The Secondment Trap | Ross Booher & Tim Haley

Transcript

Tim Haley 00:00

Secondments work.

Ross Booher 00:02

Right. Yeah. A lot of times it’s going to make total sense. We’re just talking about the times when –

Candice Reed 00:07

That’s not what you said in your article.

Tim Haley 00:09

It’s kind of what we said. We said in the beginning, “Hey, it makes sense sometimes.” We didn’t say in which cases.

Ross Booher 00:15

Yeah.

Candice Reed 00:16

It’s called “The Secondment Trap.”

Tim Haley 00:18

It is a trap. It is a trap.

Ross Booher 00:19

Unless you navigate this very, very narrow path –

Tim Haley 00:23

Yeah, everybody’s got to be on the same page. Yeah.

Ross Booher 00:25

Yes.

Candice Reed 00:26

Most traps are not positive.

Ross Booher 00:30

If you step off that narrow path.

Candice Reed 00:32

Words matter, gentlemen.

Ross Booher 00:33

They do.

Tim Haley 00:35

I stand by it.

Ross Booher 00:37

Yeah.

Tim Haley 00:38

I think both things can be true. It can work, but also be a trap.

Candice Reed 00:46

This is Leveraging Latitude, Cultivating a Full Life in the Law and we’re your hosts, Candice Reed…

Tim Haley 00:53

…And Tim Haley.

Candice Reed 00:54

Please join us on our journey as we discover how to leverage the hard work of becoming a lawyer to achieving success and leading a rich and fulfilling life in the law.

Candice Reed 01:10

Hi, Tim. How are you?

Tim Haley 01:12

Candice, it’s a great day. How are you doing?

Candice Reed 01:13

It is a great day. I’m doing well. Thank you. I’m excited because today I get to put you on the hot seat as one of our guest experts, along with Latitude’s CEO, Ross Booher.

Tim Haley 01:29

Yeah. I feel like that’s actually our formula, right. It’s my bi-weekly free therapy session. Always on the hot seat.

Candice Reed 01:39

That may be true. But this time I’m going to be asking you questions about stuff you actually know something about.

Tim Haley 01:44

Oh, well, thank you for that. I enjoy the vote of confidence. That’s great.

Candice Reed 01:47

It should be easy.

Tim Haley 01:48

Oh yeah. Okay. It should be easy. It should be.

Candice Reed 01:48

It should be easy. Let’s invite our other guest into the conversation. As I mentioned, Latitude’s CEO, Ross Booher is joining us today as well. Welcome, Ross.

Ross Booher 02:02

Thanks so much. It’s great to be here. I’ve been listened to a bunch of these to now watch how this is put together.

Tim Haley 02:09

It’s all magic, Ross.

Ross Booher 02:09

I’m glad to be joining you. Yes.

Tim Haley 02:11

Just magic and we’ll sprinkle the dust on. And here we go.

Candice Reed 02:14

I like the magic metaphor better than the sausage metaphor, right.

Ross Booher 02:18

I was actually about to use the sausage metaphor, and I paused and shifted away, I don’t know if you’d noticed that.

Candice Reed 02:25

I did. I did. And I appreciated it, but then I just had to go there because I knew that’s what you and probably others were thinking. So yes, it’s magic, not sausage. That’s what we’re doing here on the Leveraging Latitude podcast. So today we’re going to talk a little bit about secondments. So, this is an arrangement that has become more popular in recent years. I would say over the last what, 10 to 20 years — you guys are the experts on this, so I’ll leave that to you. I know that it’s been at least a couple of decades that law firms and in-house legal departments have had this arrangement. Who wants to jump in and help me out here, get me out of the hole I’m digging for myself and explain to us what a secondment actually is.

Tim Haley 03:16

I don’t know what you keep digging, Candice. No, I’m kidding.

Candice Reed 03:21

Payback.

Tim Haley 03:21

That’s right. Now the secondments have been around forever. I think Ross, you and I didn’t do any research behind it necessarily, but it’s been going on at least 50 years, probably longer than that. Pretty standard course, especially three or four decades ago, right.

