Monday, October 24, 2011

The Art Of Not Swinging For The Fences: Moneyball's Lessons
For The Legal Profession

In the movie Moneyball, Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, the General Manager for the Oakland A’s whose strategies for recruiting new players were out of left field. For decades, talent scouts focused on the wrong metrics, according to Beane. What mattered more than the flashiness and home runs of years past was how often a player could get on base and score. In this intriguing American Lawyer article, the authors argue that the same basic philosophies apply to legal hiring. Flashy statistics like law school rank and a spot on the Law Review have been paramount for decades, but what matters even more is whether or not a candidate can write well and excel at interacting with clients. In fact, as Marjorie Shultz and Sheldon Zedek at U.C. Berkeley have demonstrated, there is often an inverse relationship between law school grades and relationship building. In other words, some of the best team players have far more to offer when you scratch below the surface.
- Jared Solovay