Joe Fuller: Outside of a courtroom, would the founders of a law firm established 100 years ago, recognize the day-to-day activities of their 21st-century successors? Technological advances are changing how, when, and by whom work gets done. At the same time, demographic and cultural shifts are transforming firms’ people strategies, including the transmission of institutional knowledge. How will the adoption of generative AI and other trends in white-collar work shape the firms of tomorrow?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor, and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. My guest today is Keith Fullenweider, chair of the legendary Texas law firm Vinson & Elkins. We’ll talk about how automation has altered the firm’s division of labor and how it recruits, trains, and develops its talent. We’ll also look at post-Covid issues like hybrid work and an increasing concern for employees’ mental health and work-life balance. And we’ll consider the firm’s overall workforce and how its leadership has come to emphasize teamwork while delegating more responsibility to non-attorneys. Welcome to the podcast, Keith.

Keith Fullenweider: Thank you, Joe. Good to be with you today.

Fuller: Keith, you’re managing partner of one of America’s most distinguished law firms, Vinson & Elkins. How is it that you find yourself in that position?

Fullenweider: I’ve spent my legal career at Vinson & Elkins. I grew up in Houston, graduated from Princeton with a history degree, and then went to law school at the University of Texas, and I started work at Vinson & Elkins in 1988, and during my career I focused on mergers and acquisitions. I had the opportunity to work on some of the most interesting transactions across the power and energy and infrastructure space during my career. In the second half of my career, I really focused on the development of the firm’s private equity practice. I first got elected to our management committee in the mid-2000s, subsequently led our M&A practice and private equity practice and then our entire corporate department and got elected to be chair of the firm at the beginning of 2022. So I’ve been in the position about two and a half years.

Fuller: Many of our listeners will be familiar with the firm just by its name. It’s got a great reputation and a storied history, but could you tell us just a little bit about the breadth of operations of the firm and what sorts of people work for Vinson & Elkins, so that as we talk about managing their future at work, people have a better sense of what you’re overseeing and what sorts of folks provide service to your clients?

Fullenweider: V&E is over 100 years old. We were founded in Houston. In our early years, we were a Houston-based firm, but we’ve spread a great deal since those early years. We’re one of the 50 or so largest firms in the U.S. by revenue, maybe one of the 20 or so most successful in terms of profitability. We have 12 offices in the U.S. and overseas; about 700 lawyers. About two-thirds of our work is transactional of one kind or another—an acquisition or a financing or a real estate transaction, private equity investments; and about one-third of the work that we do is dispute-oriented—it could be a trial or an arbitration or an investigation. It can be a high-pressure environment, an environment that involves at times long hours and a significant amount of stress. We work across all industries, but in particular, financial services, energy, private equity, infrastructure, tax, real estate are big industries for us. Maybe just some of the clients we have that your listeners will have heard of: Apollo, Blackstone, the Panama Canal is a big client, Fluor, ExxonMobil, Google—some household names like that. So people come to work here to work at the highest end of the legal profession. A significant number of our lawyers still live in Texas, where we were founded, but we have lawyers on both the East Coast and the West Coast as well as in the U.K., Ireland, and the Middle East.

Fuller: So the core of your client service model rests on highly trained, highly educated, carefully selected white-collar workers, supported, of course, by administrative work and leverage like paralegals. What are the workforce issues that you’re managing in the post-Covid world? And which of are most challenging for you and your partners these days?

Fullenweider: Yeah, thinking about our workforce issues are probably divided up between our associate and business professional population and our partners. At the associate and business professional level—and by “business professionals,” that’s the term we use to refer to non-fee earners. They could be lawyers, they could be finance or IT professionals, communications professionals, people who work at the firm who are not doing legal work for clients. So for that population, it’s definitely… a top issue would be recruitment and retention. Nationwide firms like ourselves experience about a 20 percent turnover in their associate population; associates are the attorneys, let’s say, roughly in their first eight or nine years out of law school. So battling that turnover from a cost perspective, from a cultural perspective, something that we focus on pretty intensely. The turnover with our business professionals is less. We have many people who come here and spend decades working at the firm. That population tends to be a little bit less geographically mobile. People tend to put down roots in a community and stay there, so that helps with retention. At the associate level, we’ve adopted a program called the “Attorney Development Manager.” These are former practicing attorneys who we hire into the firm and assigned to practice groups. Their responsibility really is to keep up with our associates and to track their development, both the sort of transactions or disputes they’re working on, how they’re doing on a daily basis, are they getting the kind of work exposure and mentoring that they need? If they have problems, they’re sort of a first source. And that’s been a great program for us. One of the things that’s come out of that program we’ve really focused on is moving toward more real-time feedback. That’s a place where we’ve really concluded that we’ve got a lot better job satisfaction with associates and business professionals when we give them real-time input on how they’re performing, particularly if there’s an issue that can be corrected, instead of letting it drift or kind of fester, sort of tackling it head on.