Ross Booher 03:36

Yeah. And I think that if I’m remembering incorrectly Lucian Pera and I worked on a writeup on this, on the ethical considerations. And I think that if I’m remembering correctly, some of his research was this, the secondments go way back as a military term when an officer would be seconded from one unit to another. And so that’s just flowed into the legal profession and is typically when a corporate client asks their law firm for an attorney to basically provide them to essentially function as an interim in-house counsel on loan. So they’re still employed by the law firm, but they’re on assignment to the company for a set period of time. And what oftentimes happens of course, is that the company hires them and/or they are sent back to the law firm after whatever it is, two months, six months, a year.

Candice Reed 04:33

So, Ross, you and Tim have recently written an article that has been picked up by several publications, entitled “The Secondment Trap: When Should Law Firms, Legal Departments & Attorneys Avoid a Traditional Law Firm Secondment?” So I think generally speaking secondments were considered to be a good thing right, where there was this symbiotic relationship between the in-house legal department and the law firm, perhaps an opportunity for a young associate to get some in-house experience to better serve the client once the secondment concluded, so what’s the trap? What are some of the disadvantages to this type of an arrangement? Or maybe we should start with the advantages and then give the counterpoint.

Tim Haley 05:24

Yeah, I think the secondment arrangement can be very beneficial in several cases. I mean, there’s lots of reasons that in-house legal departments need high quality attorneys. And sometimes, usually they go out and hire them themselves. Sometimes they can’t either because maybe there’s a hiring freeze, maybe they don’t have an FTE. Maybe it’s not in the budget. Maybe there’s just, there’s an immediate short-term problem that an in-house legal department has. And the only way to fill it as with really smart, qualified attorneys. And so it’s an easy and natural progression for that general counsel to go to their favorite law firms and say, “Hey, let me borrow and associate for a year.”

Tim Haley 05:59

And that’s in theory, great for the company, because now they’ve figured out their short-term issue in terms of getting whatever work it is that they need done. And the law firm feels good too, they get to help out one of their valued clients. So at least on a very basic level, it looks often like a win-win, but Candice, as you alluded to, there’s a lot of hiccups and tricks and it really has to work well, especially in this environment. It has to work well, and not only for the firm and the company, but also for those seconded attorney who the first example really doesn’t have a say, they just get moved over and Ross probably in the military, right. I’m guessing the secondee didn’t really have that much of a voice in that process.

Ross Booher 06:42

Yeah. I think that that can definitely be the case. I think that there are a lot of situations where the secondment really does work well for the company, for the law firm. And in many instances, for the attorney as well, the seconded attorney as well. But I think, as Tim was saying, that it is, it’s so important to make sure that it really is working for everyone because there are a number of circumstances where I think it ends up not being a great deal for any of the three. The traditional law firm secondment is done because it’s just the default and viewed as the path of least resistance.

Candice Reed 07:22

What are some of those hiccups as Tim said, or what are some of the challenges that law firms and legal departments should at least be aware of or think about prior to entering into this type of an arrangement?

Tim Haley 07:38

Yeah, I think first of all, I mean, the secondments work well when the law firm and the company have a complete understanding at the outset. That’s when they work well. I think if we broke it down into perspectives right, the legal department perspective, the law firm perspective and the attorney perspective, you can see in some cases where it wouldn’t work so well.

Candice Reed 08:02

What are some of the things that they need to work out beforehand? Because, I mean, I imagine there’s a conversation or something takes place. Some type of discussion takes place beforehand. So what are some of the terms or expectations that need to be discussed?

Tim Haley 08:18

Yeah. So it’s one thing to have a short-term problem that needs an attorney immediately to fill. It’s another to think about the long-term relationship at the same time at the outset. So if you’re an in-house legal department and you know you need an attorney and you go to your three best firms and say, “Bring me an attorney.” Number one, you’ve got to get the right attorney to do whatever job it is that you want to do. And number two, it’s got to work out for the firm, right. Most firms, a lot of firms anyway, I don’t want to say most, but a lot of firms don’t like the secondment relationship because it’s a lost opportunity cost for them. Their seconded attorneys are their biggest billers, their most profitable units.

Candice Reed 08:53

And typically, a seconded attorney is going to be billed substantially less per hour because of the long-term engagement, is that right?

