Wilmer Cutler and Seyfarth Shaw Join the Executive Education Parade

Wilmer Cutler, in conjunction with Harvard Business School, and Chicago's Seyfarth Show, with Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, have now followed Reed Smith and DLA Piper in initiating formal long-term collaborative efforts to train their current and future leaders.

While the details of each program vary (for example, Reed Smith offers curricula for everyone from senior members of the management committee to staff, while Wilmer Cutler intends to focus on leadership and strategic planning), the goal of, the rationale for, all are simple:  To train lawyers to lead complex, multinational enterprises given that nothing in a traditional legal education remotely touches upon the skills needed.

It gets worse:  A Hildebrandt Director who is a psychologist with a law degree has catalogued the personality traits common to lawyers:

"They include: skepticism; high cognitive thinking; urgency or impatience; autonomy; sensitivity or defensiveness; and a lack of sociability."

Shall we engage in the thought experiment of constructing a similar catalogue of traits common to successful business leaders?  Here are my nominees:

Instinctive trust of others; intellectual smarts combined with "emotional intelligence;" decisiveness; collaborative by nature; welcoming of alternative viewpoints and sincerely open to constructive debate; and an inborn temperamental ability to get along with a wide variety of people.

So not only do these executive education initiatives have their emotional and behavioral work cut out for them, they cannot apply the MBA template to law firm leaders:  "What works for GE will not work for law firms," since the art of "managing" a group of high-performing, verbal and analytic overachievers whose career success may have been largely built on standing out from the crowd, bears no resemblance whatsoever to employer/employee relations.

Finally, real money is at stake.  Not only does week-long immersion in executive education supplant otherwise-billable time, but the cost of the curriculum itself can be tens of thousands of dollars for a handful of partners.  Nevertheless:

Michael Pollack, a partner and director of strategic planning at Reed Smith, says that the training is critical to the firm's future.  "It's not cheap, but we're growing a lot, and as we grow we need more help."

Pollack and his firm are smart enough to recognize that as much as this costs, the alternative could be even more costly—and to act decisively by placing a savvy bet on preparing the firm for its future.