Who Will Be Your Successor?

Succession planning is part of the Management 101 toolkit that law firms ignore at their peril.  Too many firm leaders are reluctant to attend to it, either intentionally ("it will all work out") or simply through preferring not to take up a potentially contentious, personality-intensive issue so long as there seems no urgency to it.  Of course, once it's urgent it's too late.

These observations are not academic.  I had the happy experience of being an associate at the late, great firm of Shea & Gould here in New York when it was in its heyday, but after both Bill Shea and Milton Gould retired in their 70's, the firm ultimately dissolved for want of strong and uniting management—a death that could have been avoided.*  Thinking about succession planning is also timely:  We've recently learned that Testa-Hurwitz is no more, two years after the sudden death of marquee founder Dick Testa, and my recent piece about Jay Zimmerman's leadership at Bingham-McCutchen shows the flip-side:  That good, not just bad, things can happen when a new leader steps in. 

So bravo to Larry Sonsini of Wilson-Sonsini for handing the CEO keys to John Roos.  Roos, who's been at Wilson-Sonsini as a corporate attorney for 20 years, is currently the managing director of professional services and, in the small world department, a friend of mine from Stanford Law School days.  (Yes, I have already congratulated him, and he has graciously and self-effacingly replied.)   Aside from my own delight at John's well-deserved elevation, why do I hold this out as a model of succession planning?  Consider:

• Sonsini didn't have to do this now; he's only 64 and clearly in a position to remain on the throne for as long as he chooses.
• Wilson-Sonsini may be at something of a strategic inflection point.  While it is pre-eminent in technology and venture capital circles, and sizable by any standard (600 lawyers, #46 on the AmLaw 100), it's heavily Bay Area-centric:  Palo Alto and SF aside, none of its offices has more than 30 attorneys.  If they aspire to be a Latham & Watkins or an Orrick, a different approach is called for.
• Sonsini has not attempted to clone himself and appoint a mirror-image successor:  Instead, he has self-consciously moved to "institutionalize" (his word) management.  While Roos becomes CEO, Jeffrey Saper, now managing director of business development, will become vice chairman and focus on client development.

John sums up the change with pith:  "We are a major company that needs full-time management." 

GE has been written about in the management literature as a virtual finishing school for CEO's.  AmLaw 100 firms could do worse than taking a page from that playbook.

*Trivia fact: Bill Shea is the "Shea" in Shea Stadium. Huuuh? you ask. After the Dodgers decamped from Brooklyn to LA, New York was for some time without a National League baseball team. Eventually Major League Baseball got around to talking about giving an "expansion" National League team to another city--but not to New York! Bill Shea, who was unbelievably well-connected politically, started a movement to create a third, new baseball league, the Continental League, and planned, of course, to award this new league's first franchise to New York. The National League blinked, New York got the Mets, and Bill got his stadium.