Tim Haley 09:04

Yeah.

Ross Booher 09:04

Yeah. A classic example and I’ll have this come up in conversations with law firm partners. It’s the stereotypical situation where the partner is asked by a client to provide a first-year associate for work that requires a fifth- or sixth-year associate. And they’re asked to provide that person at less than paralegal rates. And the person that they’re asked for is someone who’s going to be in incredibly high demand. And oftentimes they’re one of their most profitable attorneys. And the attorney is often going to be someone that is on multiple client matters. So from the law firm partner perspective, all of a sudden you’re being asked to pull a key player out of sometimes multiple matters and provide them at a massive discount that essentially represents in many cases, the loss of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of revenue to the law firm.

Ross Booher 09:58

But the situation is typically you’re being asked by a really good client to do that. And so you value the relationship, and you want to provide a solution to the client, but it oftentimes puts a lot of stress on the firm and not just on the firm, as in the organization, but whenever you’re pulling that key player out, it’s adding a lot of stress to your other team members because all of a sudden they’re down a person. So what’s happened is in order to meet a need, a short fall in bandwidth on the client’s side, that burden is shifted to the law firm. Of course, the law firm partner wants to help the client. It’s just oftentimes at multiple disadvantages for the law firm, and so that’s why when it’s that type of situation, if there’s an alternative, it could be very attractive.

Tim Haley 10:46

On the in-house side, if you’re only thinking about the short-term fix and you’re not thinking about the long-term relationship, I mean that’s where the secondments don’t work very well because you’re going to bring in a star and it’s going to, maybe it helps your short-term situation, maybe it doesn’t, and we can talk about that but… And then you’re going to do what — are you going to bring him on full time? Are you going to kick him back to the firm? How does that affect the long-term relationship with the firm that just, as Ross said, gave up hundreds of thousands of dollars and gave you a star that, and what’s going to happen to them too.

Candice Reed 11:18

So, you both were partners at large law firms prior to joining, or in Ross’s case, starting Latitude. Were you ever approached by one of your corporate clients to second one of your firm’s attorneys? And I guess, what was your reaction to the client, and then what was your internal reaction, the real feelings that you had whenever a client might ask for a secondment?

Tim Haley 11:52

So I wasn’t, but as an associate, some people in my class were seconded. And I remember at the time thinking, oh man, they’re so lucky they got their billable hours for the year done, right. It was like, man, that’s a great gig. Fast forward two years later, they weren’t with the firm anymore. That’s my perspective on it, just seeing my peers gets seconded out. Now, in fairness, they’re all in happy and productive legal careers, so it’s not a knock on them at all. It’s just how it all shook out.

Ross Booher 12:21

Yeah. For me, I did get asked for secondments. I mean, my practice area was investigations and compliance. And so a lot of times what would happen is a client would be implementing a compliance program and they would then ask for a secondee to help, for however many months as the compliance program was rolled out. And so it was a challenge. In fact, that was one of the trends or I guess the types of circumstance that prompted me to want to start Latitude. That if I was experiencing this, then I knew there was a lot of other law firm partners who are also in need of some alternative to a traditional secondment, because my kind of I say joke, but the comment of a client asking for a first-year associate for work that really requires a fourth- or fifth- or sixth-year associate, and they want it at less than paralegal rates and/or they ask for by name one of your key associates. And that person is one of your key players, they’re on multiple different matters and you couldn’t really pull them out without affecting a whole bunch of other people. And you’d pull them out of their career track for multiple months, and then you have to reintegrate them back in, if you provide the secondment.

