The Data-Centric, Empirical "Law Firms Working Group"

My friend Professor William Henderson at Indiana University School of Law—Bloomington just sent word of a new initiative the law school is launching in conjunction with the American Bar Foundation. 

Called the "Law Firms Working Group," the project includes no fewer than 14 research teams comprising 38 scholars in all, who will have access under a special license to the archival data of American Lawyer Media, which "includes cross–sectional and longitudinal information on law firm structure, financial performance, lawyer demographics, branch office size and location, lawyer mobility, associate satisfaction, relative law firm prestige derived from lawyer surveys, practice group prominence, and other facets of modern law firm practice."

What precisely are they researching, and what makes this initiative different from yet another set of academic papers on our complicated profession?

First, what promises to make it different is that the "LFWG" researchers will actually be working with data.  In other words, their work will be far more empirical than the usual armchair-observing and abstract-pontificating (and no, I'm not naming any names, thank you).

Second, their proposed projects include several that promise to be of genuine interest to those of us who are long since out of the academy and into the actual nitty-gritty of management and leadership.  Here are a few that struck me as particularly "real world" in focus:

• Lawyer Mobility:  "The investigators will study the volume of lawyer lateral mobility, and the and factors influencing it. They will explore the importance of a strong firm culture in the quality of client service, firm profits, firm stability, employee satisfaction, and associate attrition. After this analysis has been completed, Marc Galanter and William Henderson will utilize this dataset to study the relation of mandatory retirement policies to lawyer mobility."
• Interaction Between Law Firm Structure, Hiring, and Partner Promotion:  "John Gordanier will study the empirical relationship between the structure of law firms and the characteristics of associates and partners. His focus will be on whether a multi-tiered partnership structure [with equity and non-equity partners] changes the composition of a firm's associates and whether it affects the quality of the partners."
• Globalization Strategies of U.S. Law Firms:  "Carole Silver and Nicole DeBruin will combine Law Firms Working Group data with their own prior research into non-U.S. offices of U.S. law firms to analyze the consequences of different approaches to global expansion. They will examine a variety of factors, including the ways that offshore offices reflect or differ from their domestic counterparts, and the relationship between offshore office growth and financial success."
• The Professionalization of Large Firm Management:  "Elizabeth Chambliss will track the emergence of full-time ("professional") managers in law firms, focusing on the managing partner and law firm general counsel positions. Her research will examine the relationship between professional management and the economic success of the firm, and the sources of managerial authority for full-time versus part-time/practicing managers."

Other projects will look at the relationship between firm performance and a commitment to pro bono, the changing geographic footprint of global law firms, career trajectories of young lawyers, and race and gender in large law firms.

For some time now, Bill Henderson has been one of the rare law professors with a dominant "quant" gene and I for one will be fascinated to see the fruits of these various research projects.

And of course, you know that "Adam Smith, Esq." will be one place where you can read about those results as they materialize.