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Smart growth

As Gentry Locke Attorneys prepares to celebrate its 100th birthday in 2023, the venerable Roanoke law firm isn’t slowing down — it’s accelerating.

The firm hung out its shingle in 1923 and spent its first 40 years as a regional specialist representing insurance companies before adding corporate and business work in the 1970s and ’80s.

During the past eight years, however, Gentry Locke has added regional offices in Lynchburg and Richmond and opened Gentry Locke Consulting, a Richmond-based subsidiary specializing in lobbying and governmental affairs. The firm has expanded its practice areas to include expertise in emerging fields such as cannabis and renewable energy.

In all, the firm has grown to more than 80 attorneys. That makes Gentry Locke the eighth largest law firm in Virginia — yet still far smaller than behemoths like McGuireWoods, which has more than 1,110 lawyers, or Hunton Andrews Kurth, with its 900 attorneys.

“We remain relatively moderately sized, which is fine by me,” says Monica Monday, Gentry Locke’s managing partner.

Recent growth means the firm is large enough to handle major real estate transactions, Monday says, but also still small enough to be nimble and courageous enough to take on challenging cases.

Taking chances

Take, for example, a whistleblower case the firm fought for more than six years, in which a university employee reported fraudulent research at Duke University. Joseph Thomas, a former Duke research analyst, said a colleague had repeatedly submitted fake pulmonary data, drawing millions in federal funding.

Gentry Locke took on Thomas’ whistle-
blower case in 2015, filing a research fraud lawsuit against Duke on behalf of U.S. taxpayers in federal court. The firm took the case knowing the only way it would get paid for its services was by winning.

“It was an enormous effort, and, in many instances, put some pressure on the firm in terms of the resources we had,” Monday says. Over six years, the case involved more than 300 motions, orders and other legal filings. “There were times when it was scary, definitely,” Monday adds with a chuckle. “But we felt we were strong enough and smart enough.”

The case “should scare all [academic] institutions around the country,” attorney Joel Androphy of Houston-based Berg & Androphy told the journal Science at the time.

In 2019, Duke settled the lawsuit, agreeing to repay $112.5 million to the U.S. government; the whistleblower received $33.75 million of the settlement funds for fighting the case on the government’s behalf. The case, Monday points out, was the largest university research fraud case in U.S. history. “That was a real watershed moment for us,” Monday says.

Other notable Gentry Locke cases include settling a widely publicized defamation case against Rolling Stone magazine for a shocking — and quickly discredited — story involving rape accusations at a University of Virginia fraternity house.

More recently, Gentry Locke found itself on the losing side of a large case. Gentry Locke was one of the law firms representing Pegasystems Inc., a tech company that was accused of stealing trade secrets in a lawsuit filed in Fairfax County Circuit Court by McLean-based rival Appian Corp. A jury ordered Pegasystems to pay Appian more than $2 billion in damages, by some accounts the largest such award in Virginia court history.

Gentry Locke and Pegasystems say they will appeal. “We think the verdict and judgment are bad for business in Virginia and a misinterpretation of Virginia law, and we look forward to presenting what we believe to be strong grounds for appeal,” the law firm and tech company said in a joint statement.

Unique leadership

Gentry Locke’s recent growth spurt has occurred under Monday’s leadership. The William & Mary Law School grad is an unusual choice of managing partner, at least by the standards of venerable law firms. For one thing, she’s an appellate lawyer, not a trial attorney or corporate counsel. For another, her career path diverged from the stereotypical. After she got married, moved to Martinsville and had a child, the firm agreed to let her work part time so she could commute from Martinsville, more than an hour’s drive away from Roanoke. In 2013, she returned to full-time work and was named managing partner — very possibly becoming the first female managing partner of a Virginia law firm that large.

Monday says her experience is a good example of Gentry Locke’s supportive, innovative culture. “The firm took a chance on me,” she says. “So, when the opportunity arose to become managing partner, in a way it was a way for me to give back, for the grace and room that I had been given.”

