Remember the famous debate when Walter Mondale asked Gary Hart where the beef was? It was a resonant moment for most professionals, because most professions are cluttered with slogans, flavors of the month, packaged bells and marketable whistles. How easy it is, for example, for lawyers to talk about practice management as if it were some kind of magic formula that can be bought from a consultant and slipped painlessly into the water cooler for all to come and profitably drink.

In fact, at the core of legal practice management is legal practice, actually knowing how to do the work you're supposed to do in the most efficient and effective way possible. From an institutional standpoint, real practice management is thus a labor of love involving training and mentoring lawyers in substantive law, as well as refining the corollary arts of communication and client relations.

It's a full-time job, as the smart firms realize. But where some firms rely on competent inside training administrators, Boston's Hale and Dorr has gone a step further. That legendary law firm designated a full-fledged partner to manage the in-house program full-time. No clients, no book of business; Brenda Fingold, the firm's Partner Responsible for Training and Professional Development, is instead taken up 100% with the chore of practice management at all levels: firmwide, departmental, practice group, individual.

For Fingold, that means a professional life at least as hectic as that of most active practitioners. The routine she describes seems a formidable one indeed, because she's not just drawing up lesson plans and grading papers. True practice management involves pedagogy at intensely personalized levels, as well as addressing a host of related fundamental issues: work allocation, lawyer evaluation, team building.

One theme that Fingold often returns to is the crucial need for such a manager/pedagogue to be someone intimately familiar with the firm and who, in turn, is perceived by firm members as a permanent part of the institutional family. Such a person would ideally be an attorney as well, particularly one who's established himself or herself as a credible practitioner before presuming to give lessons to others on how to practice law. Fingold is quick to note, however, that she has many terrific colleagues in the training field who came to their roles from academia or senior administrative positions.

Fingold joined Hale and Dorr right out of New York University School of Law and was a litigator at the firm for seven years. In fact, when she was promoted to partner in 1989, she had no thought of taking her career on the unusual path it was about to take.

Yet, in 1990, she would give up private practice altogether to devote herself to training. At the time, she was one of only a handful of full-time training professionals at U.S. law firms, and certainly one of an even smaller number of partners functioning as full-time trainers. It was a striking choice for both Fingold and the firm. With a recession about to close in, many firms were dead set on wringing every billable hour out of their lawyers not, to be sure, investing good lawyers' time solely to burnish the infrastructure.

But it's the cardinal principle underlying what we do with law firms, and the insistent message we hope to deliver, that the real work of professionals begins when the clock stops ticking. Hale and Dorr obviously understood that point ahead of most others, and the firm has continued to build on the remarkable program it started a decade ago.

We asked Brenda Fingold to share some of the specifics of that program, and her vision of why it works.

Edge: A law firm seems to be dealing from strength when it designates a partner to spend all of his or her time training colleagues. How did the firm pick you for the job, and why did you accept it?

Fingold: In 1990, John Hamilton, our Managing Partner, and John Burgess, who was then one of our assistant managing partners (and is now vice chair of our corporate department), were looking at the whole area of training: What our next step ought to be, and how we could expand on what we were offering. They presented a set of recommendations, including that the firm have a person responsible full-time for training. I was already very active in the firm's hiring and training efforts and had been teaching at Boston University Law School for a couple of years, and it seemed like a natural jump from my current responsibilities at the time to being the person to lead Hale and Dorr's training efforts.

Edge: Were there partners at other firms in this position at the time?

Fingold: A few. There was Peter Glenn at Jones, Day (Reavis & Pogue) and Ida Abbott at Heller Ehrman (White & McAuliffe), for example.

Edge: Tell us about your areas of responsibility.

Fingold: Hale and Dorr has nine departments and two dozen or so practice groups, and I work with all of them as needs arise. I design, coordinate and sometimes conduct training sessions, which can be on substantive areas of the law or practical lawyering skills such as trial advocacy or conducting due diligence. We also hold workshops on negotiation, communication skills, and writing. I work one-on-one with associates as well, enhancing their skills where needed. I also chair our Committee on Training and Professional Development. Nine partners sit on this Committee, which was created to foster mentoring activities and to advocate on behalf of our associates.

