Micro law schools

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Posted in: Governance, Law School

Two interesting articles by Alex Dimson at Law Is Cool today have me thinking about a possible next step in the evolution of law schools. Two Ontario universities have applied to set up law schools: Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. Alex reports that Lakehead’s application, although on shakier ground with both the Law Society of Upper Canada and other law deans, seems to have political momentum, while Laurier’s isn’t so fortunate. I personally think there should be no new law schools until Ontario fixes its training and licencing regime, but that’s a story for another day.

What interests me more is how the universities are pitching the proposed law schools. Lakehead suggests a class size of just 50 students, while Laurier envisions no more than 75, and each is described as specializing for particular regions and practice areas. According to Law Times, the Lakehead school “would focus on aboriginal law, access to justice in northern and rural communities, decreased access to the profession for students from northern Ontario, and the decline of participation in sole and small firms in the area.” In the LIC story, University President Fred Gilbert added natural resources to the list. Thunder Bay is in small-town Ontario, deep in mining country and close to several aboriginal populations, so the program sounds like it would be very much tailored to the community.

Laurier, meanwhile, is in Canada’s new high-tech heartland of Waterloo, home of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion and other innovative companies. Laurier President Fred Blouw framed the issue this way in another Law Times story: “With respect to the Kitchener-Waterloo area as a hub of intellectual property development around the technology sector, [there is] a tremendous need for specialized legal training, legal knowledge, and a need for more bodies.” The story adds that “the school also draws many students from rural centres, where lawyers often practice in a small firm or sole practitioner setting.”

This makes me wonder if, following the lead of microbreweries and microlenders, we might someday soon see the debut of the micro law school: a boutique institution with intentionally small class sizes that aims to produce graduates specialized for certain types of private-practice careers. Continue Reading

Authenticity and lawyer recruitment

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Posted in: Big Firms, Collaboration, New Lawyers, Talent, Technology

The editors at LegalWeek blogged recently about the results of the Sunday Times’ “Best Company to Work For” survey, which, remarkably enough, saw eleven law firms crack the Top 100. I think this probably signals not so much a renaissance in law firm working conditions, so much as that many UK law firms are getting pretty good at using workplace reputation rankings for their own ends. It’s a phenomenon not limited to the eastern side of the Atlantic.

The thing about “Best Employer” lists, as LegalWeek‘s editors point out, is that law firms consider them enormously important recruiting tools for new lawyers and lateral hires. A solid ranking adds lustre to a firm’s marketplace brand and reinforces the strength of its hiring pitch, especially to new lawyers who consider (accurately) that law firms are all pretty much the same. Anything that can help a firm stand out from the faceless crowd, especially on “soft” criteria like flexibility, mentorship and socializing, has a lot of value.

The trouble with third-party marketing and recruiting tools like this, of course, is that they’re destined to be gamed. Savvy firms figure out how the system works and take steps to ensure they do well. Some law firm associates know this first-hand, because they receive a memo “encouraging” them to fill out the “Best Employers” survey and help improve the firm’s standings. It strikes me as odd that firms expect these rankings to impress potential lawyer hires when their own lawyers have been directly involved in what amounts to a manipulation of the results.

In fact, it’s this “gaming” element of such rankings that raise what I think is going to become a problematic element of law firms’ recruiting efforts down the road. Young lawyer recruits, when deciding which firm to work for, are going to start zeroing in very clearly on the authenticity of firms’ marketing and recruitment efforts. This is a generation weaned on word-of-mouth recommendations, and they give a lot of weight to a friend’s or reliable acquaintance’s testimony that something is worthwhile or not. Failing those kinds of first-hand recommendations, they will tend to go, not to press releases, newspapers or magazines, but to collaborative knowledge portals to test the judgment of the crowd. This is where new lawyers are heading now, and law firms need to go with them. Continue Reading

How to write for the media

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Posted in: Marketing, Publishing

You might have heard of a new website called JD Supra — it’s essentially an online forum and database in which lawyers register, create profiles, and post court filings, decisions, forms and/or articles, free of charge and free to access. Check it out and see what it has to offer you. The benefits to lawyers include raising their profiles, providing research materials for consumers and other lawyers, and drawing journalists’ attention to a case or matter that the lawyer is working on.

It’s this latter capacity that caught my interest, since I quite like the idea of a service that can bring lawyers and the media together for their mutual benefit. Accordingly, I penned a short article with eight points for JD Supra’s users to consider before posting a document to “The Scoop” section of the site. Some of the specific points apply strictly to JD Supra’s setup, but others are more broadly applicable to lawyers’ press encounters in general, and I think you’ll find the overall principles set out in the article useful for all communications with the media.