In 2015, Gentry Locke opened its Lynchburg office, the firm’s first notable expansion outside Roanoke since its founding.

Three years later, the firm opened its Government and Regulatory Affairs office in Richmond with two attorneys, including Gregory Habeeb, a former five-term Republican state delegate who represented the Roanoke area. The Christiansburg native saw opportunity in Richmond.

Habeeb recalls meeting with John G. “Chip” Dicks, another former delegate and longtime lobbyist and attorney with a strong practice in renewable energy and real estate law. Building on Gentry Locke’s existing client base in Richmond as well as its many Roanoke clients who needed representation in the state’s capital, Habeeb and Dicks decided to join forces, with Dicks joining the new Richmond office in 2018. “I said, ‘I think we can enter the market not just as a presence but as a leader,’” recalls Habeeb.

In the center

With lower overhead than larger Richmond firms and access to the resources of the Roanoke office, Gentry Locke has found the state capital to be a good market for its services.

The Richmond practice has expanded to 20 attorneys, including former Virginia Secretary of Veterans and Defense Affairs Carlos Hopkins and John Scheib, former chief legal officer for Norfolk Southern Corp. It also opened a subsidiary, Gentry Locke Consulting, to focus on lobbying and strategic communications — partly, Habeeb says, so the firm can stay on the cutting edge of regulations and legal trends.

Gregory Habeeb, a former state delegate, heads up the firm’s
Richmond-based Gentry Locke Consulting subsidiary. Photo by Matthew R.O. Brown

Despite the accelerated pace, Habeeb and Monday agree that expansion itself is not the firm’s goal. “We are very, very, very much opposed to growth for growth’s sake,” Habeeb says. “It’s not a numbers game for us.”

Serving as a stark reminder of too much growth, Gentry Locke’s Richmond office is in the same building that once housed LeClairRyan, the fast-moving, aggressively expansive law firm that added offices across the world at a startling clip before it collapsed abruptly into bankruptcy in 2019, followed by waves of lawsuits.

Habeeb says he sees LeClairRyan’s ignominious end as a cautionary tale of doing too much too fast. “The lesson from LeClairRyan is not that growth is bad; it’s about managing your growth, knowing your overhead, investing in your people, knowing who you are and working to be a better version of yourself.”

He’s also opposed to growing by merging with other firms for the same reason. “We have had firms in every single city in Virginia approach us for mergers, and we have never done that,” he says, in large part because different firms’ cultures and values can have trouble meshing.

Monday agrees. LeClairRyan’s failure, she notes, is “a reminder that you have to make really smart decisions and you have to be careful with your growth. That’s what we’re thinking all the time. It has to be smart growth. … We’re very, very cautious.”

Gentry Locke places great emphasis on its culture and on career development. By focusing on building a supportive culture, Gentry Locke aims to retain the younger attorneys it sees as key to the firm’s future success. “The culture is valuing the relationships that we have with each other and also valuing the relationships with our clients,” Monday says. “Many times, that means your very best friends are the people you work with. We really enjoy being together.”

A few years back, the firm’s leaders established a development program dubbed Gentry Locke University — or GLU (pronounced “glue”) — to provide leadership training, particularly for young and mid-career attorneys. Unlike some firms, where attorneys compete in-house and “eat what they kill,” at Gentry Locke all partners are formal shareholders in the firm so when any part of the firm flourishes, they all do.

“We see that young lawyers want opportunity, they want training and they want to see that there is a pathway to success,” Monday says. “That’s where we’ve been successful. We value our relationships, and we invest in our people.”  

Read the 23rd edition of the Virginia Business Legal Elite here.

Hitting home

“The stereotypical view is that every young lawyer wants to work from home,” unlike their older peers, observes Victor O. Cardwell, principal and chairman of Roanoke-based Woods Rogers Vandeventer Black PLC.

Indeed, 51% of baby boomer attorneys report being eager or very eager to get back to the office, but just 22% of their millennial colleagues agree with them, according to the results of a Return to Office survey published in May by Law360 Pulse and legal executive search firm Major, Lindsey & Africa.

