During the recession some areas of practice such as banking, finance and commercial property experienced a dramatic drop in business. Associates who had spent the preceding growth years embedding themselves within their respective practices as specialists subsequently found themselves subjected to one, if not more rounds of redundancy. Many became victims of the recession and ended up unemployed.
This now raises the question of whether associates should specialise or not. Are associates gambling with their careers by becoming specialist and operating in a tiny niche within practice? Is it better for associates to gain skills and experience in other practice areas so that they can move with economic cycles?
All too often management’s first reaction to an economic downturn is to cull associates rather than invest in retraining them to specialisms that are in demand.
On the contrary, if associates decide to become more generalist, they risk every likelihood of being paid less as they may not have the detail and level of expertise they need to be charged out at top rates to clients. Will peers who decide to remain specialist view decisions to generalise as a ‘cop out’?
Whichever way you look at it economic cycles represent cost/investment for senior management. Either they have to bear the cost of making staff redundant or they have to invest in training for associates so that they have a wide enough range of skills across their associate resource to be adaptable and allow themselves room to shift with economic cycles.
Many in senior management within practice wax lyrical about how well they try to look after the welfare of employees and endeavour to provide secure career paths. However all too often management’s first reaction to an economic downturn is to cull associates rather than invest in retraining them to specialisms that are in demand.
Risk of over specialisation seems to be more prevalent at larger firms. Some firms, such as Linklaters, have recently chosen to make promotion contingent on versatility in a bid to give associates more rounded experience early on in their careers. This has clearly polarised opinion because general experience is increased by compromising the extent to which associates specialise by a given stage in their career.
By introducing such schemes do firms risk alienating clients? Clients specifically use larger firms because they have specialist teams. There are bound to be differences across the industry but it does beg the question of whether newly qualified lawyers should have some sort of extra rotation introduced once they have qualified.
The key issue is that generalist exposure will give associates more of a better understanding of clients needs by allowing them to see more of the bigger picture – for example, a generalist M&A associate that has had exposure to competition and employment law will have a much better grasp of many of the secondary issues at hand compared to a highly specialist M&A associate.
Surely more generalist associates would benefit firms and their senior management? They’ll be able to respond better to economic cycles, make fewer redundancies and position their firm as an employer that really values its employees. This will ultimately help employee engagement and improves employer branding which means they’ll attract and retain a higher proportion of really high quality candidates.
