Previously on Law21 … last month, to be exact, I designed another survey for your consideration. This one was a good deal more complex than my first Law21 questionnaire, which simply asked you to prioritize 10 characteristics of a modern law firm.

This time around, we postulated a “future legal survival kit,” giving you 15 features with which to equip a future firm and asking you to assign them points according to how important you thought these elements would be. The survey was posted in the dead of summer, so I was pretty pleased to get the 73 responses that we did. I also suggested (and still recommend) that you check out Evolutionary Road, my new book published by Attorney At Work, as both a guide to help you complete the survey and as a fairly transparent, yet hopefully still effective, promotional effort.

So let’s get to the results, which I’ll follow with an analysis of each entry and my own rating of each one.

So, the top choices of our 73 respondents (those options that received 10 points on average or more) were strong client relationships, integrity, and legal know-how. I can’t help but observe that if I had asked for the top five features of a traditional law practice in the halcyon bygone days of the profession, I would have wound up with a very similar list. This isn’t to say that Law21 readers are reactionary conservatives, which I’m pretty sure you’re not. More likely, it represents a yearning for the future profession to return to the fundamental bedrock values that we perceive underlay the successful law practices of our parents’ and even grandparents’ generations.

I can understand that desire, and I approve of it to a certain degree: there’s an emerging consensus that whatever lawyers and law firms have morphed into from the 1980s to the present day, more has been lost than gained in the transformation. But however much we may wish for a return to the old days (and they weren’t wholly fabulous, let’s keep in mind), they’re not coming back. We can’t simply revisit the past to build the future: the architecture of legal practice has to adapt.

Here’s my brief analysis of, and my own opinions on, the 15 features listed in the survey:

1. EQ.  Survey: 11.89. Me: 10

I was pleasantly surprised by how well emotional intelligence was rated, and it gives me hope that lawyers are coming to appreciate not just the importance of communication and client service, but also how these methodologies need to be infused with the virtues of attentiveness, sincerity, and personal connection. It matters that we care, and it matters that we get that fact across.  [do_widget id=”text-7″ title=false]

2. Connections.  Survey: 11.49. Me: 0

Here’s the first major diversion between me and all y’all. I can see the desirability of having strong relationships in place to help jump-start a future law practice. But to my way of thinking, this is a secondary characteristic, one that I can develop if I have many of the other listed skills and assets. My zero doesn’t suggest that I think this trait is worthless; it’s simply that I value other things more.

3. Moral Fibre.  Survey: 10.73. Me: 20

I’m reassured that you rated integrity so highly — this is an asset we don’t always think about when assembling our advantages. But for me, this is a cardinal virtue in a lawyer: not just having moral character, but having a reputation for it. In a future legal market riddled with noise and confusion, trustworthiness and personal reliability will be a tremendous competitive benefit, not to mention an inherently good thing to possess.

4. Legal Knowledge.  Survey: 10.16. Me: 0

Again, it’s not that I believe legal know-how has no value in a law practice; obviously it does. But I don’t need to personally possess this feature or have it in place, in-house, in my practice. Legal knowledge is now widespread and easily accessible, and its price keeps dropping. I can outsource this asset, retrieve it when and from whom I need it, and build up other resources instead.

5.  Innovation.  Survey: 8.63. Me: 0

We’ve now moved out of the top four and into the single-digit answers, although 8.63 is still above average (assigning equal points to all 15 choices would mean 15 awards of 6.66.) This one was a tough call for me, as it came down to a choice between Innovation and Risk-Taking, which are related but different ideas. But for reasons I’ll set out below, I went with Risk.

6. Solutions R Us.  Survey: 8.53. Me: 20

This was my first really big surprise: I felt sure that problem-solving would rank more highly. To me, this is a primary lawyer characteristic, one from which many other assets flow. People seek out lawyers when they have challenges they can’t solve: we’ve always been able to meet that need ourselves and we’d always better be ready to do so. Problem-solving lets us anticipate risks and opportunities, too.