The reality, Cardwell finds, has been more complex.

At his firm, he says, he sees both senior and younger attorneys embracing the idea of working remotely — at least part of the time.

“Everybody wants flexibility,” Cardwell says. Firms looking to recruit good talent — and that would be most firms in the current tight labor market — need to keep in mind that “flexibility is one of the selling points.” That usually means a hybrid schedule, alternating in-office and remote work.

And while younger attorneys may say they want to work remotely, Cardwell says, “they went into law to work with people. … They want to be around other lawyers for the training opportunities.”

Callaghan S. Guy, an associate practicing in commercial real estate, environmental and health care law at Richmond-based Christian & Barton LLP, says that in her experience, there may not be as much of a generational divide when it comes to remote work. “I hear younger workers talking more about wanting to work from home. Younger workers are talking more about it. Older workers do it.”

Guy started at Christian & Barton in 2018 after graduating from the University of Richmond. The “default” position at Christian & Barton is working from the office, she says, but the firm has “fairly flexible” arrangements about working remotely.

In general, she says, “if people say they don’t want to come into the office, maybe that’s a problem with the office. You need to create the office you want to be in. If law firms want people to come into the office, there have to be benefits, there has to be good mentorship,” she says.

Steven D. Brown, a partner in Isler Dare PC’s Richmond office, believes that younger attorneys see the value of collaboration and contact with senior partners.

“They want that interaction,” says Brown, who also serves on the Virginia Bar Association’s board of governors. But, he adds, “it doesn’t make sense to mandate” the amount of in-office time required of attorneys.

Isler Dare, a boutique firm with 17 lawyers across offices in Tysons, Richmond and Atlanta, had experience with attorneys working remotely even before the pandemic shutdowns. Now, Brown says, “most of our folks are in the office part of the time,” working a hybrid schedule. Successful hybrid work experiences don’t depend on the size of the firm, though, Brown says. “It depends on whether the management team is willing.”

“COVID taught us we have to be flexible,” says Victor Cardwell, chairman of Roanoke-based Woods Rogers Vandeventer Black. Photo by Don Petersen

Generation Remote?

If firm leaders aren’t willing to make some accommodations when dealing with younger workers, that won’t go over well and could result in losing talent, he adds. “Gen X and Gen Y require you to modify who you are as a leader. They look at things differently than we do,” and communicate differently, says Brown, a self-described baby boomer. “That’s OK.”

Monica Monday, managing partner at Gentry Locke in Roanoke, reports that younger attorneys with less experience have been finding remote work “a significant challenge.”

It benefits younger attorneys to work in person so that “they can walk down the hall to the partner’s office and ask questions,” according to Monday. “It allows them to get professional development at the pace that they want it. Less experienced attorneys want that development and so much of that comes from partners, from working with teams.

“It’s important for firms to create a culture that values relationships,” she continues, “both with each other and with clients. That’s the glue that holds us together.”

Monday has talked with colleagues at other firms who are struggling to bring people back into the office.

“I have heard from bigger firms in bigger cities that attorneys young and old don’t want to come back. In urban areas I think it is a different dynamic,” she says, because of traffic battles and parking restrictions. But in Roanoke, where Monday works, “people have a 10-minute drive to work. If I were in an urban area, I would want to come into the office a couple of days a week, but you couldn’t pay me to come in full time. It’s not an efficient use of my time.”

At Pender & Coward PC in Virginia Beach, “it’s expected that people come into the office, but it’s not such a hard rule,” says shareholder Kristen R. Jurjevich, who has been an attorney for more than 10 years and whose practice areas include corporate and transactional law, real estate, community association matters and litigation.

“Sometimes I choose to go into the office. I really enjoy the people I work with,” says Jurjevich, adding that she appreciates a culture where some attorneys at the firm go to lunch together every day just because they enjoy each other’s company.

“I’m happy with the flexibility,” she says, but “if they said it was mandatory [to be in the office], I would have an issue.”

