Sills Cummis & Gross Managing Partner Max Crane was interviewed by New Jersey Law Journal Bureau Chief David Gialanella for an article about millennials.
As seen in this article, “R. Max Crane, managing partner of 140-lawyer Sills Cummis & Gross in Newark, put the dynamic in different terms: Those who complain about millennials are like ‘your cranky old uncle,’ he said. ‘Truthfully, I think [millennials] get a bad rap.’
Crane said the firm has long sought to offer the more engaging client work and lifestyle balance that’s harder to come by at other firms, where ‘they expect to kind of own you.’
‘We’ve always looked at our direct competition as the big New York firms, all of whom have some economic advantage over our pay structure,’ Crane said. ‘If you can’t match somebody dollar-for-dollar,’ you have to offer better work and lifestyle, he said.
For the past 20 years, there’s also been an annual ‘technology allowance’ at the firm (which, Crane reminisced, lawyers used to use on printers and fax machines).
‘[Millennials are] more holistic. We didn’t allow ourselves to be fully integrated human beings,’ Crane said of his own generation. ‘They do sometimes head out earlier, physically. … In our case, we stayed. We stayed as long as we had to and sacrificed some of that home life.’”
