Is leading lawyers impossible?

• Author: Beese, Mark

Is Leading Lawyers Impossible?

One of my favorite Super Bowl commercials is a 60-second spot for EDS that ran in 2005. The music is straight from an old spaghetti western. Men on horses ride over a ridge and the camera zooms in on a wrangler holding a black-and-white photo next to a horse with a grey cat sitting on the saddle. "This man right here is my grandfather. He's the first cat herder in the family." Stetson-wearing cat-herders with gruff voices reflect on their profession with quips like:

"Herding cats--don't let anyone tell you it's easy." "Being a cat herder is probably one of the toughest things I've ever done." "Not everyone can do what we do." The camera pans across thousands of cats running through the prairie as one cat-herder sums it up, "It ain't an easy job, but when you bring a herd into town and you ain't lost a one of them--there ain't a feeling like it in the world."

Leading lawyers is a lot like herding cats. Lawyers, and those who work with them, tend to have extreme personality traits that help them be good lawyers, but perhaps difficult leaders. Not long ago, law firm leadership guru David Maister wrote in "The American Lawyer,"

"After spending 25 years saying that all professions are similar and can learn from each other, I'm now ready to make a concession: Law firms are different. The ways of thinking and behaving that help lawyers excel in their profession may be the very things that limit what they can achieve as firms. Management challenges occur not in spite of lawyers' intelligence and training, but because of them. Among the ways that legal training and practice keep lawyers from effectively functioning in groups are * problems with trust; * difficulties with ideology, values, and principles; * professional detachment; * and unusual approaches to decision making. If firms cannot overcome these inherent tendencies, they may not be able to deliver on the goals and strategies they say they pursue." [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

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Is leading lawyers impossible? No, but it can feel like it sometimes.

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