Jurjevich has a 2-year-old daughter, and her husband, who is not an attorney, has a job that isn’t as flexible about working outside his office.

Finding child care has always been difficult, but the pandemic has made it worse, she says. “That’s a factor. Things happen. Flexibility is key.”

Being inflexible about hybrid and remote work could result in firms losing talent, says Steven D. Brown, a partner in Isler Dare PC’s Richmond office. Photo by Matthew R.O. Brown

In the loop

Keeping people who are working remotely in the loop is critical to the success of the hybrid work model, according to Brown. “We have to make sure we’re giving them the same thing. People shouldn’t suffer because they’re not in the office. People working remotely have to stay top of mind.”

That requires clear expectations and communications, he says. “For remote folks, we make sure we dial them in. We really schedule specific times” for interaction.

Using collaboration and work management software to assign tasks, track project progress, share documents and calendars, and manage other work is valuable because “it allows everybody to track and to make edits in real time. It keeps detailed status reports. It keeps folks plugged in.”

Woods Rogers Vandeventer Black has no formal mandate regarding in-office or remote work, but Cardwell believes it’s important to have senior attorneys in the office at the same time as their younger counterparts. He suggests there may be a need for some type of “core hours” when people are expected to work in the office, but he adds, “I’m not going to draw a line in the sand. COVID taught us we have to be flexible.”

Gentry Locke’s attorneys worked fully remote for just 13 weeks during 2020 because “we had associates and partners who did not like being at home and being disconnected,” Monday says. Firm leaders quickly realized “that without in-person collaboration, there was something really missing. We made a conscious decision to return. We learned that remote work and flexibility’s here to stay but you need to find the balance.”

Working remotely requires more initiative on the part of both the individual and the firm, Monday says. Attorneys who generally work remotely need to tell co-workers when they plan to be in the office, so everyone can maximize opportunities for interaction. And law firms should build team camaraderie through activities such as social hours, agenda-less monthly lunches and group roundtables, suggests Monday.

Gentry Locke has developed a more in-depth orientation program and encourages remote workers to attend key meetings in person. The firm also has its own training program, known as “Gentry Locke University,” where “we talk about the culture, about professionalism, about policies. This is where we talk about the importance of relationships, how to grow relationships, how to work with clients,” she says. “We talk about the importance of community, about bar activities and we have programs on networking and business etiquette. We try to cover all the bases.”

One thing Monday does see changing due to the pandemic’s upheaval is the dress code at law firms. “I think across the country we’re seeing more business casual. You dress for your day — are you meeting with clients, are you going to court?”

Gentry Locke generally maintains a business casual dress code in the office, she adds, allowing workers to wear jeans on Fridays if they contribute to charitable fundraisers.

When attorneys started going back to the office at Christian & Barton, casual dress was the rule rather than the exception, Guy says, but attire has been returning to pre-pandemic standards. Now, “we’re not wearing jeans in the office or anything.”

At Pender & Coward, “on average people are more often business casual unless they are going to court,” says Jurjevich. “But some people say if they dress up, they are most alert. As they say in law school: Dress to get things done.”

Battling burnout

One big concern now, Cardwell says, is how to help firm members find work/life balance and avoid burnout.

“The pandemic has shown how fragile our work lives can be,” Cardwell says. “One of the hard parts is that we don’t check out. The work environment has relocated, has gone with us. We don’t turn off — our devices or ourselves.”

Eighty-six percent of employees who work from home full time say they experience burnout, while 81% of hybrid workers and 70% of in-person workers say the same, according to career planning site Zippia. Sixty-seven percent of remote workers report feeling pressured to be available all the time, according to Zippia, and 51% feel they don’t have support from their employer to deal with burnout issues.

Burnout can hit young lawyers hard. They often are driven, Cardwell says, and “we have to try to convince them this is truly a marathon. We, as the firm, are not looking for them to burn candles at both ends and the middle. Sometimes we can see that, and we pull them aside and talk.”

