The circle of life dictates that one day Millennials will be calling the shots at law firms, but whether or not they change the system or the system changes them is a question that remains open to interpretation. Still, like it or not the Millennial demographic may already be shifting the way that law firms earn revenue and even interact with clients on a day-to-day basis.

A lot of that movement can be chalked up to law firms facing a stiffer competition for talent thanks to the maturation of corporate legal departments and the rise of the legal operations professional. Jarno Vanto, a partner at Crowell & Moring, indicated that as legal departments continue to grow their ranks, in-house roles may hold particular appeal towards Millennial applicants that may have previously gravitated towards law firms.

"[Millennials] want more work/life balance, and that's perhaps more attainable in the in-house legal department than it is in a law firm that's still being driven by the billable hour rather than the kind of work product. You are going to be paid regardless of how many hours you bill in an in-house legal department," Vanto said.

In order to compete, firms may eventually be driven to implement more efficiency-driven solutions based around tasks like document review, contract management or even collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams to help support alternative fee arrangements outside of the billable hour. Christopher Ballod, a partner at Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith, noted that Millennials themselves have already displayed a greater willingness to discuss alternative fee arrangements with clients.

But the outlook that attorneys should be judged based on the quality of contribution rather than a measurement of time could also cause firms to reassess some financial imbalances among their own payroll that may have previously gone overlooked. For instance, Millennials may have less tolerance for a judge that comes off the bench, starts a litigation practice inside of a firm and then brings nothing to the table except for a reputation and name recognition.

"This is a blindspot that law firms have had for a long time, the fact that some members of a team and some members of a law firm have kind of soft value that don't directly translate into numbers," Ballod said.

An emphasis on fairness could also have repercussions for the traditional law partnership structure. Per Ballod, Millennials are less willing to be part of a hierarchical model—but how or with what that system could be replaced is unclear. One potential answer could be the virtual law firm model, which often finds attorneys geographically dispersed throughout the country, resulting in less importance being placed on titles.

However, this may be one area where Millennial attorneys find their perspective shifting slightly as they move up the ranks. "Once you understand some of things that go into administration and leadership, you are a lot more willing to embrace the hierarchy because there has to be structure. But there's a lot less willingness to take it as a title of royalty or the kind of King God syndrome that I've seen at law firms in the past," Ballod said.

In the interim, savvy firms may have found a way to appease Millennial hires by permitting associates to work more directly with clients. Per Vanto, there was a time when associates would have been relegated to background work while partners handled all of the customer interfacing. 

"Firms have been increasingly more open to exposing associates to clients … I think that's a very healthy development," Vanto said.  

Still, law firms are organisms that thrive on tradition—can Millennials break the chain? Ballod at Lewis Brisbois indicated that while it's hard to generalize attitudes towards certain technologies or practices by generation, Ballod does think that Millennials have some advantages over Boomers or Generation X.

"You don't have any of those stalwarts in the Millennial generation. You don't have anybody who is saying, 'Well, I do it this way because that's the way it's always been done.' I feel there's no willingness to say, 'Well, that's way it's always been done so I'm just going to accept it,'" Ballod said.

However, this is still the legal industry, which tends to run at its own distinct, sometimes meandering, pace. In other words, it will take more than Millennials to reinvent the wheel. "It's a conservative industry and things take time to change. Part of it is driven by the Millennial generation coming and taking leadership positions, and part of it is driven by the client," Vanto said.