Berkshire Hathaway’s Munger speaking to lawyers, law firms

Charlie Munger, the celebrated vice-chairman at Berkshire Hathaway, has gotten the status of guru, especially among writers about investing.

Many do not recall that he is a lawyer and founded one of the most admirable American law firms, Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP; or that he was persuaded to quit practicing law by Warren Buffet. Munger says quitting was one of the best things he did. Aspects of law practice such as measuring out your life in time sheets, did not suit him. Munger has thought and spoken well about the profession —from both perspectivews – as lawyer and as quit-lawyer .

Shane Parrish at Farnum Street, an exceptionally good blog, is a leader among Munger admirers. He recently called attention to the commencement address Munger gave at USC Law School in 2007. Parrish says the speech contains so many of Munger’s core ideas that it represents “Munger’s Operating System” for life.

Maybe so. That address is a string of jewels about career development for lawyers and regarding law firm management.

Here are four nuggets lifted from there. There are more at Parrish’s piece; and more yet in the address itself. But, start with these.

Lifelong learning

[Y]ou’re hooked for lifetime learning, and without lifetime learning you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You’re going to advance in life by what you’re going to learn after you leave here…if civilization can progress only when it invents the method of invention, you can progress only when you learn the method of learning

Reliability

If you’re unreliable it doesn’t matter what your virtues are, you’re going to crater immediately. So doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability.

Work that excites you

Another thing that I found is an intense interest of the subject is indispensable if you are really going to excel. I could force myself to be fairly good in a lot of things, but I couldn’t be really good in anything where I didn’t have an intense interest. So to some extent, you’re going to have to follow me. If at all feasible you want to drift into doing something in which you really have a natural interest

Trust

The last idea that I want to give you as you go out into a profession that frequently puts a lot of procedure and a lot of precautions and a lot of mumbo jumbo into what it does, this is not the highest form which civilization can reach. The highest form which civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another. That’s the way an operating room works at the Mayo Clinic.

If a bunch of lawyers were to introduce a lot of process, the patients would all die. So never forget when you’re a lawyer that you may be rewarded for selling this stuff but you don’t have to buy it. In your own life what you want is a seamless web of deserved trust. And if your proposed marriage contract has 47 pages, my suggestion is do not enter.

That last one is the key to operating a law firm. True law firms are professional associations whose members share professional values out of which grow a kind of trust that cannot be achieved by policies, rules or procedures.

Trust among law partners creates real law firms. The rest are “legal services organizations”.

The most liberal art

Masada overlooking Dead Sea

Lifelong learning is the ultimate liberal art. It is the single skill or attribute that is most important for a school or college to impart to its students.

The truth never changes. But our understanding of it must change continually. If not, we are dead or dying.

Where lifelong learning can’t be imparted, it should be thrust upon.

And, that is what happened to MidLaw on that recent trip with 18 members of the senior class at Westtown School to Israel and Palestine.

It was not a trip. It was a master class in “You aren’t 18 years old anymore.”

Hike the Snake Path to Masada before dawn to see sunrise over the Dead Sea? At age 70?

Is that lifelong learning, or the lack of it?

Snake Path visible at left

 

 

What the horse-and-mule business shows to lawyers, robots and others preparing for an uncertain future

Last week, John Markoff at the New York Times published a note calling attention to recent studies which conclude that technology will not replace lawyers so much as create new kinds of the work for them to do. “The End of Lawyers? Not So Fast” He points to a paper written by UNC Law professor Dana Remus and Frank Levy at MIT, “Can Robots Be Lawyers?“.

Well, let me tell you: my great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father were in the horse-and-mule business from the 19th Century forward. It was a good business and they did well. Then tractors came.

By the Mid-Twentieth Century, the horse-and-mule business was done. My family has been on the run from technology ever since. So my crowd knows a thing or two about competing with machines.

Now, here I am in the 21^st Century weighing the possibility that robots may take most of the jobs that were left after the tractors came. I am being told not to worry. And, I have an attitude about that.

A rush of recent books and article has proclaimed a coming era of technology-provided abundance. Maybe, nobody will need to work. But that initial rush quickly subsided into a flow of worry — about whether there will be jobs for people to do. This will be with us, we are told – in twenty years’ time or less, they say.

Things are in flux. In the future, either the work we do will be gone, or it will will be changed. Either way, it will be different. How do we prepare for that?

Here is what the horse-and-mule bid’ness showed me.

