POWER SHARE - Young lawyers are burned out on grunt work. Law firm leaders are exhausted from a year-and-a-half of making increasingly unenviable decisions. It’s an untenable situation but maybe there’s a cure. How about letting young lawyers make some of those unenviable decisions? As Law.com’s Patrick Smith reports, some analysts say law firms should be looking for more avenues to share the power, and responsibility, of leadership with younger attorneys to curb leadership fatigue, prep the next generation for what’s to come and to increase the active involvement of more junior personnel. Sounds good! But it’s not that easy. “The leadership roles that are most appropriate for younger leaders are different,” Marcie Borgal Shunk of the Tilt Institute said. “They need to be more defined than a general leadership role.” She said that the traditional method of pairing up a more seasoned leader with a younger one can have unforeseen pitfalls: “In reality what ends up happening is the up and coming leader does most of the work, the more senior leader gets the credit and the situation becomes more of a burden than a learning opportunity.”
LGBTQ+ ON THE QT - While Corporate America has seen a significant shift in the way LGBTQ+ people are treated in the workplace, many LGBTQ+ people still prefer to stay closeted at work, Law.com’s Trudy Knockless reports. In addition to being concerned about how their colleagues will view them, they are careful how much of their personal lives they share with clients. Panelists who served on a Minority Corporate Counsel Association panel this month titled “Coming Out in a Straight-Laced Profession: Cultural Challenges LGBTQ+ Attorneys Continue to Face in the Legal Profession” said that, to spur change in the workplace, it’s up to them as representatives of the LGBTQ+ system to have open discussions with people who sometimes use “thinly veiled language” to address them. “It’s so easy to let those things just go by and not do anything about them. It’s hard to sit down and have those discussions. It does take courage, but it’s something we need to do,” Michael Moore, associate GC at Amazon, said.
