Trailblazer

Someone had to be first. In February, Pepper Hamilton announced that it had hired Scott Green to serve as the firm’s­—and The Am Law 100′s—first nonlawyer CEO. Under Pepper Hamilton’s new management structure, department heads, practice group leaders, and office managing partners will all report to Green, who has previously held positions at Weil, Gotshal & Manges and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. Green’s got the right pedigree: He’s a CPA and Harvard MBA. Green, who reports to Pepper Hamilton’s executive committee, is in charge of developing strategy for the Philadelphia-based firm, which ranked among the bottom third of The Am Law 100 in gross revenue, PPP, and RPL for FY 2010. Green spoke to senior reporter Ross Todd about the pressure of being the first nonlawyer charged with leading an Am Law 100 firm.

As a professional manager, what surprised you about the way law firms run themselves? A lack of current management systems, metrics, and techniques. Law firms have grown very entrepreneurial, and now they’re big businesses. They’ve really lacked the systems and the information that a lot of the professional service firms use to run their businesses. At the two law firms that I’ve [previously] been in, the introduction of metrics—and operating metrics in particular—was a real sea change, and one that took a lot of effort for even the nonlawyers to embrace.