Chairman Paul Schmidt is quoted throughout two articles about attorney disengagement that were recently published in The American Lawyer.
In the June 22, 2023 piece, “‘A Huge Concern’: Big Law Leaders Grappling With Attorney Disengagement,” Schmidt told the publication that law firms can’t measure their success only by billable hours. Lawyers need to experience their careers in Big Law as a privilege, rather than a burden, he said.
In the June 26 article, “In Era of Disengagement, How Do Law Firms Motivate Lawyers and Staff?”, he told The American Lawyer that “the best way people learn from each other is through a kind of ‘active osmosis’ – absorbing what someone is doing or saying through observation, but then also getting time for spontaneous debriefing,” according to the article.
“But I can tell you that when busy people are on a Zoom call, they hang up, and they go to their next Zoom call. That’s it,” he added. “We have to teach people to interject that spontaneous debrief into a postmortem Zoom call.”