Ross Booher 13:39

So I saw all those challenges firsthand. And then the flip side was I also saw circumstances where I would have clients ask me, in my case to do a foreign transaction, let’s say. Someone says, “Hey, we want to do a JV in Brazil and what’s the initial step?” And in my practice area at the time, it was, “Hey do you want to do due diligence, preliminary due diligence on this potential JV partner? I can go down there, we can have an associate and two of us whatever, or you can use a third party.” I used a particular company that do that sort of thing. And I would share with the client, “Look, the law firm, we can go down there and do that, but it’s going to be very, very expensive. And my recommendation is to use this third-party organization. I’ve used them with multiple clients. People have been really happy. You, the in-house counsel can quarterback them, or I’m happy to quarterback them, engage them through the firm.” And I had the same statement that I would make to my clients is, “Hey, if you’re going to go into, fill in the blank, high-risk jurisdiction, I recommend you go ahead and save your money now, because if you go forward with that, the odds are pretty good that one day I’m going to be calling you and recommending an internal investigation, and it’s going to be horrifically expensive.” And clients really appreciated that because they knew that I was trying to look out for their bottom line and I was proposing an alternative solution to what the normal default would be in using a third-party organization that, I didn’t have any stake in. It was clearly just an effort to meet the client’s need in an effective way and in a cost-efficient way.

Ross Booher 15:14

And so those are two things that were happening simultaneously seeing the client response to offering an alternative solution that was more cost-effective. And at the same time, seeing that I as a law firm partner and my associate team were feeling the effects of, or having to deal with the effects of being asked for a secondment. And so that was why this whole idea of, gosh, what if there could be a platform where you have fantastic attorneys that are available on a third-party basis for a secondment to the client. So you don’t have to pull your own key associate players and you’re able to provide the client what they need on a much more cost-efficient basis. And so the thought was this could be a solution, that’s a great option, an additional option for both the law firm partner, for the associate who now might be able to essentially avoid a secondment that might not be in their career interests. And also obviously meeting the need for the client in a way that could be even more effective than receiving a mid-level associate. For instance, by receiving someone who is both not only more cost-efficient but has more experience and more on-point experience, including in-house counsel experience. So that was one of the key aspects of, or purposes of Latitude was to help meet this three-part need.

Candice Reed 16:38

So Tim, you mentioned that several of your friends or colleagues, peers at the law firm were seconded or had the opportunity to be seconded. And that seemed like a really great gig to you. And I can certainly understand why, as you mentioned, that you don’t have to worry about your billable hours. You know that you’re going to meet that requirement for whatever period of time you are seconded to the client. But what are some of the pitfalls or disadvantages of being seconded for the attorney that young associates may not think about when first asked to do this?

Tim Haley 17:16

When I was a young associate – and I don’t want to assume that all young associates are as naive as I was – but when I was a young associate, it was do your work, find your work, get good at the job, bill your hours, and if you were lucky to go home and get a solid eight hours of sleep, right. That was the task and for me anyway, that’s how I simplified it, just to power on through. Young attorneys though, when they’re seconded out, particularly if they’re very young, I mean, it’s probably not so bad if they’re very young because you don’t know what your career is going to be anyway. But if you are set, dead set on becoming a law firm partner, a secondment may not the best choice for you because the skill set required to be a really good associate at a really big firm, and the skillset to be a really good in-house attorney, they’re just two totally different things.

Tim Haley 18:00

And the best example I can give I think, is just on risk tolerance and as an attorney in a law firm, I mean, it’s drilled into you, your risk tolerance is zero. So every decision you make is with an eye toward, okay, this is our risk tolerance here, we can’t be wrong, we have to be right. In-house often, it’s a little different because companies… The risk tolerance, right. The actual company’s like, “Yeah, okay. We might get sued on some of these, but we can live with it” or “This contract isn’t perfect, but we’re going to live with it.” I mean, it’s different little things that in the course of an in-house practice add up to just an ingrained inner sense of, “Okay, this risk is okay, that risk isn’t.” And just having that skillset is, it takes a lot of practice, it takes a lot of meetings. It takes a lot of experience. You can’t just go from one environment into the other and expect to succeed.

Candice Reed 18:51

Yeah. And I would think too, that associates who are seconded might miss out on some of the mentoring and the training that law firms are typically very good at, particularly during the formative years of an attorney’s career, right? I mean, one of the advantages of going into a large firm is the variety of experience that you get by working with many different clients. And also the mentoring that you receive by virtue of practicing with very experienced lawyers within your specific field. Where I think many of us think of in-house often requiring a more general skill set. So it seems to me that associates could miss out on some critical mentoring and training that they might otherwise receive at a law firm by being seconded for a period of time.

