Fried Frank chairman David Greenwald is a change agent. When he rejoined the firm in 2013 after a stint as deputy general counsel at Goldman Sachs, which included more than six years in London, it was to help fix a place that on the key metrics was lagging well behind its peers. Our feature at https://www.thelawyer.com/revive-law-firm/ shows just how successful the right medicine can be.
Sometimes it really is the little things that count. People often talk of coming in and changing the culture. In practice that can be pretty woolly, but there’s been nothing woolly about some of Greenwald’s hard-ball, New York-style ways of sorting out a problem.
As the story reveals, one of Fried Frank’s big issues when he took over was time delinquency, or in other words, how poorly some of the firm’s partners recorded time. Clearly this is anything but an issue unique to this particular firm, but Greenwald’s solution certainly was novel.
In short, he began fining partners, initially a hundred dollars a day if their time recording was a week late, rising to two hundred a day if it was two weeks late and three hundred a day if it reached a third week.
As Greenwald puts it, “it changed behaviour overnight”.
Today’s article is a case study in how the fortunes of a firm can be turned around. Naturally there’s much more to what Greenwald has done than simply tighten up on financial management. The former Goldman insider knows his firm doesn’t have unlimited resources so has targeted its investment in the most beneficial areas, notably New York and Washington DC in the US and in London overseas. In Asia Fried Frank has significantly downsized.
Naturally as a leader who believes law firms should be run like businesses there’s also been a focus on costs. And then there’s communication. Greenwald says he’s a big believer in communications and a culture of transparency. Consequently he’s ramped up the number of meetings with partners and associates and is about to introduce 360-degree appraisals, where associates give feedback on their bosses.
So far it has all added up to a 53 per cent rise in PEP over the past four years and similarly record results on the top line. Something tells us those appraisals are not going to be too painful.
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