Q&A: Building and Innovating Milbank@Harvard

Seven years ago, in the shadows of the financial crisis, Milbank launched a first-of-its-kind training program for mid- and senior-level associates in collaboration with Harvard Law School’s Executive Education Program. Named Milbank@Harvard, the program remains a commitment unmatched in the market. Every year the firm sends associates from its fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-year associate classes to Harvard to take classes from faculty at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. Each program is six days long.

The classes cover a range of topics, including accounting, finance, marketing, negotiations, macroeconomics, teamwork, leadership and management skills. During these modules, Milbank associates are shielded from firm work. Four times a year, the firm operates for a week without a significant number of their mid-and senior-level.

David J. Wolfson, a partner and the firm’s Executive Director, who helped launch Milbank@Harvard, recently spoke about the program’s origins, its evolution, and its future. 

Q: What was the impetus of the program?
A: We came to the conclusion that our lawyers, while extremely intelligent and hardworking, needed to have a real business context for the work we were doing so as to service clients to their greatest capability. That conclusion was reinforced by an awareness that law schools haven’t traditionally focused on teaching this information to law students.

We also felt that we were not the best people to teach this material. We had done internal professional development, and we’d done it well. But we weren't satisfied with our ability to provide a consistent top-level educational experience in the areas we wanted to focus on. And so we wanted to speak to other institutions about doing it. And that led us to become aware of a second element that we needed to do better, which was teaching our lawyers better management and leadership skills. 

Q: Why do you begin the training in an associate’s fourth year and not earlier? What’s wrong with receiving this kind of training in law school or during their first or second year at a law firm?
A: When you study some of these concepts in your first or second year of law school, you don’t have the context to understand them. And by the time you actually get into a law firm, especially when you get to a point in your career when you need to utilize this advanced level of knowledge, you’ve probably forgotten it. At Milbank, in your first through third year, you are primarily learning the foundations of your practice and basic legal skills. Then at the end of your third year and beginning of the fourth year, you start to really manage and lead teams, and interact with clients.

Q: Since Milbank@Harvard launched, more law firms have started offering business and leadership training. What makes Milbank’s program different?
A: Law firms are starting to do a much better job than they used to at training, but in order to achieve what we have achieved, they have to be willing to do two things. First, they have to be willing to provide their lawyers extended, uninterrupted training periods. And you need to layer the training over several years. Second, in my mind, they need to be willing to train their lawyers at the right times in their career. The combination of those factors makes it harder for other law firms to pursue a program like this. If you do this right, you get profound cultural advantages, but only if you are willing to make a significant investment in time and resources.

Q: What’s been key to the program’s success?
A: The main reasons revolve around the associates. First, we provide an environment where the associates are entirely focused on the educational experience. If we feel associates are being drawn away from the classroom or spending too much time on their phones, we intervene to protect them. Associates, as well as partners, who experience the program know how important this is and respect the time of people who are attending.

If we stretched people and demanded that they meet other requirements while attending the program, it would be highly problematic. We accept that a large number of our associates will not be working on client business for a week at a time. Buy-in with the partnership and the firm overall has made this successful.

Second, we ask the associates to give us critical feedback on the program immediately after their experience, and as a result they help shape the program.

Finally, the fact that we have such excellent professors, who in large part teach in the business school, and who apply the positive teaching style associated with that school, as opposed to the classic law school method of education, has been very important.

Q: What role do partners play in the program? 
A: We tend to have one or two partners at every session, although there are some sessions where we don't have partners because associates are talking about their personal career development. We don't want them to feel in any way inhibited to speak freely. When they are present, the partners are there to be guides—they’re not there to evaluate or judge. They're providing context for the material through a story or personal experience. My favorite partner stories are when they share how they made a mistake or faced a challenge. Those stories can help associates positively respond to their own insecurities and challenges as they work through their career paths.

Q: As you note, Milbank associates have played a crucial role in molding this program. Can you talk about the Leadership Feedback program?
A: Our associates told us they wanted leadership feedback from junior people on how they were doing. Many law firms hire external people to do this. But we wanted to do something different. So we created our unique feedback program at Milbank@Harvard that runs through the second and third module. Before associates attend, they provide a list of junior people they work with including lawyers, paralegals, secretaries, and others. And those people provide feedback through an off-site system that Harvard controls, so Milbank never sees it.

The purpose of the feedback is purely to assist in development. So when the associates go to Harvard, they're given a personal report, and then there's a session covering leadership and leadership style in general, and some consistent themes that came up through the evaluations.

Following this we offer our associates a four-month, one-on-one coaching program to assist and develop their skills in this area. This coaching is offered by an external consultant unaffiliated with Milbank, so again it’s purely for associates’ personal growth. This unique, personalized approach has received positive feedback from our associates. 

Q: Besides better trained lawyers, what other benefits have come from the program?
A: Having all of our lawyers from all of our practice areas and offices go off-site to learn this material over a three-year period for a week at a time without any external distractions has created an incredibly powerful cultural interconnection within our law firm. The result is that teams work better, share information better, and understand the firm better.

It means someone in project finance understands our litigation practice, our London lawyers understand our US practice, and our German lawyers, and so on. It also means that we know the product we're providing, the way we manage, the attitude and personality of our law firm, are consistent in all of our offices and all of our practices.

As an example of the culture of our firm and the connections that are forged, a group of associates from our London, Germany and New York offices all went to Octoberfest one year.

Q: Generally, what has been the reaction from clients?
A: We want our clients to know we do this because we want them to know that we're investing in our associates so that they have the best lawyers possible.

Their response has been overwhelmingly positive. So much so that, for five years now, we have invited general counsel of our clients to come and take very similar classes with the same professors over three and a half days as part of our Milbank@Harvard Corporate Counsel Program. Around 35 of our general counsel clients and maybe 10 of our partners participate in the program together each fall. We have received excellent feedback from those participants as well; we think this type of professional development is of value to everyone.

Q: The curriculum has changed over the years. What topics have been added and what areas do you see being added on the horizon?
A: We have focused on the way we do the valuation classes, and added some sessions on mindfulness and the relationship between leadership and people skills. We’re also becoming more thoughtful about how we can address diversity. One of the key principles of management and leadership is that diverse teams are the best as long as you create the right conditions for each team member to participate equally.

We are also thinking about the impact of artificial intelligence on the practice of law and the concept of design-solution thinking.