Externally, individual lawyers suffer through the disenchantment process on their own. Internally, he says, law firm managers must often make heart-wrenching decisions about the future of partners they've worked beside for decades. We force the issue. We find partners doing work that should now be done by paralegals so we have to retool that partner to do something else. Then, he says, the firm must decide if it wants to keep those lawyers and invest in a retooling or terminate them.
Some veterans make the decision easy with their attitude.
Ms. Messman cites the example of one Denver firm that lost a client, leaving three partners with nothing to do. They are in that process right now. But few firms will even discuss retooling. In the past year more than 20 different bar and law school groups have sponsored it with attendance averaging between 100 and 150 wherever she goes. She says she knows of one firm that allowed a group of lawyers to cut their billable hours while working on an audio-video tape presentation about estate planning.