The management of the Obama campaign among the lowest level operatives (i.e., me making cold calls and walking precincts) reminded me of the way in which every organization squanders its resources.

I forgive the Obama campaign its trespasses because it was run by a dedicated, exhausted, physically ill cadre of poorly paid tweens -- tweens in this case being young people in that awkward period between University and real life or University and graduate school (listen to This American Life's spot-on audio-documentary on College Voter Registration Drives here).  In any event, the Field Organizers whose goal it was to make X number of telephone calls and knock on Y number of doors were young and inexperienced in using human resources of any kind other than perhaps the counter-staff at the local McDonalds.

So it was that during the course of the last days of the campaign in Henderson Nevada that I met a growing number of 40+ volunteers who had given up going to the campaign office after walking precincts because its management style was anti-Obama -- top down, inflexible, and numbers rather than people-driven.  Two of the three campaign buzzwords -- inspire and empower -- were lost in the tumult of real life.

Law firms, unlike local political campaign offices, are presumably being run by mature adult professionals who understand that which Obama Field Organizers could not.

If it takes 1,000 phone calls to recruit a single volunteer (or lavish summer programs; sky-high salaries; and, signing bonuses for first year associates) it's best to treat that volunteer or freshly minted lawyer like the valuable commodity they are.  When the local campaign head or firm manager rages out of his office and browbeats his human resources into (temporary) submission, he might as well be keying his own new Bugatti Veyron.

I won't repeat most of what Jordan Furlong has written in his terrific post The Perils of Squandering Talent (a must read ) but I will give you his bottom line:

the legal profession [may be] at risk of becoming the North American automobile industry, about to be hammered by market forces we never prepared for[.] Are our clients, fed up with the cost of tapping our traditional resource, ready to cast about for alternative sources of legal talent? And does your firm in any way foreshadow General Motors, a well-known name poised to collapse from short-term thinking and a failure to give customers what they want?

Why is a negotiation blog put to the task of examining the well being of the profession as a whole?  Because the negotiated resolution of disputes requires innovative, value-creating "out of the box" thinking as does the health of our profession in the 21st Century.  That's why I've begun a new post category - Outside the Box - so that we can continue exploring those issues critical to our survival as legal professionals.