We’ve all probably heard some variation of the following two business quotes:

Prepare your staff so they can leave and go anywhere… treat them well enough so they don’t want to leave.

Q: What if I train them, and they leave?
A: What if you don’t train them and they stay?

I thought about both

I am disappointed every time I guest lecture a law school class.

Because anecdote is often more compelling than data, I’ll start with an example from two weeks ago. An adjunct professor who teaches one of those great law school classes with cool titles like Tomorrow’s Lawyer had his students take the Word module of

Fuller Classroom with elephant
Image [cc] PainterWoman

Training… something we do every year for incoming Fall Associates, yet somehow most of us walk away feeling like we really didn’t help integrate the newbie lawyers into the firm the way we’d really like. Of course, many of the Associates are too concerned with the billable matter that was assigned to



Dan:  Recently a number of firms have announced reductions in their secretarial ranks as a means of improving their secretary ratios – which is to say 5:1 is the new 4:1. For those not familiar with this stat – it means that the new goal is 5 timekeepers for every 1 secretary. This approach makes