Super Idea

How to define the development of lawyers 

Just like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, after meeting the dignity and survival needs, what lawyers concern is how to develop. How to define the development of lawyers after all? Development means growth, progress, breakthrough and even leap-over. It includes personal development and team development, and even law firm development. Moreover, it also involves profession, market, and management. Therefore, development is a multi-dimensional mixed concept. But in any case, development will involve three levels of problems: development space, development path, and development system guarantee. As lawyers develop, law firm will also develop. Therefore, the core task of law firm management is how to consider, plan and guarantee the development of lawyers. 

When discussing this problem, it must acknowledge that there are different types of lawyers, such as professional, market, and management; There are different development stages of lawyers, such as initial development stage, peak development stage, and development decline stage; In addition, lawyers are also grouped by age, such as young lawyers, middle-aged lawyers, and elderly lawyers. Only by considering these three dimensions, lawyers can be divided into 27 types. We can't discuss them one by one. Today, we briefly introduce some of our practices in this area. 

Overall system design level 

At the level of overall system design, we believe that a moderate-scale law firm must be comprehensive. Through a series of system arrangements, we hope that lawyers of different types, development stages and age groups can find their own position and perform their own duties in DOCVIT. 

In addition to the difference in partner and non-partner, we also emphasize the difference in equity partner and non-equity partner. Regardless of the corporate system or the commission system, and regardless of the name used in each law firm, lawyers only play the role of partners and non-partners in the law firm substantially. It is unnecessary to discuss more. But we have deeper understanding about partners. 

We believe that partners are for human resource cooperation at first, and all partners are business partners with equal status at the level of professional cooperation, business cooperation, and intellectual cooperation. However, we must acknowledge that law firm is an enterprise to some extent, with capital cooperation. From this perspective, partners can be divided into equity partners and non-equity partners depending on the investment in the firm. All the partners are for human resource cooperation, and some partners are also for capital cooperation. This design can meet different demands of different types of partners at different development stages, solve the contradiction between the development of the law firm and the natural accumulation to some extent, and properly avoid the pan-democracy and other problems caused by equal investment and rights under the traditional partnership system. Of course, this is also our attempts on corporate system of the law firm. 

We set clear promotion system of lawyers, and enrich and innovate the system to some extent. We have clear promotion channel from assistant lawyer, apprentice lawyer, to lawyer, partner and senior partner, with definite promotion conditions and procedures. On this basis, we also introduce the job rotation system, accelerated promotion system, salary partner system, advisory system, partner recommendation system, business-undertaking senior partner system, etc. Some systems will be explained and shared with you later. In this way, lawyers can realize smooth promotion in DOCVIT, and the width of the promotion channel can be expanded. Of course, we also adopt the last place elimination system, demotion system, recommendation responsibility system, etc. 

We encourage lawyers to develop toward three directions: Professional lawyer, market lawyer and management lawyer. Lawyers have their own personalities and traits, their own backgrounds and experience before entering the industry, and have different practice styles before serving DOCVIT. Therefore, each lawyer is unique. If you want to manage all lawyers with one standard, one style, and one mode, it will be very uncomfortable, in view of this, flexible management is the best choice. For example, allow professional lawyers to develop without limits, until to be business-undertaking senior partner; allow market lawyers to undertake business without trouble, and solve their worries through partner cooperation, public lawyer pool, and basic team deployment; allow lawyers with weak professional and market ability and strong management potential to serve at the management position, to enrich the management teams of the centers and offices of the headquarters. 

We also launch the staff shareholding plan. This may be our another brave attempt. We believe that a lawyer can become an equity partner of a law firm, and this equity can be changed and transferred. We also believe that non-lawyers can also share the income distribution of the law firm, and even obtain some simulation equity based on the joint transfer of equity partners. Moreover, we even believe that some excellent lawyers may obtain certain income distribution or the equity subscription qualification due to the high recognition of the philosophy of the law firm and the outstanding performance in a certain aspect before their qualifications and business abilities meet the partner standard. Based on this, we launch the staff shareholding plan. The staff shareholding does not mean that all employees must have equity at the same time, but all employees have the opportunity to obtain the firm's equity or equity incentives. Building a sharing law firm is our dream. 