Edge: So what we would call practice management dovetails with a training curriculum that isn't always so far removed from what lawyers study in law school.

Fingold: I take a very broad approach to practice management and see it as covering people management skills (delegation, supervision, training and providing feedback); time and paper management; client relations; marketing; managing technology and internal resources; leadership; and team-building. Practice management also means attaining the mind set, skills, and knowledge to provide superior service to clients, which ultimately brings you back to training lawyers on substantive law and practical skills.

You can't really separate the content of the law from the management of the practice and the lessons learned in law school have to be learned again, but this time in the context of how those lessons translate into service. You can describe all of this as simply learning good work habits, for want of a better term, but these are work habits with a powerful impact. Essentially, the way you conduct yourself and manage all aspects of your practice directly benefits your clients, colleagues and yourself in terms of your own effectiveness and sense of professional satisfaction.

Edge: It seems to be an approach to practice management that would have the greatest impact on associates.

Fingold: I do work more closely with associates. However, part of my job involves designing department meetings at which issues affecting both partners and associates are discussed. In addition, we have held numerous programs over the years specifically for partners on topics such as marketing, delegation and supervision, and communicating with clients. In addition, there are some skill-building programs, like negotiation, for example, where I find it is most effective to bring partners together from different departments for complex negotiations with each other.

Edge: I suppose that team-building is a skill that by definition would include lawyers at every level, although I'm not sure I know what teaching team-building means.

Fingold: The team-building programs that I have conducted focus on helping the members of a team to better understand the behaviors that can either enhance or impede superior team performance. The programs are also designed to give people a chance to have fun together and at the same time better appreciate the diversity and wealth of talent and resources that members can contribute to the team.

I will give you a concrete example of one of the types of team-building programs we have done at Hale and Dorr. Over the last few years I have taken groups of lawyers as well as non-legal directors and managers to an Outward Bound center located on Thompson Island in Boston Harbor. (The partners in our Washington, D.C. office have also participated in a multi-day Outward Bound course at a site closer to their office.) The teams engage in exercises that require cooperation, communication, problem solving, leadership, support, and the like, and we then extract principles that can be applied back at the office.

Ultimately, the participants develop a set of principles for how they can work best together.

I have also designed and led a number of leadership development Outward Bound programs that have many of the same elements as the team-building program. I recently ran one of these programs for 22 women lawyers, mainly non-partners. I believe that leadership is a quality that can be developed, rather than simply a position one assumes, and so I have structured a series of exercises and discussions relating to the characteristics and behaviors of leaders. The exercises are designed to highlight acts of leadership and to give people an opportunity to begin to make conscious choices throughout their professional life to engage in those acts of leadership.
The program also includes physical challenges, such as walking across a log thirty feet in the air. These are designed to explore the role of reasonable risk taking in leadership development.

Edge: Your schedule seems, in any event, a rather intense as well as a varied one. Conventional or even unconventional training sessions, like the Outward Bound jaunts, are no doubt only one aspect of your work. I think it would give us a good sense of the breadth, as well as the ebb and flow, of your work if you would describe the last few days of Brenda Fingold's week.

Fingold: I'll touch on just a few things…I'm setting up a mediation program, and I've been working with an outside mediator to design a workshop that will involve teams of associates mediating a mock dispute. I also facilitated PracticeCoach(R) sessions with two of our practice groups, real estate and securities litigation. I've oriented a new lateral hire, and I've been working on plans for a series of training programs that we will hold for lateral attorneys this spring.

I also began taking some follow-up steps in connection with a recent upward evaluation, in which all associates evaluated our partners. Each partner received numerical ratings and written comments on 27 items relating to work assignments, feedback and training. office demeanor, and management of cases and clients. The partners were also benchmarked against the firm average on each question. I am now in the process of speaking with the Department chairs, individual partners, and our associates about the results.