First, the less work there is for people to do in an abundant future, the more need there will be for real educations. It will take a real education to know how to thrive in a time when jobs are not needed any more. That will require: “men and women with well-trained minds and good hearts; people who can think for themselves and not be blown about by every wind of doctrine.”

And, second, the same also looks true if jobs are still around, but the work is different from what it is now. We must be able to cope with that change. And the best way (maybe the only way) to prepare for change , is to have a real education.

A “real education” is what Jane Fernandes at Guilford College calls a “practical liberal arts” education.

 

Ross’s Goose sojourns at Guilford College

Ross’s Goose among the Canadians @ Guilford College

A Ross’s Goose has appeared at Guilford College. It has taken to hanging out with the usual crowd of interloping Canada Geese.

He is not supposed to be there. Ross’s Geese usually go to California or Mexico this time of year.

This one may have heard about Guilford’s unusual — practical liberal arts — field biology curriculum; or there may be some Quaker thing working here. Fabled Guilford ornithologist Lynn Mosley is on the case.

Guilford and Greensboro seem to be greeting the event with more aplomb than similarly situated Mainiacs .

Anyway, this visit is rare, surely auspicious. And, I’ve got to say, I like the cut of the little fellow’s jib.

Sir Thomas More and the mid size law firm

He was the great lawyer of the English common law. He stood at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of what came next. A lawyer who was canonized.

Thomas More’s 1998 biographer, Peter Ackroyd, says that

For most of his life, More was a lawyer and a public administrator; he was not a visionary or a scholarly humanist. … [H]e believed that experience in the practical business of the world led to prudent deliberation and good judgement [sic].

“Experience in the practical business of the world leads to prudent deliberation and good judgment.”

Experience, deliberation, judgment. That is the core franchise of the mid size law firm. It is the promise that mid size firms make to beginning lawyers; and the product they deliver to clients.

The same thing is at the core of “the practical liberal arts,” which President Jane Fernandes is defining at Guilford College. Practical experience married with structured study of tradition and learning.

Jon Meacham apothegm @ Guilford College Bryan Series

Jon Meacham at the Guilford College Bryan Series last night:

I believe deeply in the power of the liberal arts to enable us not only to see the dots, but to connect them.

3 hard-guy comments on real education, not a commodity

Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote The Black Swan and Antifragile. He tweets aphorisms, one after another.

Recently, he emitted more about education. Tweeted he:

“Good students” usually a category of pple [sic] with the ability to focus on details of boring things not relevant to them, pre-bureaucrats.

Never hire an A-student unless the job is to take exams.

Trial and error means you can learn by and only by failing exams.

The beginning of the end. Education, because it became commoditized/gamed/nerdified, converges to useless.

Taleb reminds me of H. L. Mencken, who said

“Education in the truest sense – education directed toward awakening a capacity to differentiate between fact and appearance – always will be a more or less furtive and illicit thing, for its chief purpose is the controversion and destruction of the very ideas that the majority of men – and particularly the majority of official and powerful men – regard as incontrovertibly true.”

Tough.

Taleb and Mencken put me in mind of Nereus Mendenhall, who said the same things in milder terms but much tougher straits than either Taleb or Mencken. Mendenhall was the legendary Quaker president who kept Guilford College open, with its pacifist and abolitionist values, in the middle of North Carolina throughout the Civil War.

Guilford College, Mendenhall said, should:

produce men and women with well-trained minds and good hearts; people who can think for themselves and not be blown about by every wind of doctrine.

The promise of liberal arts colleges is precisely that.

A good college is anything but a commodity. Every independent college should be a unique, values-based learning community – that prepares its students – to think – for themselves.

That is what Guilford College does to this day.

Jane Fernandes, her French major & the job it prepared her for

In the most recent post here, the point is made that studying what you love has greater practical value than studying what you think has the greatest practical value.

Just after that note was posted, MidLaw became aware of this article in Our State magazine about Dr. Jane Fernandes, Guilford College‘s ninth president. Jane is deaf. She was a French major. She majored in French despite her parents’ worries.

Jane dove in anyway. “I loved every minute of it,” she says. “It was more about being in charge of what I could and couldn’t do.” She read books. She went to Paris. She got the degree.

Our State, North Carolina, September 2015.

It worked out fine. She got an advanced degree. Now she’s the president of a world class liberal arts college. She is very good at what she does, which is not teaching French.

FOOTNOTE: Your humble servant is also a French major. With that preparation, he promptly became a soldier in an unsuccessful land war in Asia, then a business litigator and trial lawyer, a banking lawyer, and now the managing partner of an exceptional law firm with offices in three North Carolina cities.

