better understand their compensation rates. This also makes it less likely that recruiters will be able to successfully exploit large pay gaps, as partners and associates will better understand their role, performance, and compensation.
Providing all of this data works towards creating a culture of faith in firm leadership. Transparent data creates a better understanding of individual roles in the firm and allows firm leadership to address any performance issues before they become problematic. Additionally, by providing the best legal tech solutions to your partners and associates, you’re more likely to recruit higher-performing team members in the first place.
