At the Canadian Legal Summit, they talked about harnessing purpose, flexibility, and workplace culture
Younger lawyers are no longer content to grind through long hours in pursuit of a partnership title; they want work that matters, autonomy in how they deliver it and leaders who live the values they advertise, not just print them on a brochure, a recent panel at the Canadian Legal Summit made clear.
For Kurt Schlachter, the chief executive officer at Stringam, the shift began with focusing on purpose. “Younger lawyers want to be part of something greater than themselves. They want to feel like they're making a meaningful contribution, [that] they're part of a team and they're valued themselves,” he said. That desire, he argued, compelled his firm to reconsider the traditional promise of a linear path from associate to equity partner and replace it with something more tailored, transparent, and honest about trade-offs.
Schlachter admitted that earlier generations had often followed that path without asking many questions. “I frankly couldn't tell you back then why I wanted it other than it was just sort of what you did. They didn't really give you a lot of information. There wasn't that transparency around what is the value proposition of staying with this firm long term?” he said. By contrast, today’s associates pushed hard for clarity; “they want to understand the why, and they're smart, and they want more information,” he said.
At Stringam, that pressure first manifested in how the firm approached culture. “We're very deliberate about culture, so we did a robust firm-wide exercise to develop a culture plan for our firm, so everyone in the firm, from partners to employees,” Schlachter said. Those values were then integrated into partner compensation, associate reviews, and everyday management, so they did not sit in a slide deck while the firm carried on as before.
Flexibility became the fault line where many firms, in his view, were still being caught out. Schlachter drew a sharp line between slogans and practice. “We're not one of those firms that say we value flexibility and then have a very prescriptive policy about you must be in the office this many days per week. Those two things don't jive in our opinion,” he said. Instead, lawyers were treated as adults trusted to meet client needs while managing their own time, with structure to support them rather than control them.
To make that real, Stringam built individual frameworks around each lawyer. One tool, Schlachter said, was “called a success plan, where we do a tailored plan for every lawyer and partners as well that says, here's your goals for the year. Here's what you're focused on.” Alongside that sat a pool of resources, “we call a flex budget so they can focus on what's the priority, what makes sense for them, their goals, their practice,” he said. The firm’s compensation model also abandoned the idea that everyone should aspire to become a future equity partner. “We're very transparent from the start. Not everyone has to be a partner. We don't want everyone to be a partner. There's plenty of different roles within the firm that add value,” he said, asking plainly, “Why wouldn't we create space for people to excel where they are individually? Our compensation model allows for that flexibility.”
If Stringam had been re-engineering a traditional firm from the inside, Caravel Law approached the problem from a different starting point. Managing partner Jacqueline Dinsmore described a structure that had treated flexibility as a design principle rather than a concession. “We've always kind of looked at, it's not about where people work, but how and why they work,” she said. Remote practice, part-time arrangements, long sabbaticals and the ability to choose files had been baked into the model well before the pandemic.
The retention data, she argued, spoke for itself. “Our attrition rates are 1 percent to 5 percent compared to 27 percent for the industry. So our lawyers don't leave us,” Dinsmore said. But she was also clear that many competitors still clung to a familiar disconnect between branding and reality. “How many times have you seen brochures of a law firm that says, oh, you know, we believe in your mental health, but then they don't do anything about it?” she said. The same gap showed up on diversity files: “Or, you know, we're really DEI forward, and you look at their partnership committee, and it's all men,” she said.
To close that gap, Caravel established specific roles and systems. A “director of lawyer happiness” was tasked with surfacing issues before they blew up. “And that role really encourages an open dialogue for people. If you are burnt out, … there shouldn't be a stigma attached to that,” Dinsmore said. Culture was also codified in a detailed charter. “We have a firm charter, which I love. It's 10 principles that we all live by. And it's things like overthrow the status quo, set the pace, obsess over value, inspire trust, pull hard and pull together, respect others authentically, embrace expectations, leave excuses to others, be in the business, live fully and responsibly, rise up,” she said.
Dinsmore argued that the billable-hour model had squeezed out recognition and learning. “The one thing about legal, and we all recognize this, there's lots of negative criticism about people's work,” she said, asking, “How often do people give positive reinforcement and positive feedback?” She linked that directly to time-based targets. “When we talk about teamwork and mentoring and learning, those almost feel like luxuries when you're on a billable hour model because they're like, oh my gosh, I'm going to take 45 minutes to learn something. Oh, you know, I'm not billing. And that's a sad state of affairs,” she said.
For her, technology needed to be part of the fix. “I think we really need to lean heavily on technology,” Dinsmore said. Automation and AI were already changing what clients were willing to pay for, and she argued that this shift should prompt firms to focus their lawyers on higher-value work and relationships. “Client relationships matter that much more because now you have this tool that makes you more effective and efficient on the routine tasks,” she said. “And so, what sets you apart? It's how you deal with your clients and your customer service… I think now that we've got automation to do that, it allows people to really practise law and not push paper. And that's what the more junior lawyers are looking to do,” she said.
Technology also shuffled generational power. Dinsmore said she was increasingly seeing reverse mentorship, where younger lawyers helped senior partners navigate new technology, for example, rather than being stuck in the back room, “So they have a new sense of purpose. They're not just there to look through a banker's box anymore,” she said.
After practising on Bay Street, Ashlee Froese illustrated what happened when a partner decided the traditional bargain no longer stacked up. After becoming a non-equity partner, she walked away to launch her fashion and trademark firm, Froese Law. “It was literally purposefully built with that in mind as an alternative to Bay Street and the rigidity of Bay Street without compromising on the Bay Street calibre,” she said.
When she mentored younger lawyers, it was about finding the right career for people, not the other way around. “What I try to do is tap into what's their authenticity and what's their motivation. So it's really focused on what are you good at? What do you like? How do you want to incorporate law into your life? What are your hobbies? What are your passions? How can we integrate that into your practice of law?” Froese said. “I think also mentorship is really about also being honest with the juniors or with the associates or partners, on, here's the business realities of law,” she said.
Those realities had driven her own decision to leave a big firm. “But at that point, it didn't make sense to me to pay six figures to buy into a firm to get points on the dollar when I could start my own firm for a fraction of that,” she said. From that experience came a blunt piece of advice for younger lawyers. “If you have your own book of business and you start to build it from an early stage, early age,” you gained leverage, she said, whereas “If you don't have your own book of business, and you can't go to your next potential employer and say, hey, I can make money from you from day one, because I have this loyal customer base, you're back on your heels a little bit. And that's the reality of private practice,” she said.
For firms still hoping that cosmetic tweaks would satisfy this new cohort, Dinsmore closed with a line that cut through any illusion of neutrality. “If you're not changing, you're choosing,” she said.
The panel was moderated by Robert De Toni, Director of Student and Associate Professional Resources at Siskinds.
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