Getting to Wobble: The Three Legs of Job Satisfaction
by Pete Meyers

You know what it’s like. You’re out to lunch with a partner and the table wobbles. Every time either you or the partner places an arm on the table, even lightly, the table wobbles. What’s worse, being the obsessive-compulsive type who has found a comfy home in the practice of law, you have a nearly uncontrollable urge to fix the problem.

So you sit there and you think of wadding up a paper napkin—or even a cloth napkin—finding the offending leg, and shimming it up. Anything to stop the wobble. And you know the partner is having the same thoughts.

Finally, in your politest voice you suggest you’re both aware of the problem and you can fix it. You reach down, find the point of wobble, and shim it up. The partner is grateful. You’ve fixed the problem, and now you can both rest your elbows with confidence. True, there’s still a little wobble, but it’s a soft wobble and neither of you mind.

Job dissatisfaction is like this wobble. A little job dissatisfaction is okay, but not so much that it’s distracting, especially to those who lean on you. Several years ago I compared job satisfaction to a three-legged stool. Three legs is the minimum number of legs for a stool. Any fewer and it falls over and can’t support a person. You can have more than three legs, but certainly no fewer. And a three-legged stool that with a soft wobble is not so bad.

The three legs of job satisfaction can be defined in terms of three questions:

• Am I happy with the type of work I’m doing?
• Am I happy with the people I work with every day?
• Am I happy with the firm as a whole?

If you don’t like the type of work you’re doing, it will seem like drudgery day after day, week after week. Life will be mere survival for you.

If you don’t like the people with whom you work, you can count on at least fifty hours per week of interacting with people you don’t like. Talk about good times. You will loathe to arrive at the office and long to leave.

As for the third leg, an intelligent, motivated person like you will have a difficult time working for a firm that is directionless and which you don’t respect.

It can be bad enough if the legs aren’t even, but God forbid if one of the legs is completely missing. You can’t even get up for work without feeling miserable.

But even if all the legs are attached and you’re satisfied with your job, you can still measure your job satisfaction by the wobble. If you’re shooting for the stars and want a job that doesn’t just fit, but fits perfectly, measuring your job satisfaction might be a luxury. But for most of us who aren’t satisfied with our jobs, for whom one of the legs is significantly shorter, measuring job satisfaction is required. You probably can’t even adjust one leg enough to make the stool simply wobble and, more than likely, you’ll have to make a move to repair your misery. The last thing you want to do is simply hope things will get better. Hope deferred makes the heart sick and a joy deferred is a joy too long delayed. Take action to pull yourself out of misery!

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the three legs.

Are you happy or satisfied with the type of work you’re doing?
You may be in an area of law that is difficult for you or for which you have no affinity. In your first few years of practice, it’s crucial you find a type of law you’ll like practicing. Otherwise you may get pigeonholed into an area that you don’t like, even though you’re good at it. For example, if you didn’t take a tax class in law school and you’re working as an employee benefits lawyer, it may be difficult. Employee benefits can be as much as one-third to one-half tax, and tax has a hierarchy of authority that will seem unfamiliar, with research initially difficult at best. So what type of law you practice affects your job satisfaction.

You may be in the wrong type of practice. Law school taught us many skills: issue spotting, legal writing, document drafting, advocacy, as well as patience, discipline, logical reasoning, and other classical virtues. All these skills are generally transferable among the different types of practice, so don’t worry if you are not making a big splash in your first job out of law school and you want to find something different. But if you think you would be thrilled with a motions practice where you can engage opposing counsel and you would die if you had to draft real estate closings every day for a week, then you are probably more of a litigator than a transactional lawyer. A change should be in the offing for you.

You may be in the wrong type of practice setting. Law firm work is generally acknowledged to be the most challenging type of setting because of the billable hour requirements. But don’t overlook the fact that billable hour requirements vary considerably among firms. For every 2100-hour firm there is a 1600-hour firm. Law firm billable-hour work takes at least ten hours per day when maybe what you want is a 9-to-5 day. There’s no shame in that and maybe an in-house counsel or government job fits your style of wanting more time for yourself and your family.

Are you happy or satisfied with the people you work with?
You may currently be working for really mean people. Life is too short to work for people you don’t like or respect, and life is too long for you to turn into an unlikable person yourself. There are so many law firms that you don’t need to spend time working in one with people who can’t bring themselves to be at least a little nice. If, on balance, you work with people who don’t care if you live or die, make a switch. There are plenty of firms that have an ethos of niceness about them because they’ve made a cultural decision to not turn into devils as they practice law.

You may not be getting enough work, which may mean the other lawyers in your firm don’t trust your work, or it may mean there isn’t enough work coming in the door. It’s important to find out what the problem is. If you can correct the problem that’s causing the mistrust, then correct it and your lack of work will eventually disappear. But if there isn’t enough work coming in the door—whether you’re at a large firm or a small one—it may be a sign of something beyond your control. This is especially true in your first few years when you’re not expected, maybe even discouraged from bringing in new clients. If there isn’t enough work, you’re justified in jumping ship before it hits the shoals.