Fuller: Keith, one issue we hear a lot about with younger professionals are issues of mental health, wellness, of the ability to balance the demands of work and their personal lives and self-care. Are you seeing that and how are you thinking about it?

Fullenweider: We’ve really tried in the last couple years since Covid to focus on anxiety and stress in a more open way. These are jobs that involve long hours. We’re dealing with people and our clients who are under a great deal of stress sometimes trying to accomplish some of the goals that may be the most important in their company’s history, and that can create an environment that can be quite stressful. Lawyers also will be inclined toward things like perfectionism or excessive amount of work relative to the rest of their lives, levels of anxiety that can be unhealthy. We know that these are jobs that involve hard work, but we don’t think that they need to be jobs that lead to unhappiness. We want our lawyers to develop a mindset that protects them against the excesses that often accompany what passes for success in this profession.

Fuller: Keith, you’ve been a partner for a long time, seeing the firm evolve. How do the needs of young associates today differ from your partners of today who came up in the firm and how are you thinking about managing their lives now that they’re senior representatives of the firm and important in your practice, developing clients and leading client work?

Fullenweider: Clients are willing to change lawyers and go with loyalty to individual lawyers as opposed to firms at a much greater pace than when I was a younger lawyer. So successful partners have to spend more time developing and getting business. What does that mean for us in terms of managing partners? It really means that we have to focus on incentivizing and rewarding collaboration. Once you’ve gotten a client to trust you with a certain kind of work, whether it’s a financing or a litigation matter, you’ve built trust with that client. And if you are able to transition that trust to your colleagues who do other kinds of work, you can maintain and hopefully grow that client relationship. But that really takes being focused on the success of others, not just on your own success. So we’ve really worked hard to battle against silos and incentivize our partners to think about the value of helping each other and to see how that really translates into the growth of the business.

Fuller: Keith, I’m curious. Are you seeing corresponding changes in the way your clients are managing their workplace in terms of expectations for their either in-house counsel or executives and younger workers and the type of quality of work life they’re trying to build for them and, therefore, their expectations of how you provide your services?

Fullenweider: I do think that across in-house legal departments there is much greater focus on quality of life and actually some concern about how the law firms that are working for the in-house legal departments approach quality of life issues for their population. One of the things that came out of the pandemic that’s really helped people just get away from the physical grind of having to be in places for extended periods of time are the developments of things like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, which have really led to routine court appearances now happening by video, as opposed to the effort it took to get to a courthouse far away to be there for 15 minutes. Things like that have kind of, I think, helped get rid of some of the wasted or busy time that we all experienced as younger lawyers.

Fuller: How has the training of lawyers changed over time? And how has professional development changed? Are you thinking about that differently? Does it go beyond you have to know new topics like the energy transition into different types of skills you feel that 21st-century lawyer needs, as opposed to one of 25 or 50 or 100 years ago with a firm of your long history?

Fullenweider: Yeah, I mean, it’s changed a great deal. Obviously, we still have training on what the proper elements of a loan agreement or a merger agreement should include or how to conduct a deposition. We still do those kinds of training, but what’s really changed is the amount of training we do on leadership—or call them “soft skills.” I was thinking back to my younger days in preparing to talk to you guys today, and we learned a lot of those things late at night while we were wasting time together or traveling together. So if you had to take a bunch of plane flights with your colleagues, there were lots of casual conversations that happened where you picked up the way they did their work, the way they thought about their work, some of the softer skills that are important as you develop as a lawyer. I learned a lot of that sitting around a conference room eating cold pizza at 9 o’clock at night. I’m glad we’ve left that behind. You won’t see a lot of people in conference rooms in our firm or any firm really at 9 o’clock at night anymore. They’ve been able to relocate to home, hopefully have dinner with their families, and then pick work back up again, if necessary, into the evening. But they’re doing it under better circumstances. But we are missing something. There’s a gap that’s been created, and I think we’ve really tried to focus on leadership development, relationship development, training specifically, and talking about those kinds of things and programs because we realize that a lot of that’s fallen by the wayside because we don’t “waste” as much time together anymore as we used to.

