Noonan, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, identified the book's protagonist, small town lawyer Atticus Finch, as a model of stable, wise counsel that would benefit many of today's young leaders. (There's a slight flaw in one part of Noonan's analysis--Atticus Finch was about the same age as many modern "young" leaders she points to--people like President Barack Obama, British prime minister David Cameron, and Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper (no relation). What Noonan doesn’t get is that wisdom is neither the province of the old nor the assured destination of advancing age.)

The column's central thesis about an emerging mentoring gap applies throughout big law. In fact, in the legal profession, the gap is growing. Why?

In many large firms, the phenomenon flows directly from the dominant MBA-mentality that forces firm leaders and everyone else to focus on short-term metrics--individual billings, billable hours, associate-partner leverage ratios. The resulting behavior is predictable. Each individual's drive to attain and preserve his or her position in accordance with such metrics leaves little room (or time) for the personalized mentoring that turns good young lawyers into better older ones. There's no metric for measuring the contribution of mentoring to, say, average profits per partner.

Northwestern University Law School Dean David Van Zandt recently revamped his law school's curriculum, in part, he has said, because "increased leverage pressures within firms necessitate that their newer associates do, in fact, work with clients and lead teams from the beginning of their tenures... As a result, the traditional training method of associate-partner mentoring gets sacrificed." (David E. Van Zandt, "Client-Ready Law Graduates," Litigation, Fall 2009, ABA) To address the problem, Van Zandt is redefining the law school's mission in a way that will fill the void.

I have spoken with enough senior partners throughout the country to know that not all lawyers (or all firms) have succumbed to the trend, but those that haven't are exceptions. For firms adhering to the pervasive big-law model, the absence of a mentoring metric makes all the difference. When I was a third-year associate, the partner who helped me craft the opening statement for my first jury trial (without charging the client for his time) wasn't preoccupied with the impact it would have on his billable hours or billings. He and a relatively few others like him would still guide protégés today, but their institutions' financial incentives point them in a different direction.

In Hildebrandt Baker Robbins's 2010 Client Advisory to the legal profession, one of the pioneering consultants responsible for the proliferation of law firms' short-term, profit-maximizing misguided metrics concludes, "There is a management adage that 'what gets measured gets done.'"

I would add this corollary: Throughout large law firms in particular and the world in general, what can't be measured gets ignored.

Unfortunately, some of those things are important.

Steven J. Harper is an adjunct professor at Northwestern University. He recently retired as a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, after 30 years in private practice. His blog about the legal profession, The Belly of the Beast, can be found at www.thebellyofthebeast.wordpress.com. A version of the column above was first published on The Belly of the Beast.

Photo: George Douglas-Hulton Archive, Getty Images