Legal Marketing & PR

Jon M Queen, Environmental Finance Attorney, Addresses CDM Validator Attrition Problems with a Law Firm Comparison

By Law Firm Marketing Blog

Last month, Attorney Jon M Queen brought up an interesting challenge faced by Clean Development Mechanism validators (related to the Kyoto Protocol) regarding the attrition rate at the Designated Operational Entities which are commonly referred to as DOEs or Validators.

Mr. Queen states “The attrition challenges presently confronting Clean Development Mechanism validators are not new to the business world, however; nor are they unique throughout time. They are the precisely the same challenges facing large corporate law firms everyday due to the interactions between their brightest younger associates and the wealthy business clientele and institutions they represent.“

Mr. Queen postulates that the types of salary adjustment decisions and scales utilized by large corporate law firms are precisely the mechanism that could rectify their attrition problems and would have a significant impact on the streamlining of the overall validation process.

• Big law firms typically are not understaffed and can grow to match client demand.
• Though in law firms there is widespread attrition among young to mid-level associates, it is manageable from a business point of view because more experienced senior associates and partners tend to stay rooted.
• Law firms maintain and slowly grow out their partner and senior associate base, while simultaneously calculating the hiring numbers for junior associates to reflect the degree of attrition they can expect based on historical statistics.

“Validators should simply recognize that CDM is a multi-billion dollar industry heavily focused on the skills and expertise their employees possess; and as such their personnel are highly valuable, and they should re-assess the financial packages presently being offered to mid-level and senior employees.” says Jon Queen, Esq.

Finally, lawyer Jon M Queen summarizes, “Validators must transition into a more commercially oriented employee compensation mindset, to set the CDM validation and registration process back on track. That is the best and most direct solution to the present bottleneck.“

So interestingly enough it seems as if a major success factor for major law firms is attributable to their compensation packages, structures, and scaling capabilities. Obviously HR practices play a significant role in any successful business, but I found it interesting to see other large industries that could potentially see such significant benefit from adopting a close model.

Full post as published by Law Firm Blogging on June 02, 2008 (boomark / email).