Fuller: Well, I think all of us who grew in professional services think back on those bull sessions over cold pizza or that breakfast in the cafeteria of some hotel waiting to go to the client as being great learning opportunities, but we probably glorify them a little bit in retrospect. Keith, can you give an example of the type of thing you’re doing to cultivate things like those soft skills or other skills, educational resources, training that you’re investing in to keep your people learning and moving forward?

Fullenweider: Joe, I think one of the programs we really like is called OptimalWork. It was developed by a doctor on the Harvard medical faculty, Kevin Majeres. OptimalWork uses a 25-question inventory that helps focus and teach lessons about mindfulness, reframing and accepting challenge in our work. The last couple of years we’ve used that with our first-year associate class. The really essential feature of it is just to get them asking themselves the right questions: What am I working for? Do I feel like I lined my work up with my purposes, my ideals? Did I take the opportunity to look at this thing that went bump in the night or that didn’t go my way during the day constructively, or did I complain about it? Am I feeling good about my work-life balance? Am I feeling good about the amount of time I’m spending at work, versus spending on other parts of my life? Getting our young lawyers to ask themselves those questions, which the OptimalWork program does a fantastic job of doing, I think is a great way to start them off on a path of good mental health around their profession, and hopefully also just contribute to their success and other aspects of their life.

Fuller: How do you evaluate a program like that? Are you seeing a change in the demeanor of the young associates? Are they demonstrably more engaged, are they more comfortable? Have turnover rates in that job category gone down after you’ve installed this program?

Fullenweider: I think it’s hard to attach causality to any one thing we’re doing because we’re still in a period where people are happy to be back together again. What we specifically will track is, do the associates keep using the program after the initial phase-in period works? And if you see even 15, 20 percent carry on with the program, you feel like everybody got some initial benefit from it. But it’s a bit of a ripple effect. If you have a small handful of people thinking about their work in a constructive way, it has an effect upon the people around them, even if they’re not using the program. So we’ve seen good take up, and again, it’s not a majority of people who would keep doing something after the first year. Maybe it’s a meaningful minority. But I think that actually has an effect upon the people around them that’s perhaps hard to measure. So we look at how many people keep going with the program.

Fuller: How did Covid change your thinking about any of this—or did it?

Fullenweider: I think Covid didn’t change us fundamentally. I think it was a great reminder that we were on the right path to focus on some of these mental health issues and some of these softer skill-development issues. We recruited our chief talent officer shortly after Covid, a guy named Hy Pomerance, who’s got a PhD in clinical psychology. He had a long career across HR and various kinds of professional service organizations. It was a pretty new entry into the legal industry. We really were focused in working with him to create things like these attorney development managers or the training and skill development we do around leadership and sort of inoculating our lawyers, if you will, against anxiety and stress and some of the things that come with the job.

Fuller: One of the trends we follow here at the Managing the Future of Work project is the creation of all sorts of new employment relationships—whether it’s the gig work or also the really, to a great extent, hidden growth of firms that provide personnel for companies as their business model. A Randstad, for example, another good Texas-based company in the U.S., although headquartered overseas. What have you seen? How has your practice evolved to take advantage of those opportunities and where do you think it’s going?

Fullenweider: Yeah, we have not gone outside of the firm very much. I think the way that we’ve changed is really to focus much more intensely on the contribution of our business professionals within the firm. So I think, if you go back in time, lawyers probably tended to trust lawyers too much to do too much. Lawyers did strategy, lawyers did budgeting, lawyers did their own press releases. We spent a lot of lawyer time doing things that perhaps lawyers are not the best at doing. We’ve really in the last several years—and again, the pandemic, I think accelerated this—focused on having business professionals who can really provide services, I think, at a higher level than we were doing by relying too much on lawyers. We’ve really sought to professionalize and step up the quality of people who are not fee earners but are actually working in the firm helping us think about strategy, think about talent management, think about how to most effectively communicate with our clients and our constituents, really tapping the skills. But we’ve brought these people largely into the firm. Now, some of those people had relationships with outside consultants in public relations or in IT or in financial management, and they have tapped those relationships in those organizations. But in terms of the way that I think about it, I’ve really focused on bringing super high-quality group of business professionals—our C-suite, if you will—into the firm and trusting them to manage those relationships.

Fuller: So, Keith, we’re talking in the summer of 2024 when we’re in arguably the second stage of confronting generative artificial intelligence. We’ve moved from that kind of initial stupefaction and amazement phase of 18 months ago to getting our arms around what does this actually mean in terms of making our organizations more productive. Also, of course, what all the broad issues are of regulation, legal issues, ethical issues related to AI. I’m curious about how you’re thinking about it, first and foremost as a managing partner, as someone who’s an economic steward of the firm along with your senior team. How are you approaching it? How far along do you think you are? How far do you think you can take it?