This also gives me an opportunity to expound a little on a subject that’s been kind of aggravating me lately: press releases. In my capacity as editor of National, I get between 10 and 20 e-mails every day from law firms, law schools, corporations, and non-profit organizations looking for legal media coverage of one kind or another. If you’re one of the people who sends me these press releases, I’m sorry to report that I actually read maybe one in 25 of them, and I actually act on perhaps 1 in 100. I don’t think I’m especially unique among editors in this respect — editors of larger-circulation publications probably get scores of these e-mails per day and delete most if not all of them.

I don’t think communications professionals in legal organizations appreciate just how much potential downside there is to sending out a press release that’s not targeted, properly calibrated, and part of an ongoing relatiionship. For many people, e-mailing a press release is standard operating procedure, part of the publicity machinery: alert the media to our issue/event/complaint/opportunity. But for an editor, opening up a non-targeted press release is akin to a homeowner getting a telemarketer on the phone or an office worker receiving spam: at best irrelevant, at worst insulting.

Here are a few thoughts on press releases, what works and what doesn’t.

1. Read my publication before contacting me. Every month, a large law firm sends me its list of lawyers who’ve made partner or worked on a big transaction, requesting I place it in our “People on the Move” section, despite the fact National has never had such a feature (and if I can help it, never will), and thereby reminding me every month how little interest the firm has in what we actually do here. If you want to know what “bad publicity” looks like, that’s a good start. Continue Reading

Conflicts for “sophisticated clients”

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Posted in: Big Firms, Ethics

When Clifford Chance General Counsel Chris Perrin talks about conflicts of interest, lawyers pay attention. The man whom the Financial Times calls the “czar” of conflicts has been working on the subject for nearly a decade, most recently as chair of the City of London Law Society’s Committee on Professional Rules and Regulation. It’s in that capacity that he has now called for a “significant widening of client conflict rules,” according to a story in today’s edition of The Lawyer:

Currently the rules permit law firms to act on conflicting instructions only where the clients share a common interest and consent or where two clients are competing for the same asset, such as in an auction sale. “In addition to these two exceptions,” proposed Perrin, “there should be a wider exception to be used by sophisticated clients, which would enable them to waive conflict in any circumstances.”

Perrin argued that if two sophisticated clients want to get a deal done and both have historically used the same firm, it is impeding their desire to get the transaction done to prevent them from using that firm. And if both parties are happy that a firm will look after both their interests, he said, there is no reason why it should not. The proposed definition of ‘sophisticated clients’ would include clients, which have received independent legal advice or which have in-house legal departments and the exception would not apply in litigation matters.

This rang a bell with me, and sent me off into National‘s archives to find an article published in the March/April 2004 issue (not online, unfortunately) about a proposed change to the Law Society of British Columbia’s professional conduct handbook. Proposed Rule 6.3.1 would have enabled lawyers to act against current “sophisticated” clients without their consent if (a) the matters are substantially unrelated and (b) the lawyer has no confidential information that might reasonably affect the other representation. (The law society’s contemporary bulletin on the subject provides more information.) Continue Reading

Takeaways from TECHSHOW

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Posted in: Big Firms, Collaboration, Solo & Small Firm, Technology

The kid is back from the candy store known as ABA TECHSHOW. This was my first trip in two years, and probably the best of the shows I’ve attended so far. I met up with old friends, made some new ones, and managed to avoid most of the St. Patrick’s Day revellers at the Chicago Hilton, so altogether it was a great success.

I loaded up on numerous sessions and gathered a ton of material that will be making its way into National and onto CBA PracticeLink in the coming weeks and months. But I thought you might be interested in a few highlights of the seminars I attended and what I took away from them. (Note that the “takeaway” isn’t necessarily the presenters’ position, but rather is my impression of where things are and where they’re headed in the future.)

* Privacy on the Internet, a keynote by Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Marc’s address was both entertaining (he opened with a discussion of the Eliot Spitzer case) and sobering (the amount of data about us that both government and the private sector are collecting is astounding).

Takeaway: Google is amassing the greatest collection of data in history and the tools to do some disturbing things with it, and all we have to reassure us is their word that they won’t misuse it. But we’re at the stage now where we need to be asking exactly who owns “information” of various kinds. For example, we worry that Google can track and keep everything we do online, including things we searched for and found. But much of this data would never have existed in the first place if not for Google: information that we consider our private business exists only because we voluntarily use Google’s services. Can we rightly lay claim to it? Isn’t it the consideration we chose to render Google in exchange for free search? As both privacy and anonymity become harder to maintain, we need to think a whole lot more about this. Continue Reading

Off to TECHSHOW

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Posted in: Technology

If you’re in Chicago attending the ABA TECHSHOW, let me know! I’ll be there Thursday through Saturday morning, checking out what really is the world’s premier legal technology conference. This year’s sessions look especially interesting, including seminars on voice recognition, client collaboration and the always valuable “60 Minutes” series of presentations. I originally had hopes of doing some live blogging while I was there, but I couldn’t get my system set up in time, so I’ll aim to add some fresh content here on Monday instead. Hope to see you in Chicago!