Tim Haley 19:49

Yeah. I think you miss the mentoring, you miss the comradery with your peers a lot of times, unless there’s a peer group in the company you are seconded to. There’s a lot of the experience learning, just getting in front of different companies, different clients, learning how different attorneys work. If you’re gone a year from a firm, you miss all that.

Ross Booher 20:08

Yeah. I think there’s really a lot of times, and it depends on the firm, but there’s a really accelerated learning pace within a law firm. And I think it’s very typical, not only of law firms, but many consulting-type roles. If someone’s going out in the accounting profession, for instance, public accounting, they’re doing the same thing. They’re jumping in like an attorney and they’re getting exposure to multiple different matters, multiple clients, oftentimes multiple partners at the same time and those are the types of experiences that are so critical to development. And so if you’re a young associate and you all of a sudden step out into a six-month, let’s say, or one-year engagement, your peers might have been on multiple matters. They might’ve had exposure to multiple partners who then developed an affinity for them. The ability to work closely with them, who are then going to include them on future matters. And while you’re on that secondment, oftentimes you’re out of sight and out of mind. And so yes, you may return to the firm, but when you do, all of a sudden you’re having to be reintegrated back in to different client matters. And oftentimes I think what the seconded attorneys find is that they have missed a lot of key experiences that their peers have not. And they’re now behind.

Candice Reed 21:27

Ross, listening to you describe that particular scenario makes me think about some of the concerns that many parents are having right now with children who did online school last year. And the concern about their re-entry into traditional campus environment, where there’s this recognition that cliques were formed, friendship groups were formed, during that year that some students were online and some were on campus. And that it’s difficult to just jump right back where you left off as a child, and the same is true as a young professional as well. That it’s like the first day of school all over again, or starting back into a new environment, you can’t just pick up instantly where you left off. Someone probably took over the cases or the deals that you were working on and so it may take some time to get integrated or reintegrated back into the firm.

Ross Booher 22:31

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And I think that you might’ve missed out on some really key experiences. You know, like thinking of it from an investigations perspective, you might be gone for six months or a year, implementing a compliance program. And meanwhile, your peers, someone else has stepped in to the lead associate role, let’s say, on a particular team, and they’ve been in four or five different countries, doing the internal investigation interviews. And those are countries that maybe you’ve never even been to. And so they have now gained all that experience. You as the secondee may have gained that experience as well, that’s different and that has value. But in terms of what is needed to progress within the law firm environment, the value that you gained as a secondee might from an overall career arc really help you and give you a great experience, but it may not help you in the near term advance your career within the law firm because you’re out of sync with the law firm style of progression.

Candice Reed 23:35

It certainly sounds like there’s some risk, especially if the secondment is not expected to lead to a permanent offer on the in-house team. If it is truly going to be temporary, it seems like that’s a much bigger risk to the attorney and their career development than if it were say secondment-to-perm opportunity. Which I know a lot of these arrangements end up being, but generally you don’t know that at the onset.

Tim Haley 24:10

Yeah. With the experience too, it really will come down to the individual attorney, like what they want out of their career. Because you can turn a year of secondment that, “Yeah. All right. Maybe I’m behind at the law firm, but maybe I don’t want to be in the law firm, right. Maybe I want to be in house somewhere.” And now all of a sudden it’s a great asset to have that on your resume. So it just depends on each attorney.

Candice Reed 24:29

So we’ve talked about some of the considerations from the law firm perspective, as well as from the law firm associates perspective. What about the in-house counsel? What should that person be thinking about or considering? What are some of the advantages and disadvantages to this type of an arrangement?

Tim Haley 24:52

I mean, the short-term advantage is you now have an extra resource that you didn’t have, and you can deploy your team as you need to, which is definitely an advantage. The challenge oftentimes from in-house and I talked to an old, not an old guy, he was a young guy, but a former GC at a big company here who had some experience with secondments, and he said he hated it. Because you bring in the associate and the associate, they’re in a business meeting and the business team says, “Hey, this is what we want to do.” And they look at the lawyer and they say, “Can we do it?” And the lawyer’s like, “I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it.”