Fullenweider: Yeah, AI in law firms, really a host of issues. People usually start by thinking about how we use AI to produce legal work, and that is still early stages. It’s amazing what’s happened in the last two years, but the work that is done in a place like Vinson & Elkins is so precise and so tailored to specific situations that the ability to rely upon big public databases and information and get them to tell you what a legal answer is or produce a first draft of a loan agreement is not that useful yet. I think what really will apply AI is when people are able to put AI on top of their own private networks, which I think is coming, and then you’d be able to tap into all the confidential documents that exist in a law firm. That’s going to happen over the next year or two, and that will make us more efficient at creating initial drafts and tapping precedent and things like that. That’s really a continuation as opposed to something revolutionary. We’ve really seen the amount of busy work, the amount of just churning through documents or papers that young lawyers did when I started really decline dramatically over the last 20 years. So technology has already taken us down that path. I don’t think it’s going to change the legal paradigm for the elite law firms, where you really are engaged by clients to provide advice, to provide judgment, to reflect on things you’ve seen in the past, and to really to be a trusted adviser. We are looking forward to using AI in other ways in our business. For example, in recruiting, there’s a great new product that law firms have started to use, a business called Suited.com, which came out of the investment banking business originally, but it’s used to help you in hiring. And what it helps you do, again, using sort of AI research and background, is to spot candidates for your law firm that have a good fit with your law firm. And so if they study your population, they say people with these sorts of characteristics who answer these kinds of questions in this sort of a manner have a high degree of success in your law firm, as compared to the generic law firm. We think these candidates will be a good fit for you. I think that’s something that we’re very excited about. We think it will help us with those retention issues we talked about—happier experience, attracting people to our firm who will prosper and flourish here. So excited about using it in those kinds of ways. So I think we’re going to see, we’re going to be a consumer of AI. Then you alluded to this, but we’re also going to see AI create tons of new legal issues that’ll create new business for law firms. A—a kind of different topic than I think what we’re talking about today. But I think AI will certainly be a good source of business for lawyers helping clients sort through the new issues.

Fuller: Well, I imagine some of our audience hear that with mixed feelings, Keith. But let me ask you about this Suited application. Are there particular attributes that you think distinguish a Vinson & Elkins attorney from other top-tier firms, things that you really emphasize? Or as you look back on success stories in the firm, is there some common denominator about values, characteristics, attributes that you think really define what it is to be a Vinson & Elkins lawyer?

Fullenweider: That’s a great question, because all lawyers you would think are going to focus on things like attention to detail and precision and producing quality work. That’s a pretty common thread you would see, I think, across elite law firms. At Vinson & Elkins, we will be looking for people who are interested in helping others and define their success through the success of the people around them. So that means you’re looking for people who value teamwork, value working in a community, value working on new and innovative issues, where they have to rely on others, as opposed to people who want to be super specialized or siloed or in a comfort zone.

Fuller: So one of the issues that a lot of executives, certainly in large companies that are wrestling with—this summer, this early fall of 2024—is rebalancing their mix of hybrid workers. How are you approaching that? What’s the logic you’re applying to it?

Fullenweider: Yeah, I would say, compared to a lot of companies or our clients, we’re pretty far down the spectrum toward “in the office.” More than 95 percent of our lawyers and business professionals live and work in a city where we have an office, so going to the office is a big part of the culture here. We do have a percentage, and it’s very important for people in our firm who work remotely, but it’s definitely the exception, not the rule. So we were one of the early adopters of the four-day-in-the-office week. I think we were the third or fourth major firm to adopt that. It’s been close to a year now. Look, I think it’s fantastic to people now, the flexibility, if they have a young child who’s not feeling well or they’ve got to get something taken care of around the house on any given afternoon or day; we can all work just as efficiently from home. But I think there’s a tremendous value to people being in person and being able to have casual and formal conversations and sort of walk around and solve problems. V&E was always a very boisterous place—not like a library, much more like a coffee shop. So we’re pretty far down the spectrum of in-the-office, and I think it’s really led to a happier workforce and success for us.

Fuller: When we look at the demographics of enrollees and post-secondary programs, like law school, medical school, PhD programs, one of the singular characteristics is an absolute majority of the enrollees are women. And we know through research here and elsewhere that the demands of a professional services job often really start mounting just as families enter childbearing and young child-rearing years. How are you managing those trade-offs in light of what you just said and confronting the very understandable concerns people have about the obligations of caregiving for kids and often now for seniors, parents, in-laws that they have to be looking out for in more than just casual ways?