I also met with the Director and staff at the Hale and Dorr Legal Services Center at Harvard Law School. That's a clinical program students can participate in, which handles actual pro bono cases, and where Hale and Dorr attorneys supervise and train students as well as provide pro bono legal services to clients of the Center. (The Legal Services Center was renamed for Hale and Dorr in recognition of our firm's contributions, both direct financial contributions and assistance from Hale and Dorr lawyers.) I coordinate the firm's relationship with the Center and called the meeting to discuss our joint cases, upcoming training programs, and some marketing materials that the firm is putting together for the Center.

Edge: There's a recurrent criticism of American law firms that they don't train their lawyers, that it's the first thing that falls through the cracks whenever firmwide attention gets focused on the bottom line. Is Hale and Dorr one of a handful of exceptions?

Fingold: My experience as a member of an association called the Professional Development Consortium belies that general criticism of the profession. The Consortium has been around for well over a decade, but its ranks have been swelling in recent years, and, in fact, we now have over 70 members. The membership includes training partners as well as senior administrators with significant responsibility for attorney training.

Edge: Is this resurgence in training mainly a function of a prosperous market in which firms can afford to pursue practice management/training initiatives, so that's what they do? Should we expect more retrenchment with the next downturn, however?

Fingold: No. I don't foresee firms jettisoning these training initiatives as some of them may have done in the last recession, simply because their clients will no longer permit them to do so. It's the clients who have forced the issue, who have brought training to the forefront, because they, the clients, pay such serious attention to the levels of mentoring, supervision and training that their outside counsel provide to the junior lawyers with whom they might work.

Retention is another issue. It's expensive and disruptive when lawyers leave in their third, fourth, or fifth years. Let's be realistic. Partnership is no longer a given, so those midlevel associates have to have a reason to stay put rather than hop firms as the spirit and the job offers move them. When you offer substantial training, you give lawyers a reason to stay, because you're giving them the opportunity to develop the skills and experiences they will need either to become a partner or to move to desirable senior positions elsewhere.

Edge: But the institution, if it's a law firm, is also divided into many different practice groups, each of which may even have a separate culture or, at least, demand a separate training/practice management regimen. How are you able to adapt your own principles, your own skills and your own personality to these disparate groups?

Fingold: I am a litigator, and I have a natural capacity to relate to the learning needs and learning habits of our litigation group. Designing mock trial or deposition programs, for example, is something that comes naturally to me.

But over time I have been able to adapt some of the same learning principles to our other groups as well. With the intellectual property group, for example, we've done an interactive session in which lawyers role-play to dramatize various aspects of their work (counseling inventors, meeting with a patent examiner, dealing with a potential infringer) rather than just watching talking-head videos or attending live lectures. The session was very well received.

Edge: It seems that, in terms of training, the litigation groups serve as a model for where practice managers like yourself really want to lead other practice groups.

Fingold: I think that's true. Litigators are ahead of the others in terms of innovative training because the trial process itself mandates that they do interactive programs involving prior preparation. All litigators, no matter how senior or successful, refine their skills with each new upcoming trial as a matter of course. It goes with the turf, and they'd hardly think of not doing so. And the great skills training institutes like NITA have reinforced that tendency.

Edge: Isn't it a challenge to get, say, the corporate groups to do likewise?

Fingold: It certainly requires a different approach tailored to their practice, but we're making progress at Hale and Dorr. We've designed some interactive materials that Hale and Dorr has used to train associates on due diligence and negotiating and drafting acquisition agreements. I think these programs have great potential if they are structured and implemented in the right way.

Edge: I'd imagine that when you're trying to be innovative with a practice group, your relationship with the practice group leader could be decisive, especially if you're introducing something the group may not be naturally predisposed to.

