50 LEXPERT MAGAZINE
|
APRIL 2016
FEATURE
A DIVIDE HAS OPENED BETWEEN
top corporate law firms and their clients.
Heather Morse found herself staring at it on her computer screen.
Morse, the Director of Marketing at Greenberg Glusker Fields Claman & Macht-
inger LLP in Los Angeles, spent 10 months poring over the websites of Fortune 100
and NASDAQ 100 companies looking for the age of their in-house counsel. It was
for a marketing presentation with a colleague.
If their age wasn't publicly available, she'd hunt down the year they graduated
from university: Undergrad, because some people go to law school later in life.
She then repeated the exercise with management of the AmLaw 100 companies.
"I'm the geek who sat down with a laptop in the middle of the night looking all
this up," she jokes. "I looked up every single person. I researched every single person."
Some nights, hunched over her computer, she must have wanted to tear her hair
out. But what she uncovered is fascinating, a must-read for law firms everywhere
that are tackling the minefield of generational change.
Morse discovered that Gen-Xers – some of whom are by now in their early 50s
according to the US definition – were still largely shut out of law firm management.
ey made up less than 5 per cent of managing partners or their equivalent.
eir clients? Younger.
GAPS
GENERATION
Savvy firms are looking through the prism
of generational change when it comes
to how they do business. Those not doing
that do so at their peril
BY SANDRA RUBIN
PHOTO:
SHUTTERSTOCK
