Minnesota Lawyer Blog

I'm not a big fan of labeling generations.

Being called an Xer — the least popular letter in the alphabet and the bane of Scrabble players everywhere — doesn't exactly fill me hope and pride.

But these denominations do make for good survey material.

Robert Half International recently released a report called “What Millennial Workers Want” that surveyed 1,007 people ages 21 to 28. Happily, the results weren't terribly surprising.

What does Gen Y want? The same thing everybody else wants: financial security, job stability and career satisfaction.

But dig deeper, and there's some interesting information on what this group looks for in a job. On a scale of one to 10, respondents ranked the importance of several aspects of their working environment. Here's how the numbers shake out:

• Working with a manager I can respect and learn from (8.74)
• Working with people I enjoy (8.69)
• Having work/life balance (8.63)
• Having a short commute (7.55)
• Working for a socially responsible company (7.42)
• Having a nice office space (7.14)
• Working with state-of-the-art technology (6.89)

In other words, that iPod-listening employee who grew up with mouse-in-hand cares more about people than technology. Surprised?

About 60 percent of Minnesota's solo-small firm practitioners make less than $100,000 per year, while approximately 5 percent make more than $250,000 -- at least according to the results of the MSBA Law Practice Management and Marketing Section’s “Solo-Small Firm Economic Survey 2007.”

The results of the survey were revealed at the "Strategic Solutions for Solo & Small Firms" conference in Duluth earlier this month. St. Cloud attorney Michael Ford and Minneapolis attorney LaVern Pritchard, founder of the LawMoose legal search portal, presented attendees with a summary of the results.

Of 5,000 randomly selected Minnesota practitioners in firms of one to 10 lawyers, 339 responded to the survey, which was sent out in late July. Some of the other interesting tidbits that emerged from the survey include:

--18.4 percent practice in the family law area (the largest group represented);
--38.9 percent spend between one and four hours per week on management/administrative duties;
--67 percent charge $200 per hour or less;
--45 percent do not have a retirement plan; and
-- about 44 percent said they were “mostly satisfied” with their careers.

The survery results are available on the Minnesota CLE website.