Rex Schlaybaugh says lawyers are skeptics by nature. So when the chairman and CEO of Dykema Gossett PLLC tried to drive a systemwide change in their mindset, he was faced with overcoming a great deal of established inertia in order to make it happen.
“Large law has never been a fast-paced, fast-changing industry,” Schlaybaugh says. “Changes come slowly, are often resisted, and as the economy changes, we have found that we are subject to business cycles just like any other industry. Therefore, the way we’ve been operating for the past 100 years can’t be the way we operate in the future.”
Dykema Gossett is a national law firm with 700 employees that generated $175 million in revenue last year. Schlaybaugh had to figure out a way to overcome the momentum generated by an organization of that size and drive home a message that is simple to state but far more difficult to internalize and implement.
“I needed to drive home the recognition that we are a business,” he says. “Though we are legal professionals, we are a business, and our clients are looking to us like they look at any other business in a supply relationship. Are we efficient? Are we cost-effective? Are we producing value? Do we understand their business? And above all, we needed to realize that we aren’t entitled to any portion of their business, but we have to earn their business every day. It’s really a fundamental change in the way many lawyers approach the profession.”
To get the lawyers and legal staff at Dykema Gossett to think like businesspeople, Schlaybaugh needed to get out of the office, communicate and educate. He needed to make a nationwide force of attorneys aware of the business that makes a large law firm run. He needed to get his employees to think in terms of supply and demand without sacrificing any of the legal specialization and expertise that had built the firm’s reputation over the years.