Fingold: Of course, and I do generally work closely with the practice group leaders. People attend training sessions because they know that the practice leaders and other partners will be there, not because it's mandatory or they're afraid not to. They participate because they know they'll learn something whenever they have an opportunity to work closely with partners in a training setting.

The beneficial effects of having practice leaders and partners invested in training are incalculable. I'm thinking, for instance, of the two-day deposition workshop we have. Our department leaders set the example for all partners and associates by participating in the whole program, as well as conducting demonstrations and helping in other ways to make it a success. Partners and associates come together in a new way and with a different primary purpose, since the partners aren't under the gun and the focus is not on getting work out the door.

This is when the associates really see how very talented our partners are, and the partners are reminded how great it feels to watch someone grow by virtue of their coaching and support. And both the partners and associates seem to take these perspectives back to their daily routine.

Edge: How do you get people to show up?

Fingold: Not, you can be sure, by just sending a memo around. Help from the partners naturally comes in handy. But I'm also a devout adherent of John Hamilton's style of management-by-walking-around. I spend a fair amount of time on the phone or visiting my colleagues to remind them about upcoming training opportunities and to generate enthusiasm and a commitment to attend. I've also been accused of being able to inflict guilt reasonably well!

Edge: You mentioned work allocation before. That may be a topic that gets covered in your workshops and programs (the best ways, for example, to staff a team and allocate the work effectively) but do you actually have input on the allocation decisions that the practice group leaders make?

Fingold: Not officially, but I have created and am involved in mentor programs that have an impact on work allocation decisions. For example, the litigation department has a Benchmark Program in which all associates are assigned a senior partner mentor. The role of the mentor is to review regularly with his or her mentee a set of benchmarks that define the types of experiences associates should ideally have by various points in their career. For example, by the end of their second year, associates should have had a significant role in witness preparation, drafted various pleadings, taken a minor deposition, etc. By the end of an associate's fourth or fifth year, he or she should have had primary responsibility for client contact and day-to-day case management, made court appearances, and conducted a trial or major evidentiary hearing in a smaller case.

If an associate has not had a particular experience, it is the obligation of the 'benchmark partner' to give the associate that opportunity in his or her own cases, or to find such an opportunity elsewhere within the firm. The benchmark mentors are also given some issues to discuss with their mentees that relate to the areas of law the associate has been exposed to, his or her participation in pro bono cases, involvement in professional and community activities, satisfaction with work/life balance, etc.

What works so well here, in terms of how our practice groups function, is that we take seriously our responsibility not to let associates get lost. We also do our best to support them in their efforts to develop their own professional identity. The results, for client relations as well as lawyer retention, are obvious.

Edge: Is being omnipresent at the firm ever a problem? Do you ever find yourself caught in the middle between firm management and a practice group?

Fingold: If firm management has an initiative it wants a practice group to pursue, I'll do everything I can to encourage the group to do its best with it. PracticeCoach®, as you know, was something John Hamilton was very interested in. I shared his enthusiasm and helped sell it to the practice groups.

Edge: Was there any pattern in terms of which practice groups turned out to be more or less enthusiastic about PracticeCoach®?

Fingold: Definitely. The groups that are already very motivated and very successful were the ones that were most enthusiastic, because their whole mind set is to continue to be aggressive in looking for ways to improve.

Edge: Is there anything on your wish list that outside consultants or CLE providers could put on the market that isn't there now?

Fingold: I suppose something that addresses the day-to-day issues of supervision, delegation, and feedback in a very sophisticated way. The Professional Development Consortium has been working on this and has come up with the bare bones of a workable syllabus. You see, in some respects, the overriding challenge for law firms is how to teach concepts that are not necessarily rocket science to folks who are extremely intelligent and busy, and often don't feel the need to devote time and energy to things they think they already know. In PracticeCoach®, David Maister aptly points out over and over again that this is not about knowing how to do things. It is about having the discipline to actually do them.