To help avoid burnout, Cardwell suggests firms consider policies that restrict contacting subordinates after hours. “As senior lawyers, we have to be cognizant of sending out emails about jobs, assignments [or] queries to people who are going to feel they are responsible to respond,” he says.

Brown believes that the younger generation of attorneys has been doing a better job than older attorneys of avoiding burnout while working remotely. Younger lawyers “do a much better job of compartmentalizing, of keeping things separate,” he says. “When they’re gone, they’re gone. They are able to unplug. They take their time off when they’re given it. They don’t check in; they trust others” to keep them in the loop.

But “it’s harder for me,” adds Brown. “I’ve learned from Gen X and Gen Y about how they are able to do that.”

 

Legal review

In law firms across Virginia, power is now definitely on the side of individual attorneys, who can command larger salaries and other perks so long as they’re willing to cope with heavier workloads.

As demand for legal services has soared, the number of lawyers available to perform that work has slumped, leaving even the most prestigious firms vying fiercely for talent.

Two years ago, the arrival of the pandemic caused many businesses to contract, close or just hunker down, hoping to weather the viral storm. Many law firms, anticipating a concurrent contraction in the need for their services, took a wait-and-see approach to hiring and allowed attrition to thin their ranks. Some firms, with the pandemic making remote mentoring difficult, suspended summer internships, a traditional source for new hires, while still other firms were impacted by older attorneys opting for early retirement amid the upheaval.

Meanwhile, the ranks of available young lawyers coming out of law schools were diminishing. Kenneth Randall, dean of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University in Arlington, says that enrollment already had been decreasing for 5 to 10 years, but class sizes declined even further after the pandemic hit.

The nationwide rate of law school applications dropped by 10.7% between 2021 and 2022, according to the Law School Admission Council. In Virginia, the drop was even more precipitous — 12.2%. Reduced hiring by law firms played into that ebb in enrollments, too, Randall says.

But the downturn in demand for legal services was unexpectedly short-lived. “A few years ago, the conversation was about too many law students,” says B. Keith Faulkner, president and dean of the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy. Now, he says, “demand has increased dramatically, and the labor pool has not.”

Thomson Reuters’ 2021 Law Firm Business Leaders Report, which last fall surveyed 55 U.S. law firms, found that firm executives named lawyer recruitment and retention as the highest risks to firm profitability in 2022. Poaching of staff by competitors came in second in a profession in which noncompete agreements are generally unenforceable. This risk list was quite the about-face, because in 2020, talent issues didn’t even crack the top five of law firm concerns.

“It’s just an incredibly tight market,” says Brooks Smith, managing partner at the Richmond office of Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders, an Atlanta-based firm with 1,200 lawyers in 23 cities. “The demand for talent is the highest I’ve seen in 26 years.”

Recent booms in mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and other deals have significantly increased demand for legal services, says Kaufman & Canoles President and Chairman William Van Buren III. Photo by Mark Rhodes
Recent booms in mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and other deals have significantly increased demand for legal services, says Kaufman & Canoles President and Chairman William Van Buren III. Photo by Mark Rhodes

More demand

Steven D. Brown is a member of the Virginia Bar Association’s board of governors and a partner at the firm of IslerDare, which has 17 lawyers in Richmond and Tysons. The past two years, he says, have been “rather brutal, the busiest I’ve ever had.” As a labor and employment lawyer, Brown says, he’s had to deal with “a flood of workplace safety issues.”

William R. “Bill” Van Buren III, president and chairman of Kaufman & Canoles, a firm with about 90 lawyers distributed among eight Virginia offices, says that abundant capital has resulted in an “unprecedented” boom in mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, real estate deals and private equity transactions, which has “really increased the demand for legal services in the last couple of years.”

The possibility of tax code changes also has amped up compliance work in the areas of markets and securities, adding to the “explosive” amount of business his firm is seeing. “I’m working harder than I ever worked,” he says. “It’s been a struggle.”

