Charles Woodruffe argues that by being receptive to staff priorities, young lawyers and firms will mutually benefit from extra effort put into work

Most law firm senior partners enjoy a great deal of positive feeling about their work and the rewards it brings them in terms of personal status, intellectual challenge and financial remuneration. But it is not enough for a law firm - whatever its size - if only the people at the top are fully engaged with their jobs.


This term, 'engaged', is being used increasingly at an organisational level to convey the idea of employees being fully intellectually and emotionally committed to a particular activity, so that they want to give to the job what is known as 'discretionary effort'. This is an amount of effort above that which is strictly necessary for employees to give to a job, but which they nevertheless want to give to it.


Young legal professionals today are not always as engaged and as committed to their jobs as the firms that employ them would like. This is caused by firms not being receptive to the priorities of their staff. It inevitably means that some staff that are affected are much less likely to go the extra mile for clients. Ultimately, these people might leave, taking their valuable knowledge with them. Meanwhile, their disengagement could reduce the quality of their firm's professional reputation.


This is not merely an occasional problem in the legal profession, but an increasing difficulty. There are Web sites specifically catering to disenchanted young legal professionals who want to share scurrilous news about their employers and generally air their grievances in public. Misery, as always, craves companionship.


Young legal professionals can certainly have a tough time in the early years of their careers. The hours they work are notoriously long - 12-hour days and long weekend stints are not unusual at larger firms.


An unspoken pact between the young lawyers and their firms is that really hard work will lead to partnership status and the high financial rewards and prestige that this brings. But the demographics of a large law firm mean that not everyone can become a partner. Inevitably, this whole process of awarding partnerships is a source of much potential disenchantment.


However, law firms do not have to resign themselves to cultivating young professionals who are also susceptible to bouts - or even epidemics - of disenchantment with their jobs. Work should not really be all about always looking forward to a later stage of your career when you might not need to work quite so many hours and will be paid a good deal more. Young legal professionals, in short, don't need to be miserable but can instead be fully engaged in their professional lives, even at the start of their careers. The task of attending to the needs of young professionals for proper engagement with their jobs, and an awareness of the development of young professionals from a more holistic perspective, needs to be allocated to partners responsible for internal management.


Young professionals who feel that at least one partner is genuinely interested in them as people, rather than solely as fee-generators, are much more likely to give their best to the firm. Partners have to face the fact that an ambitious junior lawyer who really wants to get ahead may not be very willing to talk frankly with a partner about being disenchanted, but there should be a climate at the firm where ambitious juniors can do this without it counting against them.


Charles Woodruffe is managing director of the London-based human resources consultancy, Human Assets