Tim Haley 25:27

Which is code for, I’m going to go back to my desk and sit and research for five hours. And meanwhile, the business teams twiddling their thumbs, they just get really frustrated with that kind of service from their counsel. And of course that’s just experience, that’s the experience being in-house, that ramp up time. And it does take time to learn that skill. So that ramp up time may mean that those first few weeks, months are not very effective for the general council. So yes, you’ve got a resource, but maybe it’s not the resource that you actually need in the moment that you need it.

Candice Reed 25:58

Ross, you alluded to a solution earlier when you said that this secondment conundrum was one of the reasons you started to think about starting a company like Latitude, or it was the impetus to essentially the mission or the business plan for Latitude. So how does Latitude or a company like Latitude factor into this question here? Or, how does it present another possible solution to the secondment trap as you and Tim referred to it in your article?

Ross Booher 26:42

I would say that the single biggest element or concern with any secondment, whether you’re an in-house counsel or a law firm partner who’s recommending the solution, is the quality of the attorney. I mean, the reason that the in-house counsel is going to the law firm is because they know that the law firm has very, very high-quality standards. And so they’re going to be getting a very, very sharp attorney that has been in a very rigorous environment. And likewise, as a law firm partner, the partner doesn’t want to recommend anything to their client that is not going to be an effective solution. They do not want a subpar attorney going to the firm and disappointing the client.

Ross Booher 27:23

So the thought was, and this was sort of the genesis of Latitude was creating a practice platform where you could have fantastic attorneys, the same types of attorneys that any law firm would be happy to hire as a permanent partner track associate or counsel or a partner to be on their level of experience. And likewise, the caliber of attorney that a large public company legal department, or a sophisticated privately held company legal department, the type of attorney that they would gladly hire as a permanent in-house counsel in whatever the practice area was. So that was the concept behind Latitude is what if we could have a platform where you as a law firm partner, or you as an in-house counsel, when you have a interim need, could have access to that caliber of talent on a flexible basis. And so that’s basically the concept and that’s how, what we now see a lot of law firm partners and in-house counsel utilizing us.

Candice Reed 28:24

Yeah, I think this whole conversation illustrates that there are a lot of different ways to practice law and at various stages of your career that may not have been readily available to all of us 20, 30 years ago, but that now are. And that’s not just opportunity for attorneys who are looking for alternatives to the traditional partnership track, or partnership at a law firm or a in-house counsel gig. It’s also reflective of an opportunity or opportunities for those who are in those traditional practices to take advantage of these other lawyers practicing in other ways to fully complete their team. It’s not just a world full of law firm lawyers and in-house counsel anymore. There are a lot of lawyers practicing in a lot of different ways that create a lot of opportunities for all of us.

Ross Booher 29:25

It’s interesting. One of the things that oftentimes will come up with a law firm partner who is trying to decide, okay, how do I meet this client request? I mean, a lot of times it can be a real quandary because the law firm partner is being asked to do something that they want to do to help the client out. They don’t want to disappoint the client that they very much care about and they know has a need. They also don’t want to say no and essentially push the client into going to another law firm and embedding another law firm’s attorney within the client. And that’s never an ideal situation. But they also don’t want to have to take a huge bath on expenses and lose a key player, disappoint other clients. So it’s a tough situation for the law firm partner, but by the same token, they don’t want to recommend a solution that might disappoint the client. And that’ll also be a suboptimal situation. So what oftentimes I’ve heard from clients is that their big concern is, hey I only want to provide someone to the client that can meet the same standards as one of my own attorneys. Or they say, “Hey, our firm is not going to recommend anyone other than one of our attorneys.” And so that is something that I think a lot of law firm partners can probably relate to is, “Great, so what’s my solution. I either drive the client into someone else’s hands and disappoint them, or I take a financial bath that disrupts my other clients and harm the secondee’s career chances at my firm and stress out the rest of my associates.” That’s oftentimes what someone is looking at is their basket of options.