The 2022 Report on the State of the Legal Market, released in January by the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center and the Thomson Reuters Institute, confirms these experiences. During the second and third quarters of 2021, legal services grew by 4%, the strongest quarterly growth rate in a decade, primarily driven by an upswing in the areas of real estate and corporate law.

That same report showed a bidding war for legal talent driven by the rising demand for legal services coupled with the shortfall of available lawyers.

By the end of November 2021, associate compensation for all segments of the market had increased by 11.3% in just 12 months. Several large New York City firms made headlines recently when they raised their first-year associates’ pay by $10,000, with new attorneys at the international firm of Milbank, for example, now starting at a rather breathtaking annual salary of $215,000.

That salary inflation has not spared Virginia.

“The cost of people has gone up enormously,” Van Buren says. “It’s made talent acquisition harder.”

“We have had to make significant moves in salary adjustments for first- and second-year associates,” says Rudene Mercer Haynes, firmwide hiring partner at Richmond-based Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, an international firm with 900 lawyers. “We have to make sure that our salaries are competitive.”

Reuters notes that in addition to record-setting paychecks, many firms have added monetary bonuses for signings, referrals and returning to in-office work. Some are even paying employees to stay off LinkedIn and discouraging networking that could lead to their lawyers leaving for more profitable pastures. Not surprisingly, the law firm executives cited in the Reuters survey ranked high salaries as No. 3 on their list of risks to profitability.

The competitive labor market has resulted in “significant” salary adjustments for first- and second-year associates at Hunton Andrews Kurth, says the firm’s hiring partner, Rudene Mercer Haynes. Photo by Caroline Martin
The competitive labor market has resulted in “significant” salary adjustments for first- and second-year associates at Hunton Andrews Kurth, says the firm’s hiring partner, Rudene Mercer Haynes. Photo by Caroline Martin

Work culture matters, too

In our post-pandemic world, however, “money alone doesn’t make it,” Faulkner says. In just about every sector of the economy, the law being no exception, workers want more than a good paycheck. They want more autonomy, more flexibility and a better work-life balance. Call it a mass awakening or an overdue reckoning, but business as usual has become a thing of the past. 

“The question people are asking themselves post-COVID is, ‘What do I want to be when I grow up?’” Mercer Haynes says. “A lot of people have reassessed.”

Brown, 59, says that as a young associate, he would regularly work into the night with his only thanks being a free meal to be consumed while he labored at his desk. Yet, he was perversely proud of being overworked. “It was a rite of passage,” he says.

That “grinding of people” doesn’t fly anymore. “Lawyers in their 30s and 40s are asking themselves, ‘Do I really want to be like the boomers?’ The answer is a resounding ‘No,’” Brown says. “And boomers and Generation X-ers are asking themselves whether their own health is more important than the law firm.”

The fallout from this sweeping rethinking of priorities is that “now, we don’t say, ‘You have to do that,’” Brown says. “Now, we say, ‘You know what you have to do.’”

Such an accommodating attitude is a sea change for a profession in which billable hours were once the be-all and end-all.

“We are still beholden to the billable hour, but the [old] model is too traditional these days,” says Dan Summerlin, president and principal of the Roanoke firm Woods Rogers, which has about 80 attorneys. “[Our lawyers] now have the flexibility not to have to chart X number of hours.”

That flexibility extends to allowing all-remote working, hybrid home-office arrangements and adjustable and part-time hours for both new hires and present staff. “You get the job done wherever it needs to be to get done,” says Smith of Troutman Pepper. With many younger lawyers being a part of dual-income households, better family leave policies have become a bargaining chip as well.

Yet, despite all these accommodations, demand for lawyers continues to exceed the supply for Virginia firms.

“Lawyers are finding other things to do,” says Cliff Jarrett, assistant dean of the Washington and Lee University School of Law’s Office of Career Strategy. Some are opting for in-house corporate positions, which are plentiful and generally less demanding than law firm jobs because the attorney serves only one client. Others are taking government positions, going into academia or choosing the less quantifiable payback of working for nonprofits such as legal aid organizations.