Partner system design level 

At the level of partner system design, we fully consider three elements of the relationship between the whole and the part, the foundation of human resource cooperation in the lawyer industry, and the developing and changing partner, creatively put forward the concept of the headquarters partner and office partner, build the labor-profession binary matrix structure, and design the partner recommendation and trusteeship systems. 

We separate DOCVIT headquarters from Beijing office, and set the headquarters partners and office partners, so that it is possible for all office partners to become DOCVIT headquarters partners while becoming local office partners. We always believe that the best state of law firm is that many excellent partners work with each other on the same platform, with equal opportunity. The management personnel are only builders and maintainers of the platform. If a large-scale law firm is a zoo, its charm is that there are all kinds of animals in the zoo, and everyone is unique. Ideally, a good director of a law firm shall be the zookeeper rather than the most shining lion, elephant or tiger in the zoo. And the total equity of the zoo shall be shared by everyone. In each independent position, everyone can also have its own local equity. This is a healthy state. 

In each office, we launch the business division system, and encourage partners to establish large business division, business division, and business department. Moreover, we believe that it is not contradictory to set up departments with people as the main line and strengthen professionalization construction with profession as the main line. We encourage partners to either establish their own departments or join a mature or established department after joining in the law firm, and empower the department head for decision-making to some extent. In this way, it is easier to manage based on the human resource cooperation within the department. Moreover, since it is not divided by profession, everyone's business is different, it is easier to cooperate. Meanwhile, at the firm level, including two levels of each office and the headquarters, we set up a number of professional committees, so that everyone can conduct centralized management according to the selected professional direction. In this way, many partner teams joining in DOCVIT can retain the original team configuration, which can also increase the possibility of professionalization and the cooperation space while reducing the total cost. 

In addition to the above, we also have some innovations. For example, in order to further strengthen the human resource cooperation, we also launch the partner recommendation system. Senior partners can recommend young lawyers meeting certain conditions to be partners, and undertake the recommendation responsibility for income performance and case handling quality of these young lawyers; In view of the specific circumstances of partners, we also launch the large business division trusteeship mechanism for individual partner. Those individual partners joining in the law firm as individuals can be managed by a large business division before establishing a department, and share the distribution system and incubation dividend of the large business division. 

Our purpose is to achieve a win-win situation between lawyers and the law firm. 

Team training level 

At the level of team training, we believe that to train young people is to be responsible for partners, the law firm, and customers; Moreover, we believe that to train young people is the duty of the whole law firm rather than someone. 

We have the lawyer rating system and the annual salary system. Although we have different departments, we encourage each department to conduct corporatization management, and do not allow commission lawyers with loose management. Except for partners, all lawyers are salary lawyers with certain rating. The law firm has strict and definite lawyer rating system, and stipulates corresponding annual salary. Of course, we also empower the department to employ employees at its discretion, and encourage each department to increase the income of lawyers and establish the incentive mechanism on the basis of ensuring the annual salary standard of lawyers within the scope advocated by the law firm. 

We have training camp for new lawyers and future partner plan. Every year, we will select certain number of outstanding graduates from law schools to enrich our reserve team, and arrange them to attend the closed training camp for new lawyers. After scientific and systematic training, these new lawyers will enter different department by two-way selection. For outstanding young lawyers, we have the "two-three-five future partner plan", that is , they will undergo two years of basic training and three years of key training, 50% of them will be selected in each training stage, finally, 50% of them may be promoted as partners. In this way, we hope to realize the talent sustainability to some extent. This is also the common practice of many excellent law firms. 

We also have the partner incubation center. This is very interesting. For those lawyers with great potential who don't meet the partner conditions but agree with our philosophy, we tailor the "partner incubation center" for them. The incubation period is two years in general. During incubation, each lawyer is under the management of trusteeship department, but they are not affiliated to any department. They can choose to cooperate with each department, or gradually increase their income under the guidance of the trusteeship department. There is no task indicator, and the law firm will provide support to guide the professionalization construction and cultivate the market ability. 

We persist in this way and hope that there will be more and more lawyers recognizing the philosophy of DOCVIT joining us. 

To sum up, in fact, we just want to turn DOCVIT into a law firm that lawyers aspire to.