Ross Booher 31:07

And I think that obviously bias, but there’s another option, which is to use an attorney, a flexible talent attorney, but to only use one that you know is the same caliber as your own attorneys. And a lot of times this is going to be obvious to you because you’re going to see the Big Law experience. Sometimes it may even be a former attorney from your own firm, who’s gone in-house and is now practicing in this way. But I think that it’s oftentimes not until a law firm partner sees the caliber of flexible talent attorneys that are available, that they can all of a sudden say, “Oh my gosh, I now get it. This is a person I could propose to my client. And it is obvious to me that they are the same caliber as one of my own associates or counsel. And it’s going to be equally obvious to my client. And they’re going to realize, oh my gosh, this is a great option.” And it’s a way less expensive option than what the client was defaulting to, which was thinking about getting one of the law firm’s associates or counsel.

Candice Reed 32:10

Ross, if a law firm partner wants to take advantage of some of the flexible talent options that are available, how can they do that? How can they utilize flexible talent, but also be responsive to their client’s request for a firm attorney?

Ross Booher 32:31

As I was thinking about this, I mean, the things that it seems like law firm partners are often asking about is, “Yeah, how would this work? How does this actually work?” This is the quality issue of, “Oh, I’m not going to propose anyone, that’s not one of our own attorneys because of the quality, what are the different ways that people would…” I was trying to think of a way to get out this whole idea of a flexible talent attorney can be used as a way of simply providing options to the client. So, yes, you’re still going to offer forward one of your own attorneys as an option, but because you’re not going to be able to do the same deep level of discount, because you’re already getting hammered on the effect on your team. You’re already having to write off time to integrate someone else in, on your, for your other clients who are going to be losing that person. So there’s a whole bunch of implications for giving that attorney. But if you’re able to offer a flexible talent attorney as a lower cost option, high quality, but lower cost option, you then allow the client to make the choice of a more expensive law firms secondee or the flexible talent solution, as opposed to either just saying “no” or getting absolutely hammered by doing the secondment at a really low rate, that’s viable for the client.

Ross Booher 33:53

It happens in all sorts of ways. Sometimes you’ll see a law firm partner that has received as secondment request, and they’re going to provide a flexible talent option either as the sole option they’re presenting their client because that’s, it might be literally the only option they have, because they may not have anyone they can second. Or they’re presenting a flexible talent attorney along with one of their own attorneys. Sometimes, however, a law firm partner will simply refer their client to the flexible talent source, so that that arrangement can be made directly. Other times you’ll have the in-house counsel that is directly requesting the flexible talent options from the source. And so it happens all different ways, but I would say probably the most common is the law firm partner is identifying the talent, is going through them and they’re presenting it to the client as an option in response to the request.

Tim Haley 34:52

Personally, I think it’s fair to give the secondments a shot when you are trying to embed knowledge with lawyers, maybe you’ve got a young attorney, that’s inheriting a client from an older attorney that’s going to retire. And of course, I said earlier that risk tolerance for an associate is zero. The partners all know their client’s risk tolerance because they’ve been embedded so long, so that kind of secondment opportunity makes a ton of sense. It makes a ton of sense too, when you’ve got an attorney that is going to be outsourced in-house eventually, and everybody’s on the same page about it, that makes a ton of sense there. And then the other kinds of arrangements I’ve seen have been like shorter term secondments, where one law firm associate goes in for a month or two and then rotates out with the other associates. So everybody in the whole team gets that opportunity, and that just builds relationship. Those are cases where it makes a ton of sense. Where it’s just a gap filling exercise or where you’re just overwhelmed for one project, it doesn’t always make a lot of sense there, and usually it doesn’t make sense for the firm, for the general counsel or for the attorneys that gets seconded out.

Candice Reed 35:50

Thank you both for enlightening all of us on the topic of secondment, probably not the conversation that you have around the water cooler necessarily. Certainly not the one you have at cocktail hour, I’m guessing, but informative and very educational. I think many of us will have a few other things to think about now in terms of secondment because of the conversation. So thank you for your perspective. And again, the article by Ross Booher, and Tim Haley, is “The Secondment Trap: When Should Law Firms, Legal Departments & Attorneys Avoid a Traditional Law Firm Secondment?” We will put a link to the article in the show notes to this episode. Thanks for sharing your expertise with us guys. And I look forward to the next conversation.

Tim Haley 36:37

Thanks, Candice. We’ll talk again soon.

Ross Booher 36:40

Good talking with you.

Tim Haley 36:44

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