Practice Management

I have some experience with bumper cars, if in name only.  It deals with Issac Newton's third law of interaction, which comes into play with bumper cars.  This law says that if one body exerts a force on the second body, the second body exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in the direction on the first body.  It is also called law of action-reaction, and it is because of this law that you feel a jolt when two bumper cars collide.  And, collide is the right term to use.  Bumper cars maybe fund, but it is rough and tumble act.

I also have practical experience in this regard.  Although I have not been in a bumper car in years, in my younger days it was one of the first places I ran when I went to Six Flags Over Texas.  When bumper cars collide, the driver feels a change in his or her motion and becomes powerfully aware of the inertia.  This is because although the bumper car might come to a halt or rapidly change direction, the driver continues in the direction he or she was moving before the collision.

The thing is that we somehow seem to have fun doing in a more control setting what is otherwise dangerous or offensive.  The ride itself is called an attraction because people are attracted to it.  It is all fun except for the whiplash with which you are often left.

The great challenge that we have in the Third Wave is to get attorneys to collaborate in the practice of law in a way that is beneficial to everyone involved.  The problem is to get lawyers, whipped into a frenzy on the mantra of adversarial relationships, to collaborate.  To many lawyers collaboration is tantamount to a game of bumper cars.  Even when having fun and working together on the same side, lawyers tend to want to ram into each other.  The fact that they might think it is all a game of fun and they laugh still does not make it productive and still does not mean that it does not hurt sometimes.  It is antisocial most often.

Maybe it is just in the  DNA, but lawyers too often want to be in charge, in control, and the thought of a gentle ramming session allows them to show their independence.  But, the problem is bumper cars is not about riding together side by side and cooperating.  It is about engagement, and difference, and showing each other who can hit the hardest, even if it is in a more amiable way.  It is still, as we say in Texas, a "pissing contest".

Most law partnerships are usually contentious as well.  And, normally partnerships are really more about a congregation of individual practices all set in the same physical environment to share some support staff.  Sure there are a lot of water cooler consults, but each office or section is individually staffed.

Every day I speak to lawyers who can imagine going out on their own, and even working at home, with or without a staff, but many of them pooh-pooh the idea of of releasing all underlings, partnerships and structure and control and simply breaking the cases they solicit into its component parts, and collaborating with other attorneys to get the work done and case completed.  It is not a matter of slicing up the pie.  It is a matter or control, of being the grand poobah or the male bull dog that gets to go around marking his territory.

Lawyers like the master-servant relationship that employees and overhead bring because it leaves them in control, without the need to collaborate.  Sure they think they are collaborating with staff, but they are not because the servant, the employee, does not have the authority, like an agent, to act in his or her employer's place, and the employee is not an independent contractor.  Much like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe who decided to make Friday his slave of sorts to help him in the cultivation and other works on the island on which they were stranded, many lawyers just want to be the master over their island, their nature and the human beings that inhabit it.  It is a hard habit to break, especially given the training.

Too many lawyers confuse collaboration with collaborationsim.  The latter is the phenomenon of collaboration with an occupying army and the term is used in the pejorative sense.  The former is more of a recursive process where two or more people (in our discussion lawyers) work together toward an intersection of an intellectual endeavor.  It is about the gentle art of building consensus in doing something creative in nature for the purpose of obtaining greater resources, recognition and reward.

So here is what I say.  Get out of the bumper cars, walk together in fellowship and explore the possibility of building a practice areas with someone of equal strength, if different duties, based upon a commonality, lower overhead and profit.  Forget the concept of partnerships, private practice, corporations, PCs, PAs, LLCs, LLPs, PLLCs, PLLPs, and all other fake constructs and get down to the brass tacks of what you can do for each other.  You will be better off for it.