Cheating or collaborating?

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Posted in: Innovation, Law School

All I can say is, I’d love to see the law school that tries to flunk a student for setting up a Facebook study group, as Ryerson University in Toronto did this week. Maybe this is a generational thing — I’m officially an X’er, though my leanings are more millennial — but I can’t see how an online discussion group does anything but facilitate learning, not circumvent it. And more to the point, how it’s any different from students gathering in an empty room on campus to do exactly the same thing. I expect Ryerson will change course within a matter of days.

What strikes me, though, is that the way in which we expect students to accomplish tasks in school is very different from how we actually accomplish tasks in our workplaces. If you’re working on a factum or a memo and you’re not sure about something you’re writing, do you head down to the library for an afternoon of thrashing through the authoritative source materials till you’ve learned what you need, “showing your work” as you go? No. You walk down the hall and ask a colleague who’s more familiar with the subject to explain it to you. It’s faster, easier, cheaper for the client, and almost certainly more effective in understanding the concept.

Teamwork is how things get done now, without exception, in the professional world. Law firms boast about “open-door policies” whereby lawyers exchange ideas with each other, and they make great efforts to pool collective knowledge into KM systems. New recruits are quizzed on their ability to work well in groups and contribute towards successful team dynamics. Corporate deals and major litigation require concerted, collective efforts to achieve goals. Online listservs like Solosez are a lifeline for sole practitioners. Corporate law departments want closer working relationships with their outside counsel. In short, no one succeeds in the legal environment by shunning collaborative efforts.

Yet law schools still devote the majority of their time to testing what an individual student can do on her own, not what she can accomplish in a group setting. Unlike MBA programs, where students work on cases in group after group, many law students can graduate without ever having contributed to a team project, learning how to integrate their expertise into a diverse set of personalities and workflow preferences. If there’s any truth to the old charge that law schools “don’t prepare students for law practice,” it’s not in failing to teach professional skills per se, but in failing to train students to learn from each other, to treat knowledge as a gift to be shared, and to give the best of themselves towards the success of the team.

Any law school that wants to earn a real competitive advantage, in terms of producing graduates ready to professionally collaborate, should think seriously about revamping its curriculum to encourage the academic equivalent of Facebook groups: live, in-person, problem-solving working groups, with rotating memberships to ensure you’re not just working with people you like. Increasingly, lawyers will succeed or fail on their teamwork skills; law schools have an obligation to reflect that.

Update: With a hat tip to the Law School Innovation blog, here’s a school that gets it: Washington and Lee University Law School in Virginia is completely overhauling its third year:

• The new third year curriculum will be entirely experiential, comprised of law practice simulations, real-client experiences, the development of professionalism, and development of law practice skills.

• All students will participate in a year-long professionalism program that will include the participation of practicing lawyers and judges and assist students in the development of professionalism in all its aspects, including legal ethics, civility in practice, civic engagement and leadership, and pro bono service.

• The core intellectual experiences in the third year will be presented entirely through a mix of practicum courses that simulate legal practice environments, legal clinics, and internships.

• The demanding intellectual content of the third year will instead be presented in realistic settings that simulate actual client experiences, requiring students to exercise professional judgment, work in teams, solve problems, counsel clients, negotiate solutions, serve as advocates and counselors—the full complement of professional activity that engages practicing lawyers

There’s much, much more, and it’s exhilarating. Read the summary of the new program for more, as well as my earlier thoughts on the third year of law school.

Give up on anything but yourself

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Posted in: Ethics, New Lawyers, Satisfaction

A thought-provoking post by Seth Godin today that isn’t really about politics, even though it asks whether Hillary Clinton should quit the Democratic race. What it’s really about is quitting, which Seth endorses in a book (that I endorse) called The Dip, and the danger of changing who you are in order to achieve your goal. Here’s the ending:

For a long time, we’ve created a myth in our culture that it’s worth any price to reach your goal, especially if your ego tells you that you’re the best solution. We’ve created legends of people and organizations that pursued transformative long shots to achieve great results.

