Law21 Twitter Updates- Lawyers don't want to hear about future of law involving automation: http://t.co/Hnj5K41e (kind words, smart observations by @ernieattorney)
Category Archives: New Lawyers
Fear and loathing in the law firm
Many law firms’ insistence on treating their newest associates as adversaries continues to baffle me. Law firms know very well that the associates they hire fresh out of law school (or even after a year of articling) are sufficiently unskilled that they don’t merit the salaries they make or the rates they bill. Equally, firms [...]
Also posted in Compensation 3 Comments
Casualties of the salary war
Dan Hull at What About Clients has stirred the smouldering embers of the associate salary debate with a post suggesting that new lawyers should pay law firms to apprentice with them. It’s a provocative idea, and while I voiced my disagreement with it in a comment there, I do appreciate the frustration he and other [...]
Also posted in Compensation 3 Comments
Results, not résumés
Professor William Henderson, who teaches at the University of Indiana Faculty of Law and blogs at Empirical Legal Studies, has written a watershed treatise on how large law firms recruit and use associates. The ELS blog summarizes it, the ABA Journal reports on it, and Bruce MacEwen and Gerry Riskin have already flagged it as [...]
Also posted in Innovation, Law School 3 Comments
Core competence: 6 new skills now required of lawyers
Up till now, the necessary and sufficient skill set for lawyers has looked something like this (in alphabetical order): Analytical ability Attention to detail Logical reasoning Persuasiveness Sound judgment Writing ability (okay, that one’s apparently optional for some) This list doesn’t include such characteristics as knowledge of the law, courtroom presence, or integrity — these [...]
Also posted in Clients, Collaboration, Competition, Management 12 Comments
Interview with the publisher
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Cole Silver of The Silver Group, Ltd. for his well-known Expert Audio Series. Cole and I talked about finding careers within the legal profession outside of the default mainstream jobs — one point I focused on in particular was that many new lawyers consider a law [...]
How to work with Boomer lawyers
Dan Hull at What About Clients? has apparently had it with the ruckus over Generation Y. In a post yesterday (HT to Legal Blog Watch), Dan responded to a seminar pitch on “learning to work with Millennials” with this riposte: It’s your problem, Gen-X and Gen-Y. Not ours. Work, figure it out, ask questions, and [...]
Also posted in Generations 7 Comments
The evolving costs of young lawyers
In conversation the other day with a longtime friend of mine, a mother of three on hiatus from the practice of law, the subject of articling students came up (for those outside Canada, articling year is a required apprenticeship period after graduation but before the call to the bar, and no, it doesn’t work as [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, Talent 3 Comments
The seven-year law degree
There are a couple of well-known phenomena about legal careers that, when juxtaposed, might give us better insight into how lawyers enter the profession. The first is the common assumption that a law degree is far easier postgraduate degree to obtain than, say, a medical degree or Ph.D. Would-be doctors spend four years in medical [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, Law School 4 Comments
Authenticity and lawyer recruitment
The editors at LegalWeek blogged recently about the results of the Sunday Times’
Also posted in Big Firms, Collaboration, Talent, Technology 2 Comments
Dispelling the myths of lawyer education