For example, how do you help lawyers improve their listening skills? They'd see a training program as much too hokey, although lawyers as much as anybody in the world need to develop better listening skills - and not just in dealing with clients. We talked before about supervising and being a mentor. Those are certainly areas where lawyers also need to learn to listen better.

PracticeCoach® has made a great stride in the right direction, taking fundamental ideas and convincing the audience why they're profoundly important. I'd like to see other leadership programs tailored to law firms and covering things that PracticeCoach® doesn't, or reviewing the same concepts in a different and equally valuable way.

I have designed a program (based on Professional Development Consortium materials) involving breakout groups of eight to ten lawyers, partners and associates, where work assignment and supervision are central issues, and where partners find themselves in a situation where they have to listen hard to the people they supervise. We use a hypothetical in which a fourth-year associate has done document production over and over for the same partner, and that partner is delighted to have him continue to do it, especially since it means the work will get done relatively quickly and be of proven high quality.

But maybe the second-year associate assigned to the case has never done such document work, while the fourth-year lawyer is tired of it and deserves an opportunity to stretch in new areas. The two associates would reinforce each other's point, and the partner would hear something he might never hear in the course of a workday. Also, in listening to the partners talk about the factors that would dictate how they would staff this mock case, the associates would develop a better appreciation for the myriad of institutional and client considerations that drive staffing decisions.

Ultimately, I would hope that future actual staffing decisions would be both better made and better received.

Edge: Listening is a big theme that many marketing training consultants have also tried to introduce into law firms, with varied results. What role does marketing specifically play in the Hale and Dorr training agenda? You've suggested that practice management and practice development are really seamless, in the sense that what the firm teaches in terms of communications skills, for example, has a direct impact on client relations. But have you taught marketing as a discrete component?

Fingold: Yes. We've had some outside consultants work with our lawyers. In fact, we recently hired Silvia Coulter, a former marketing consultant, as our Marketing Director, and I expect that we will collaborate on various training programs in this area. Before she joined us, Silvia had done some marketing training and coaching for one of our practice groups.

Edge: Were you to leave, could someone else replace you who could afford to take risks and be creative and demanding? Would the firm hope to convert another established practitioner into your job?

Fingold: First of all, I have no plans to leave. I am confident, however, that the firm is committed to retaining an established practitioner in this position.

Edge: As an ombudsman, do you find that you're always having to change approach or even your own personality to accommodate the different groups?

Fingold: No more so than any number of other professionals. Lawyers, for example, have to change their approach from client to client. I try to find something meaningful for everyone.

Edge: But law firms are tough places to please everybody. What advice would you have for someone (like a marketing director, training professional, or even a practice leader) who's going to find him- or herself hemmed in by a lot of conflicting attitudes?

Fingold: The most important piece of advice I would give is to be flexible. There are many different ways to make a point or deliver training. Take the time to understand the various types of people and practice groups you serve. Be true to your ideals but, at the same time, understand and respect where others are coming from.

You also need to accept the fact that dealing with any dynamic professional services group entails a lot of risk. I am a big believer in the use of focus groups to test out less traditional types of training. I am also guided by John Hamilton, who has a high tolerance himself for risk-taking, and I spend time talking face-to-face with attorneys to get their support and participation.

When we recently held an eight-session program on managing stress through meditation, it felt incredibly risky, because it's not something most people had considered and it involved a significant commitment of time. As it turned out, over 30 partners and associates participated in the program, and their positive response and the word of mouth that followed means that people will be much more open to attending this type of program in the future.

In the last analysis, I care deeply about my colleagues — partners, associates and staff. I believe everyone has value and a contribution to make to the firm and our clients. And I derive enormous personal satisfaction from helping my colleagues to grow, both personally and professionally. I think people feel my passion for my work and my belief in them, and that adds to my credibility.

At the end of the day, I ask myself, have my initiatives helped my colleagues to enjoy their work and each other more, and to be better in their chosen field, and have I helped make this firm a more internally connected place? If so, I've done my job.