You may not be getting the kind of work that will actively advance your career. At every turn, you have to fight for your career. No one else will do it, so you have to put yourself in places where you’ll see some playing time. If you work for a plaintiff’s firm and want to become an expert in your state’s tort claims act, seek out the lawyer in your firm who does that kind of work. Approach him or her and offer to take some of the load off. If you want trial experience, keep banging on the doors of the partners and associates who do trial work. It’s really true that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

You may not be able to distinguish yourself from the crowd. Are you surrounded by smaller people or larger people? If you are at a modest-sized law firm of twenty-five to fifty lawyers, there’s probably a correlation between your getting that job and your law school accomplishments. Accordingly, you’ll probably be expected to contribute in a substantial way earlier in your career than you would if you were at a larger firm. However, at the smaller firm you’ll likely miss out on the kind of training for which the larger firms are known. On the other hand, at a larger firm, you probably won’t get the same kind of opportunities to stand out that you would get at a smaller firm.

Are you happy or satisfied with the firm for which you work?
You may not be in your ideal law firm. We all went through law school trying to get that first job. Some of us took what we could get. We had to get into the game. That’s not to say we didn’t give our first year the best shot we could, but some areas of law or types of practice are just more or less appealing to certain of us. There are so many areas of law to explore; it just doesn’t make sense to stay in a firm that doesn’t appeal to you.

Your firm may not be business-minded. This is not a question of whether the firm does business development (every firm must in some way). The question is do the partners run the firm like a business? Are they not only mindful of the bottom line, but do they act with the bottom line in mind? Do they spend lavishly? (Regarding lavishness, that may be a sign of money to burn or spending because the attorney business style requires it. In any case, try to find out.) I once worked for a firm that never let an associate pay for a partner’s lunch, even if the associate initiated the lunch. On almost every occasion the partner charged it to the firm and, what’s more, announced it as such. But this same firm was consistently failed to meet its budget. There’s a movement afoot among some firms to be more transparent with associates about the firm’s finances, which not only gives you a chance to help if you possess some business experience, but also a chance to be wary if the firm does things that make little business sense.

Your firm may not be moving forward. Let’s face it. You can live your career in an old-school firm that, despite the brainy people, hasn’t figured out a less intense, more efficient method of bringing in revenue than the billable hour. It’s a 16th-century guild mentality that’s out of place in a 21st-century world that focuses on matching legal costs with positive legal results. Surely your assignment partner can take a close enough look at an issue, forecast what possible issues will develop, make an estimate the firm can stick to and then negotiate a rate with the client that provides a modicum of predictability for the budgets of both the firm and the client. Lawyers are paid to estimate risk, so estimating a firm’s own risk on a case should not present such a huge problem that a profit can’t be made using a different business model.

Some firms have figured out how to bill without billable hours. Take a look at Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott, a Chicago firm of fifty lawyers that employs a business model that rarely bills by the hour. Instead, the firm, which largely does trial work, negotiates a monthly fixed fee for the case with the client reserving ten to twenty percent of the fee. If the case resolves favorably for the client, the firm gets the reserved amount, plus a negotiated bonus. If the client doesn’t win, the client keeps the reserved amount and the firm gets no bonus. In other words, a significant portion of the firm’s revenue is tied to results.

Without billable hours, it would seem a key metric is missing to evaluate a Bartlit Beck associate’s work. But that’s okay. “Their hourly input plays no role whatsoever in their pay or their evaluations—none,” says Skip Herman, the managing partner. Associates agree. “You really don’t think about the number of hours you are working,” says Carrie Jablonski, a third-year associate who spent her 1L and 2L summers at billable-hour firms. In fact, Jablonski doesn’t even know what her billable hours are and partners do not quantify assignments in terms of hours. “Without having to worry about how many hours they’re putting in and without doing some of the more pedantic, day-to-day discovery things, right there they’re happier,” says Herman.

When you’re working in a firm that gets paid for results, you can dispense with the internal memos and the long, single-spaced letters to opposing counsel. “Those are viewed as a complete waste of time,” says Jablonski.

“It’s all about what kind of job we are doing for the client—are we winning the motions or the case? Not having a billable hour model affects everything about how you work, about the office environment, about interactions with clients, about flexibility in working schedules. It improves all of those things dramatically.” The firm has even turned down some clients who would not accept the non-hourly billing model. “It’s more that the alternative billing structure has these ripple effects that change everything,” says Jablonski, who once worked for McKinsey and Company and has seen her share of business models. “It’s a different way to practice law.”

You have to think about your career at all stages and sometimes it’s better to move in your first few years than to get typecast. Sometimes it’s better to stay. Get the information you need to make a wise decision—it’s your career, so enjoy it! And remember … a little wobble … a soft wobble may be okay.

Pete Meyers is an associate with Independent Legal Recruiters, a recruiting firm staffed exclusively by lawyers, providing lawyers to law firms, corporations, and government agencies throughout Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Portland, Ore., and Seattle. You can reach him at petemeyers48@hotmail.com.