Some lawyers may be retiring early, too, although the evidence for the so-called Great Retirement is mixed. While the Federal Reserve reported a 7% rise in general retirements nationally among people ages 65 to 74 between January 2020 and October 2021, the retirement rate among those 55 to 64 remained constant. Further, in a survey of 1,368 senior lawyers conducted by the American Bar Association last year, just 33% of older lawyers said their retirement plans were changed by COVID, and, of those, 53% said the pandemic actually delayed their departure from the workforce.

The increase in lateral moves among younger attorneys, however, has unquestionably put a heavier burden on older attorneys who have tended to stay put at one firm for most of their careers. That kind of longevity and deep community experience is highly valued by clients, with the upshot being more work and more stress being dumped on senior attorneys.

Meanwhile, younger lawyers “tend to put boundaries around their work,” Van Buren says, placing limits on how much they’re willing to take on. Older attorneys didn’t come up that way, he says, and they’re getting worn down trying to keep up.

Kaufman & Canoles has seen an uptick in retirements, but Van Buren blames demographics for that as much as COVID. “We are on the back nine,” he says of the firm’s cadre of 15 to 20 longtime lawyers, “and the clubhouse is sneaking up on us.”

While this back end of the profession seems to have remained relatively stable, on the front end, change is afoot, as reflected by law school enrollment. Although Appalachian has not seen an increase in class sizes, Faulkner says that Liberty University, where he was law school dean until last summer, had “a bumper crop” of law students in 2021. At Washington and Lee, Jarrett says that the latest first-year law class is 15% larger than the last one, and enrollment at George Mason is up 74%.

Randall attributes GMU’s bumper crop of law students to the school’s part-time evening degree program, which began last fall and tripled enrollment. He also cites the school’s high bar exam pass rate and record for job placements, as well as its success in securing judicial clerkships for its graduates. “Students are smart about the value proposition of their education,” he says.

Further, summer internships, always a source of potential hires for their law firms, have largely returned after being downsized or paused by the pandemic.

“We believe in building from the bottom,” says Monica Monday, managing partner at Roanoke-based law firm Gentry Locke Attorneys, which has about 70 attorneys in three Virginia offices. “Even in 2020, we had four summer associates,” she says, and two of them are now attorneys at Gentry Locke.

As the supply of new lawyers begins to ramp up again, the current imbalance between work and workers in the legal profession is unlikely to last more than a couple more years. The pendulum always swings back. In the interim, though, for many lawyers, the catbird seat can be a mighty sweet perch. 

 

 

2021 LEGISLATIVE / REGULATORY / ADMINISTRATIVE LAW Q&A

Gregory D. Habeeb

Gentry Locke Attorneys and Gentry Locke Consulting, Richmond

Title: Partner, Gentry Locke Attorneys; president, Gentry Locke Consulting

Other legal specialties: I maintain an active litigation practice and serve as corporate adviser to numerous small and mid-sized companies.

Education: Bachelor’s degree, Wake Forest University; law degree, Wake Forest School of Law

Spouse: Christy Brendle Habeeb

Children: Daniel, William and Anna

Fan of: These days, most of my fandom is taken up rooting for the Richmond Strikers soccer club, where my kids play. Go Strikers!

Recently read book: I’m just waiting for George R.R. Martin to finish “The Winds of Winter.”
(Game of Thrones fans will understand.)

Career mentors: My grandfather; U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith; and my partner, Matt Broughton.

Your team assists economic development clients. What’s one of your success stories? Our team has had a lead role in crafting Virginia’s solar energy policy for a decade, including the Virginia Clean Economy Act. Since then, we have worked with our solar clients on projects with a total investment of well over $1 billion and with a total economic impact of many times that amount.

How does your experience as a former state delegate help you better represent your clients? My experience as a delegate shapes everything I do and how I serve my clients. At a philosophical level, it taught me to listen better, to think more creatively and to truly serve my clients. At a practical level, it gave me a knowledge of the inner workings of government and legislation that has proven invaluable to our clients over the years.