MidLaw is studying the proposition that everyone should major in French . . ..

Vive La France!

Law firms, law schools lumber — Elon Law, not so much

3:AM MAGAZINE Whatever it is, we’re against it

Criticism happens quick.

Criticism in tweets and blogs and articles comes really quickly. (“The legal profession is doomed.“) Changes in law firms and law schools, not like that.

Law firms and law schools are changing right now, albeit perhaps in lumbering ways.

Yet, even though “it’s surprising how long things take, [it’s] shocking how fast they happen.”

That’s the feeling I had when I read this article about Elon Law School’s success with its new approach to legal education. Elon Law has made some big changes. They appear to be working. Where did that come from?

We’re not like every other law school,” law school Dean Luke Bierman said in an interview last week. “We want a different kind of law student — a pioneer, someone with a pioneering spirit who can come into a new program and succeed.

The legal profession was pronounced “doomed” a short while back. Now, maybe not. There is something new at Elon Law.

Legal profession: Sickness unto death? Or, a return to enduring value? 10 Challenges Facing the Profession.

Brooks Pierce’s exceptional Director of Recruiting and Professional Development, Gail Cutter, has one mighty dyspeptic view of the challenges currently facing the legal profession. Yet, she is a true believer in the enduring value of a legal education and the nobility of the profession.

Gail is a remarkable (and not ignoble) professional herself. Her thoughts are valuable and they are set out below, in her words and with her permission. They merit attention.

(By the way, MidLaw has a different take on many of these same issues. That is, MidLaw agrees with many of Gail’s premises, but has a much rosier perspective. We are a good team.)

10 Challenges Facing the Legal Profession

1. The regard in which lawyers and the legal profession are held has declined precipitously over the past century, particularly since the 1970s (Watergate, general distrust of institutions). Once considered pillars of the community, statesman and leaders in all walks of life (business, government, the non-profit sector, academia), lawyers are now roundly disliked and distrusted and famously serve as the butt of jokes.

2. The Cautious/Covetous Generation: The profession is now being run and shaped largely by people who entered the profession for all the wrong reasons. (I say this as a 1987 law graduate myself.) Starting in the 1980s, as salaries climbed steeply and the media, aghast, spread the news, more and more college grads pursued JDs for the wrong reasons. Too many applicants were drawn by (a) the lure of high-paying jobs, and/or (b)their risk-averse natures, seeking stability and safety. A JD was the safe, acceptable, well-paid ‘default option’ for the unfocused college grad. (B-school applicants at least had to commit to two years in the real world.) This trend was exaggerated in the 1990s, as law firms boosted salaries repeatedly to compete with the largesse of dot-coms. The obsession with data in general and the U.S. News rankings in particular appealed to applicants driven by the bottom line. Only the hardcore public interest-minded souls still purported to be motivated by the idealism that once brought many to the law (even those bound for the private sector).

3. Legal Education, the Cash Cow: Many legal educators have lost the plot. The notion of legal academia as a bastion of high values, idealism and service has deteriorated as pressure has mounted for law schools to function as university profit centers. The rise in the cost of higher education has far outstripped the cost of living, of course. Law schools, relatively efficient operations with large classes and low overhead, are handy to fill university coffers and fund medical schools and science centers. Law school deans are under pressure to spend more and more of their valuable time fundraising. LLM programs and JD transfer programs have proliferated to feed the drive for FTE. As law schools have been run increasingly like corporations, the culture has turned. (I make this observation as a veteran of 15 fulfilling years in law school administration.)

4. A Million Unhappy Lawyers: The perfect storm has raged over the past 30 years: Law firms have grown exponentially in size and complexity. As the deals got bigger and bigger (see the M&A boom of the 1980s and beyond), the work became more specialized, technical and rote. Ditto Big Litigation. Law firm merger mania (once big news, now just a fact of life) has diluted firm culture and history, creating firms that are essentially multi-national corporations with brands created on Madison Avenue. Add high hours, massive, unwieldy and mind-numbing cases and deals: It was inevitable that associate dissatisfaction would follow. (Particularly when lawyers were entering the profession for the wrong reasons, without a clear notion of any career path—and the legal career-ball kept moving.)

