A New “Value Movement”? On Sunday night at dinner, an out-of-town friend since college, and member of a large U.S. law firm, raised the above question. “Jack’s” verbatim query was a bit, but not much, different. After being startled for a moment, I wrote it down:
“If associates get all the benefits of training at my law firm in the first three years, and can’t really add much value anyway, why don’t they pay us?”
I admit to planting this seed of heresy in Jack’s head years ago, when we had talked often, and passionately, about the understandable difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of making even the most talented law school graduates productive, client-oriented and economic inside of two years. Yes, we were both grumpy about the competitive and increasingly high salaries being paid to new law grads, by his firm and mine. And so I had first brought it all up back in 2003.