Who’s who in a law firm?
It is important to know who the key personnel are in a law firm, including the legal and non-legal roles.
The legal roles include:
1. The managing partner: the managing partner is the most senior partner in the law firm and is responsible for the firm’s overall strategy, management and operations. They are equivalent to a CEO.
2. Partners: Partners are the managers of their individual practice team. Each partner usually has specialist expertise and runs a legal team that advises in that specialised area, whether it be litigation, corporate, mergers and acquisitions, property, employment, competition, intellectual property, banking and finance, etc. There are two types of partners:
i. Equity partners: partners who have bought in to the firm, and therefore can share in a percentage of the profits. These partners are often quite senior.
ii. Salary partners: non-equity partners.
3. Special counsel: not quite a partner yet but a very senior associate.
4. Senior associate: a lawyer with at least 5 years post-qualification experience who has been promoted to a senior position within a team.
5. Solicitor: a junior lawyer who has ‘settled’ in a particular legal team (i.e. they chose to stay in a legal team that they likely rotated through during their graduate program).
6. Graduate: a newly admitted lawyer who is participating in the graduate program (which usually involves a few rotations in different legal teams during an 18 month or 2 year period). The graduate is likely to be completing their Practical Legal Training during this time in order to be admitted as a solicitor.
7. Paralegal/clerk: a law student or professional paralegal (that may or may not be studying law) that assists the legal team with work but is not admitted as a lawyer, e.g. trade mark paralegals who apply for trade marks for clients and run the administration of such trade marks.
8. Summer clerk: penultimate year law student interns who work over the summer break.
9. In-house team: there may also be an in-house legal team at a firm. They advise the law firm on a range of issues, including governance, employment issues, and procurement contracts for the purchase of goods and services that the whole firm uses.
However, there are so many different roles in a law firm - not just lawyers. Remember that law firms are businesses, and therefore have a range of roles to ensure the firm runs smoothly. The non-legal roles include:
1. Secretaries: Secretaries run the administration of a legal team - from the partner’s diary to the bills at the end of each month which allows the firm to be paid.
2. Receptionist: the person who greets the clients on the firm’s client level floor.
3. Word Processors: WPs are professional typists who type up and amend documents in accordance with your instructions (some work overnight).
4. HR: Human Resources (sometimes called People & Development or similar) assist with recruitment, pay, performance reviews, promotions, and other employee issues and concerns.
5. IT: particularly important for allowing a law firm to run, as without email, precedents (i.e. template contracts and documents), document management systems, matter management systems, e-discovery, data rooms and that all important time-billing software (which allows you to bill in 6 minute increments - yay), law firm life would involve a lot of manual handling. A lot of firms are embracing legal technology in ways we haven’t seen before including contract automation and chat bots.
6. Finance: they run the finances of the law firm, assist with determining the charge out rates, and run the financial reports including the balance sheet, profit and loss statements and budgeting.
7. Communications/Events: this team organises the firm’s internal and client events and also how the firm is viewed externally.
8. Business Development teams: help the legal teams to pitch (and win) client work.
9. Shared services: incorporates the mailroom (which is important for couriering legal documents) and other services that keep everything going within the law firm.
10. Chefs/waitstaff: keeps the clients and lawyers caffeinated during meetings and keeps the late-working lawyers fed (some firms have their own fully staffed kitchen who cook dinner for those needing to stay back late).