BigLaw Mentoring Gap Is Growing, Retired Partner Says
Steven Harper recalls the time he was a third-year associate preparing for his first jury trial. A partner helped him craft his opening statements without worrying about lost billable hours.
That kind of help is in shorter supply today, according to Harper, an adjunct professor at Northwestern University who recently retired as a partner at Kirkland & Ellis. In a commentary for the American Lawyer, Harper says there is a mentoring gap in BigLaw, and it’s growing.
“In many large firms, the phenomenon flows directly from the dominant MBA-mentality that forces firm leaders and everyone else to focus on short-term metrics—individual billings, billable hours, associate-partner leverage ratios,” he writes. “The resulting behavior is predictable. Each individual’s drive to attain and preserve his or her position in accordance with such metrics leaves little room (or time) for the personalized mentoring that turns good young lawyers into better older ones. There’s no metric for measuring the contribution of mentoring to, say, average profits per partner.”
