I Interviewed at Axiom Legal Last Week

Axiom Legal is one of the new breeds of service firms emerging in law, accounting and strategic consulting, among others. By structuring its business model differently from that of a traditional law firm (e.g., by not having an expensive partership pyramid to support), Axiom claims to be able to offer "top flight" legal service at a third to half the cost of a "traditional" firm.

I decided to interview there after seeing an advertisement  in a monthly GGMG newsletter. The ad included several photos of happy looking women, with the tagline: "Why Are All These Women Smiling?"  The ad then went on to claim that via Axiom, a rewarding family life and a rewarding career (in law) are now simultaneously possible.  Pretty appealing thought.  Excellent advertising campaign.

The offices are in the Orrick building in downtown San Francisco, and are done up how I imagine a Virgin Atlantic office would look- complete with white shag rugs, funky white lighting and a bevy of cute girls under 30.

The catch:  they base their work days on a 10 hour rather than an 8 hour day.  In other words, 4 days per Axiom standards is already 40 hours = get paid 80% of a normal person's work week, right off the bat.

I also got the distinct impression that there seems to be a high degree of tolerance for the "part time" jobs going (far) over the alloted hours.  Quote from my interview, describing someone working a 3 day a week assignment: "she was consistently working more like 40 hours a week, so we [Axiom] were able to work it out with the client to change the assignment to a 4 day a week assignment, and everyone was happy." 

Another catch:  According to my interviewers, 80% of their work is full time assignments (50 hours/week).  Much of it seems to be intellectual property based.  There currently seems to be a specific need for someone who does patent work, specifically relating to patent litigation, for example.

Per BusinessWeek:

The company offers its services in various areas, including advertising and marketing, bankruptcy, broker-dealer regulations, commercial agreements, compliance, copyright, derivatives and structured finance, employment, ERISA, and financial services

Some have called it a "high end temporary agency," but the Axiom team resists this categorization. The Axiom team instead describes itself as " a groundbreaking legal firm that is changing the way attorneys and clients work." Axiom's website calls it "Onsite Counsel services to our corporate clients."

Axiom clients include:

• American Express
• AT&T
• Bank of America
• Bear Stearns
• Cisco
• Citigroup
• Colgate-Palmolive
• Credit Suisse
• Deutsche Bank
• Dow Jones
• Electronic Arts
• Goldman Sachs
• Hilton Hotels
• Honeywell
• J.P. Morgan Chase
• Johnson & Johnson
• MasterCard
• Merrill Lynch
• MetLife
• Morgan Stanley
• NBC Universal
• New York Times
• Nokia
• Orbitz
• Pitney Bowes
• Reuters America
• Sun Microsystems
• UBS
• Viacom
• Virgin Mobile
• Yahoo!

One of Axiom's claims to fame among lawyers ties directly to that catchy marketing campaign: people wonder if it might just be a more humane place to work.  The no annual minimum billable hour requirement sounds appealing, for example.  Lawyers testing the limits of human endurance at some of the big firms dream of the ever-elusive high paying, high-caliber work environment that also happens to afford the  flexibility to achieve some sort of work-life balance. 

To make sure I got the point, they made me watch their propaganda video when I got there, complete with fathers rolling around in the grass with their children (or it may have been puppies), happy and smiling and nuzzling with their youngsters.  The video is packed full of loving little anecdotal vignettes (hearsay, and all) of thoughtful, smiling lawyers saying pithy things. This video is simply the long version of the snippets they have on their website.  To bring it all home, there are huge, silver screen sized photos of these same cheerful lawyers all over the office.

I did not get the job.  According to them, only 1 in 60 applicants is chosen (would be hard to disprove this, but...), and they may have sensed that I wondered how a 50 hour a week job (minimum- talk to us if you're consistently billing 60 hours a week) affords the flexibility and freedom they put on so high a pedestal in their marketing campaign.  Reshuffling the deck to base the work week on a 50 hour week (and pay your 40 hour/week people 80%) seems... well... unlikely to be a place where I'm going to achieve balance in my life, if nothing else. 

That said, I'm glad I went and saw it for myself.  Not getting the job was a bit of a relief.

Comments

[Cole Silver, Esquire]

Kathy: Great article. You should feel pretty good you got invited in for tea in light of thier 60:1 ratio! Thanks for your insight into the new world of contract legal services at Axiom.
-cole