When consulting to managing partners and law firm leaders, one of the biggest problems currently facing many law firms is the problem of succession. Who will be the firm’s next leader? While the average large corporation may take 15 years to develop the next CEO, many law firms provide less than a year preparation before putting a new managing partner in place. Even worse, because most firms do not think developmentally, many managing partners and executive committees are at a loss as to who the potential candidates should be. Creating a succession pipeline is a real challenge for many firms and for a variety of reasons. Doing this well is among the most important, yet difficult, aspects of being a law firm leader and there is more than one approach. But it all boils down to identifying and preparing the next generation of leader.
While most firms naturally are attracted to their top rainmakers as potential leaders, and this often points them toward practice chairs, since this is the way most firms organize themselves and count resources and profit. Seeing the firm through the lens of its practices is natural, but this view of the firm often causes leaders to neglect a huge pool of talent: Office Managing Partners.
In firms large enough to have several offices, the Office Managing Partner has an important role. First, they are the face of the firm in the local community. The OMP regularly deals with difficult, even if banal issues, such as office space, real estate, and office culture. An often unappreciated role is the information that the OMP can provide back to the home office about performance, practice needs, and the health of the firm in a given locale. Most importantly, however, the best OMP’s provide cross-practice coordination and identify opportunities for practices and cross-practice initiatives in their locale. Compare this task to one of the key functions of a managing partner, to get the firm’s practices to complement and cross-sell to existing clients and established industries in which the firm has expertise. This makes the OMP role a terrific training ground for potential managing partners.
Interestingly, if you speak to as many OMP’s as I have, you will also find it is among the most frustrating and under-appreciated jobs in the firm. OMP’s typically have little overt power and little budget to be creative or solve problems. Most of those resources are controlled by the Practice Leaders.
The opportunities and potential of the OMP role are clear. OMP’s can identify and develop talent in a way that a practice leader, especially if not in the same office, cannot. If empowered, they can play a critical role in motivating the right behaviors and improving firm citizenship. They can, and should, seek to identify cross-over marketing opportunities and they are the public face of the firm in their city or country. In sum, if a firm is looking to create a succession pipeline, it should seek to strategically use the role of Office Managing Partner. Where better to hone the skills of marketing, managing, and leading that all firm leaders, especially those at the top, should exhibit?