I need to be really clear: pushing through the Dip and becoming the best in the world at what you do is in fact the key to success. But (and it’s a big but), if you’re required to become someone you’re not, or required to mutate your brand into one that’s ultimately a failure in order to do so, you’re way better off quitting instead.

This got me thinking about lawyers. Many lawyers are happy with their working lives — or at least they’re content, having decided happiness was too high a target to aim for. But a lot of lawyers are unhappy, sometimes deeply, with their job or career. A lot of them talk about quitting, and a growing number of them do — either to find another job in a more fulfilling environment, or to keep looking until they eventually leave the profession altogether. Neither the law, nor every job in the law, is for everyone.

But many others stay where they are and grow more unhappy by the day. Some do it out of financial necessity, especially recent graduates with mountains of debt or a family to support. Some stick it out in the stubborn hope that things will improve, despite the absence of supporting evidence. Some convince themselves that the intangible benefits (social status, professional prestige, family pride) cancel out the misery. And some subscribe to the fallacy of “sunk costs,” that they’ve invested so much time, money and soul into a legal career that they can’t give up now.

One way or another, the unhappy lawyers in this second group are going to wind up in the same place as the unhappy ones in the first group: in a different job or out of the profession. They don’t have a strategy for finding fulfillment where they are, and they probably don’t have the motivation to execute such a strategy if they had one. Sooner or later, they’ll have to give it up; from my perspective, it might as well be sooner, and I recommend The Dip for more on that subject.

But there are worse things than being in a career that goes against your grain; there’s changing your grain to go with your career. Continue Reading

Canadian law blogs

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Posted in: Law21

Sincere thanks and appreciation go out to Gerry Blackwell and the editorial staff of Canadian Lawyer magazine, who paid a great compliment to this brand-new space by naming it as one of the ten best Canadian law blogs.

The fact that you can collect a “top ten” list of Canadian blawgs demonstrates just how much excellent commentary there is to choose from — our northern corner of the blawgosphere is brimming with insights and intelligence. Canadian readers: if you haven’t visited all the blogs on Gerry’s list, do so now — and leave some time to visit Steve Matthews’ Canadian law blogs list and to click on my “Canadian Blogroll” links on the sidebar. I guarantee it’ll be worth your time.

White-water change management

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Posted in: Big Firms, Innovation, Management

If you help make the decisions at a large law firm anywhere in the world, I assume you’ve been keeping tabs on the developing impact of the UK’s Legal Services Act. There’s been talk about the fallout from the Clementi Report for quite awhile now, especially regarding share offerings by law firms. Seminars are coming up and commentaries have been published; now, we might be about to see a practical application of all the talk.

A Legal Week story published late last week contains this striking opening paragraph: “Lyceum Capital has become the first investment house to openly target legal services, as the private equity firm moves to position itself ahead of sweeping deregulation of the U.K. profession.” Lyceum is not fooling around: the investment house has set up an advisory panel that includes, among others, Richard Susskind and Tony Williams. Any project with those two people on board is to be taken seriously. Big, creatively destructive change is coming, and fast.

This leads me to think that a lot of firms are not taking the ideal approach to change management. There’s a tendency, in any change initiative, to imagine that your organization is fixed, your environment is fixed, and all you’re doing is moving your organization from A to B — shifting the furniture, basically. This overlooks the reality that (a) every organization operates in (and is affected by) multiple external environments simultaneously, and (b) the organization itself is changing every day, whether its members know it or like it.

A better way to approach change management might be to envision your environment as a wild river, the kind you go white-water rafting on: fast, unpredictable, dangerous in parts, requiring constant course corrections. Your job is to navigate that river by guiding your craft along it as best you can — while understanding that the shape of your craft, the people handling the paddles, and your overall water-worthiness are constantly in flux, often in ways that are beyond your control.

The legal marketplace has never been a fixed room full of furniture, but for many years it was a pretty sedate stream. It’s been a rougher ride than that for quite a few years now, but I’m here to tell you: there are white, foaming rapids ahead, maybe steeper than we’ve ever seen, and a lot of boats aren’t going to make it. Those that do will be focused on riding the waves, staying alert to the dangers, keeping one eye on the far shore, and most of all, understanding one key thing: you’re not in full control. The river has more to say about your destination than you do.

Successful change management in this environment requires both a commitment to do whatever it takes to survive coupled with an appreciation of the modest influence you can exert over the end result. As we enter a time of true upheaval in the legal profession, place your highest priority on alertness, adaptability, acceptance of powerful forces, and a focused, unified effort on the goal. Give your full attention to what you can control, keep a respectful eye on what you can’t, and make sure everyone understands and accepts the difference between the two.