7. Pricing Strategies.  Survey: 7.54. Me: 20

Given the array of other features on offer, I can understand how people might assign pricing a roughly average score. But to me, it’s a paramount ability, one on par with integrity and problem-solving. We cannot survive in a future legal market unless we are experts at pricing our services, which in turn implies we are experts at managing our business costs. This is the last of my three “20” scores.

8. Process Mastery.  Survey: 7.45. Me: 10

I almost gave this one a 20 as well, but the fact is that I can probably acquire skills and techniques in process management from third parties. But as a lawyer of the future, I require at least a familiarity with and appreciation for the importance of systems and procedures in running a profitable business in a legal market where many services are heading towards commoditization.

9. Techno-Wizardry.  Survey: 5.78. Me: 0

We’re now entering the final tranche, where all entries received below-average support. Technology, like process, is something with which every lawyer will require at least a nodding acquaintance and comfort. But tech expertise can be outsourced more readily, and the rapid evolution of technology tools argues against making it a core lawyer feature of a modern law practice.

10. Financial Facility. Survey: 5.46. Me: 10

I thought this one might rank more highly than it did. Thanks to self-selection bias and legal education failures, few current lawyers entered the profession with any degree of financial literacy, and many still lack much business knowledge or instinct. These lawyers already struggle to compete in a closed market against other equally challenged lawyers; how will they survive in a real market against real businesses?

11. Risk Acceptance.  Survey: 5.18. Me: 10

Why did I choose risk appetite over a flair for innovation? Because the former is, I believe, critical to both business and lawyer success: you can’t run a risk-averse business in a competitive market, and you can’t properly advise clients without recognizing and integrating the reality of risk in everyday life. Innovation is very useful, and I’d take it if I could. But it’s not as essential as risk acceptance.

12. Nice Niche.  Survey: 5.12. Me: 0

I actually do think niches will prove to be important characteristics of future law practices, especially for solo and small-firm lawyers: much of what we now call “general practice” law will be lost to private companies and computers. But I came to believe that a niche is a result of career success, not a cause, and you appear to agree with that assessment.

13. War Chest.  Survey: 5.1. Me: 0

Interestingly enough, this was the first entry I thought of when conceiving this survey, and I thought I would rank it highly. But eventually, I came to see it as a secondary, not primary feature, not least because it’s a non-renewable resource: once the money’s spent, it’s gone. There’s never been a better time to find venture funding for startups, and that applies to the law as well.

14. Recruiting Prowess.  Survey: 4.6. Me: 0

I should admit that I planted this one partly as a red herring. While I think it will be important to attract the right people with ease, this entry was added more as a test of whether people think the current frenzy for lateral hiring of partners with big books of business will continue to be a staple of law firm strategy in future. I sure don’t think it will, and happily, neither do you.

15. Famous Brand.  Survey: 4.33. Me: 0

Someone’s gotta be last. I actually thought this one would and should rank higher: reputation and prestige are like catnip for lawyers, and not without reason, because a well-known name is central to our ability to get our phones ringing. But fame and prominence are things you reap, not things you sow. If you’ve chosen among the other 14 features wisely and executed them well, this one will follow.

So there you have it: my prescription for a future legal survival kit:

20: Moral Fibre

20: Pricing Strategies

20: Solutions R Us

10: Emotional Intelligence

10: Financial Facility

10: Process Mastery

10: Risk Acceptance

Whether or not you took the survey, tell us now: do you think this is the best future survival kit? What would you have packed more of, or done without, and why?

And of course, keep in mind: this isn’t really a hypothetical scenario at all. This is the situation facing your firm, today, right now. So what will you do?

Jordan Furlong delivers dynamic and thought-provoking presentations to law firms and legal organizations throughout North America on how to survive and profit from the extraordinary changes underway in the legal services marketplace. He is a partner with Edge International and a senior consultant with Stem Legal Web Enterprises.