Andrew Canter (left) and Andrew Bruck at the NALP conference in Toronto. Michael Rappaport/The Lawyers Weekly Click here to see full sized version.

Law students are used to being tested, graded and ranked. Now it’s time for law firms to feel the heat: a group of Stanford law students recently launched a project to issue annual report cards and rank large law firms in major U.S. legal markets on criteria such as diversity, work/life balance and pro bono work.

Andrew Bruck and Andrew Canter are third year law students at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California and the co-presidents of Building a Better Legal Profession (BBLP). They spoke about their group’s mission at the National Association of Legal Career Professionals’ annual conference in Toronto, before a packed audience including many recruiters from prominent American law firms.

Origins

The idea to launch BBLP sprung from an academic investigation into the billable hour, Canter told The Lawyers Weekly in an interview after his presentation.

“Dozens of lawyers had written about why the billable hour needed to be changed, but there wasn’t a group devoted to reform,” Canter said.

His class examined the harmful effects of escalating billable hour targets. In 1958 the American Bar Association recommended billing 1,300 hours per year. Today, many large U.S. law firms expect associates to bill over 2,000 hours per year.

Appalled by this trend, Canter and a fellow classmatee, Craig Segall, drafted “Principles for a Renewed Legal Profession.” The manifesto called on firms to reduce billable hour targets, address work/life balance issues and implement alternative billing methods.

On April 2, 2007, Canter and Segall sent a letter to ask firms to commit to the group’s principles. The letter was mailed to the hiring partners and recruiting coordinators at the top 100 law firms in America. Only six firms responded.

Rankings

While the letter may not have grabbed the attention of The American Lawyer’s top 100 law firms, BBLP’s law firm ranking and report card – published on Oct. 10, 2007 to much media fanfare – certainly did. The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, the legal trade press and many smaller papers covered the rankings.

The rankings and report card were based on data drawn from the National Association of Legal Career Professionals’ (NALP) surveys of law firms. Firms were graded from A to F on five categories: minimum billable hour requirements; average associate hours worked; demographic diversity; average pro bono hours; and the number of part-time attorneys.

Firms with over 100 attorneys in six major markets were ranked: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Washington D.C.

During the presentation, Bruck said that BBLP’s rankings, unlike other law firm rating services such as American Lawyer Magazine, Vault, U.S. News & World Report, Multi Cultural Law, includes both the top and bottom performers in each category.

“As much as we hate rankings” Bruck said, “we realized that if we wanted to influence students we had to rank firms.”

All of the data for the rankings is  based on self-reported figures collected by NALP. In an interview following the presentation, Canter said that if he could get additional information from firms he would request the following: first, the annual attrition rate for associates at each firm; second, the median of billable hours worked per associate (currently the target is an average that may mix part-time attorneys’ hours with full-time); and the number of equity partners with a financial stake in the firm versus non-equity partners, who may be paid at a higher rate, but are not entitled to a share of annual profits. Currently both equity and non-equity partners are lumped together.

BBLP posted the rankings on its website for students to view and sent the rankings to the general counsels of the Fortune 500 companies — along with a letter recommending that rankings be used to influence the selection of outside legal counsel.

Associate attrition rates

Big law firms have been  bleeding associates at an astonishing rate in both Canada and the U.S. Nearly 80 per cent of associates at large firms in the U.S. will leave within about five years, according to a survey by Hildebrant International Inc., a legal consulting firm. The survey also noted, that it can cost a firm upwards of $350,000 to hire and train a replacement. Despite these distressing figures, the question remains: do law firms want to staunch the loss or do they prefer to stream through a constant flow of new associates who depart long before making partner?

After all, many critics have derided big law firms for following a “churn and burn” business model, whereby associates are pressured to bill insane hours until finally they burn out and are replaced by new fuel for the furnace.

While Canter acknowledged that the law firm business model relies on attrition, he maintains that the departures are mistimed.

“Law firms are losing people mid-level, years three to five, which are the most profitable for the firms, the time when they are most valuable,” Canter rebutted. “Our business case for change is: if you give people more sustainable careers, if you cut back on the hours marginally, then you recoup that on the increased billable rates of associates as they become more senior.”

He added that this business rationale for reducing billable hour targets was developed by the Project for Attorney Retention (PAR), an initiative of The Center for WorkLife Law of the University of California Hastings College of the Law.

Idealism and media savvy

At the NALP conference, Bruck and Canter presented an unusual mix of youthful idealism, pragmatism and media savvy. Both have spurned the big law firm lifestyle. After law school, Canter is planning on doing a two year fellowship in public interest law, focusing on housing advocacy in the Gulf Coast, which is still recovering from hurricane Katrina. Bruck will be clerking for the chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court and aspires to a career with the department of justice.

But they will be leaving BBLP in good hands. BBLP was incorporated as a not-for-profit and they will continue to sit on its board. Already, in under a year, it has grown into a national coalition, with a website, a blog, a listserv for distributing e-mails ands a Facebook group with over a thousand members. Bruck and Canter have also negotiated a publishing deal with Kaplan Publishing to disseminate the rankings as a guide book.

As for summer plans? Starting in August, Bruck and Canter will be on a speaking tour of 20 law schools across America.