Survey of American Lawyers at Major Law Firms: Evaluation of Law Firm Retreats

The study presents the results of a survey of 122 law retreat attendees from 75 major law firms. The report helps its readers to answer questions such as: how do attorneys evaluate law firm retreats? Do they want to spend more or less on retreats? Have them more or less often? Where would they like to have them and what topics and speakers would they like to be featured at them? What leisure activities do they enjoy the most? How many have played golf, cards, tennis, or gone on hikes at their last law firm retreat? Do they believe that their last retreat made them better rainmakers? Data is broken out by size of firms, lawyer specialization, title in the firm, gender and other variables. Just a few of the approximately 100 page reports findings are that: • About 55% of partners found their last retreat inspiring or useful vs. only 35% of associates who felt the same. • At firms with more than 200 lawyers, 57.58% of lawyers sampled had been surveyed by their firms about how they felt about a retreat that they had attended; this was true for only 33,33% of lawyers in firms with from 25-49 lawyers. • 13.11% of lawyers sampled went hiking on their last law firm retreat. Lawyers between the ages of 40 and 60 were the most likely to go hiking and more than 20% of them did so. • Women were particularly strong supporters of spending more on speakers; nearly 58% of females in the sample wanted to spend more while only 31.07% of men felt the same. • The older the attorney, the more likely they were to believe that retreats made money for the firm.