5. Attrition and Massive Institutional Instability: The pyramid structure that defines the modern law firm’s economic model builds in mass attrition and razor-thin partnership chances. Partners have little incentive to invest in training and mentoring junior associates; the odds are slim that those associates will stick around. Clients thus cannot count on having lawyers with a deep understanding of their business, challenges and goals. The “Trusted Advisor” – a core identity of the Happy Lawyer of the Glorious Past—does not work in this setting. Without stable law firm teams, fleeting client loyalty should come as no surprise. Further, as GCs face unrelenting economic pressure, law firms are squeezed on price and must hold a ‘dog and pony show’ for most every deal or case. For fancy law firms, this can feel unseemly and humiliating (or at least it did at first). Law is no longer fun or fancy.

6. Law as a Business: The Personality Disconnect: The bottom-line reality that faces every private practitioner of a firm large or small has created a huge disconnect from the Respected Professional/Trusted Advisor model. In addition to market forces which drew bottom-line oriented, risk-averse applicants to the law, instead of Atticus Finches and Clarence Darrows, there is now a massive personality disconnect. The senior cohort currently running major law firms, in many cases, is ill-suited to the current shape of the business of law. One must be a whiz CEO-investment banker-glad-handing salesperson to survive, succeed and enjoy law firm management. The archetypical intellectual, bookish tax-lawyer type is the polar opposite of the schmoozer/businessman who thrives most readily in modern private practice. Or a firm can have tremendously successful lawyers in “production,” but they are not matched by the experts in “sales” and management needed to lead firms into the future. Most lawyers famously lack the soft skills, sales skills and management abilities now needed to succeed in the law. Law schools are not equipped to teach them.

7. The Talent Pool is Diluted: Greed, risk-aversion and lack of sales skills are bad enough among our professional community. We could always count on attracting the best and the brightest. No more. Thanks to the financial collapse of 2008, the bottom dropped out of the large law firm market.  It is not predicted to return to that high-water mark. financial collapse of 2008, the bottom dropped out of the large law firm market. It is not predicted to return to that high-water mark. Thanks to data transparency, social media and the ubiquity of the Internet, vague (and just plain inaccurate) law school employment and salary statistics were found out. The inaccuracy and inadequacy of the U.S. News rankings were laid bare, and the ABA was forced to step in and require better consumer data. Now, college students at the top of the academic food chain are turning away from the law. (Given the negative popular perception of our profession, it is deeply disappointing but not surprising.) Based upon the precipitous drop in LSAT scores and GPAs of law school applicants, future lawyers seem to be getting dumber—um, less intellectually gifted. The alarming drop in the bar passage rates make a convincing case that this is true.

8. The Talent Pool is Shrinking: If the future lawyers are getting dumber, at least there are fewer of them. (The food is bad, but the portions are small.) In our cherished profession, which has been the wellspring of so much progress throughout history and good works to this day, it is not laughing matter. Until leaders of the profession can wrest back the reins and rebrand the legal profession, we will not be able to win back the best, brightest, most innovative and ambitious. Universities have created countless joint-degree programs and have aggressively fought for and won the students who would have in the past pursued JDs. Educators in public policy, international affairs, public affairs, business—even medicine—have been far more strategic and creative in designing programs and pursuing the best candidates.

9. The Haves and Have Nots: While leading law firms fret about the shrinking pie of high-priced work, the vast majority of Americans have no access to legal services. The salary disparity between entry-level associates at large firms and legal services lawyers and public defenders is shocking. The vast majority of lawyers in private practice make a fraction of what large firm lawyers do, rendering ‘median’ salary numbers useless. (No wonder potential law school applicants cannot make sense of the data.) This is a significant systemic problem in our profession—and it certainly extends beyond to the economy at large. Our profession once saw itself as a cohesive whole; lawyers from various cities, regions, specialties and settings could find common ground and connect—often being more comfortable with each other than with non-lawyers. The vast chasms that divide us now, from top law schools to the rest, BigLaw to the vast majority of firms—this adds to the difficulty of coming together to reimagine ourselves and reinvent our profession.

10. Do We Have the Will? I see the profession as increasingly splintered, with little to bring us together. Even the leaders of the bar coalesce around topics, issues, affinity groups, specialty areas. This has enabled us to make great strides and to exercise leadership in a world that is increasingly splintered and complex. However, it makes it more difficult to imagine a ‘movement’ to bring the profession back to the glorious days of yore.

In spite of my dire “Top 10” list, I am a proud JD and a true believer in the enduring value of legal education. Private practice will remain relevant (and profitable) by bringing innovative thinking and creative problems-solving to serve clients in new and unimaginable businesses, industries and technologies. In these posts, Ed Winslow has argued convincingly for Liberal Arts education as the best preparation for this future world, inculcating flexibility, nimble thinking and innovation. For my money, the JD is the ultimate professional Liberal Arts degree.