Fullenweider: I think society’s trends toward more women in the workforce is so evident in the legal industry, right? Because I think as you said, I think 55 percent of all law students are female now. Our incoming associate classes tend to be 50 percent male-female, almost equally balanced, occasionally heavier toward the female side. So it’s very much what we’re experiencing, and I think it’s a great thing. I have a daughter-in-law who’s a lawyer. I have a daughter who’s in law school. I have a son who’s a lawyer. And watching them navigate these issues has really helped me understand what the challenges are, but also what the benefits are of having two parents who really are sharing those responsibilities as caregivers and the flexibility that they have to cooperate and work together. We are trying to deal with that at a policy level, and we’ve increased our family leave to four months a couple years ago. We are really strongly encouraging the men in our firm to take the family leave, and we’re seeing a real increase in that. It really helps the young family get adjusted. We’ve also upped our benefits around things like family planning and adoption and really try to focus on being at the forefront there. So I think these are great trends. They’re bringing a great number of people into the workforce for law firms—business professional and practicing lawyer side that we didn’t have before. It would be tough to be the primary caregiver to young children and be in the conference room like you and I used to be with the cold pizza. That just didn’t work. So technology had already made it possible to work from home, and I think the pandemic made it increasingly culturally acceptable to work from home when necessary. And we have a number of young parents in our firm really excelling at that and making it work. But it’s something that, from a workforce issue, is important as anything else going on around here, because that’s a prevailing issue. Having two professionals in a family, demanding careers, watching the two professionals juggle those responsibilities and finding ways to support that is something we spend a lot of time thinking about and supporting.

Fuller: Well, one thing our research certainly confirms universally is that senior executives starting with the managing partner and the CEO regularly confirming with sincerity that taking these benefits is something the firm not only expects but encourages and then seeing others do that. It might be that junior partner who’s having the second or third or fourth kid and that associate saying, “Gee, a partner is doing this. That’s a legitimate choice as opposed to something that I have to sheepishly ask about or I probably shouldn’t do because it’s going to be bad for my career path.”

Fullenweider: Yeah, I think leadership by example is really important. And look, you have to be honest about this though, right? There are costs to the family leave. There are costs when people step away from their practice for two or three months because the work goes on and someone has to get the work done, so somebody has to step in for you or cover for you. So I think having honest conversations about it, not pretending like it’s free—it’s not free. It’s something that we as a community choose to value and support, and it’s a great example of where you can help others out. I think if there’s any single common denominator I’ve really learned in my years in leadership, it’s that happiness on this job really comes from helping other people out. It’s the mindset with your clients that leads to the best long-term satisfaction as a practicing lawyer. Our business professionals who really thrive here bring an attitude of service into their roles within the firm. And I think when you have a chance to help your colleagues out because there’s a family issue or an illness or some sort of other issue in the family, it makes you feel good, and we encourage that. I think it brings us together and creates tighter bonds.

Fuller: Well, there’s certainly also evidence in our research that that employee that feel supported at those kinds of critical moments is more engaged with the firm, is less likely to field competitive offers, is more likely to feel a sense of reciprocal commitment. Keith, as you think forward about the firm, its prospects, how to grow it, how to sustain its reputation and brand image through the lens of the people that work there and the way you do your work, what are you focused on? What are the issues about the future of work that you and your senior colleagues and eventually your successor are going to have to spend the most time on in your view?

Fullenweider: We believe in what we’re doing around leadership development. We think that helping all of our employees and partners develop additional leadership, emotional intelligence skills, helping them develop the skills they’ll need to be successful as professionals here or somewhere else, should they choose to go to a different profession, that that really creates the sort of environment that will be successful in the future regardless of AI or other things that the world might throw at us curveballs we can’t see coming. Then in terms of our competitive advantage or competitive approach to the market, we really believe in the give and take model. We really believe that our partners believing that they succeed by helping others succeed, not giving up a focus on their own practice or own careers but giving an equal focus to realizing that the assets you accrue as you focus on your own practice are something that can really be shared and that the pie can grow. So those two principles are really at the core of how we think about the future. We’re very much in the talent business. That’s what this law firm is. It’s much more talent than it is brand.

Fuller: Well, Keith Fullenweider, chairman of Vinson & Elkins, a storied U.S. law firm, thanks so much for joining us on the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Fullenweider: Joe, thanks for the great questions. I really enjoyed it. It’s great to get to talk about the firm with your audience. Appreciate you having me on.

Fuller: You bet. We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.