Managing Employees Who Argue Professionally

Mark L. Silow was featured in the Philly.com article, "Managing Employees Who Argue Professionally." Full text can be found in the June 2, 2014, issue, but a synopsis is noted below.

Managing people who argue for a living can be a challenge. As firmwide managing partner of Fox Rothschild, that is exactly what Mark L. Silow is tasked with doing.

"Lawyers are challenging to manage," Silow said. "They are very smart. A lot of them have significant economic weight within the context of a law firm. I heard one consultant say it's the only business they know where all of your assets get in an elevator every night and you hope come back in that same elevator the next morning."

"A firm is only as strong as its lawyers and certainly one of the things we've seen in the last 10 or 20 years is lawyer mobility," Silow said.

Silow noted that gone are the days of lawyers joining a law firm for life and that they must be wooed constantly.

But how?

"The most important method is to be successful," he said. "If lawyers think they can do significantly better financially at another firm, sooner or later, they are going to follow that opportunity. So it's incredibly important that the firm remain financially successful to attract and retain talent and two, you have to have a good work environment."

What exactly constitutes a good work environment for attorneys?

"One is you have to give a lot of deference to how people run their practices and conduct themselves," Silow said. "Too many rules and I think that people, not just lawyers, start to chafe."

According to Silow, starting a niche practice at Fox is encouraged.

"We...