AKE A LOOK at one of today’s large Wall Street law firms, and you will see that it bears almost no resemblance to the firm it was 40 years ago. The summer associate class alone at a top New York firm in 2002 will probably be larger than the entire firm was in 1962. Administrative functions such as recruiting, lateral hiring, marketing, public relations, human resources, technology and information management either did not exist in that law firm or have expanded so much in size and sophistication as to be unrecognizable to the earlier version of the firm.
Nowhere is this change more marked than in law firm management. The former management model consisted of the law partners themselves overseeing all of their firm’s administrative and business functions and planning, usually by way of a committee or an administrative, or managing, partner. That model may have been fine for a firm with a few score attorneys and staff, a stable of loyal, blue-chip clients and low overhead. But today those attorneys and staff number in the hundreds, if not thousands; clients will shop for specific expertise and the best value; and overhead has exploded with associates’ salaries, global expansion of offices and technology costs.
