Don’t believe the hype

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Posted in: Careers, Law School

Whenever I drop by a law school campus, I’m reminded of one tremendous difference from 10 or 15 years ago: the near omni-presence of the practising bar. Back then, you noticed the profession on Careers Day (no OCIs back then) and maybe when the CBA President came to speak; otherwise, law practice might as well have been on another planet. Legal periodicals didn’t bother going into the schools at all, and of course there was no Internet.

Today, you’re deluged with news, information and opinions about practice. It’s not only from the law firms, which have had a huge impact on many faculties through sponsorships, donations, lectures and marketing efforts. It’s also through legal magazines and newspapers, which provide pipelines of impressions about life at the bar, and websites like Lawbuzz, which provide pipelines with fewer facts but more interactivity.

The multiplicity of information sources available today could lead you to believe you’re getting a broad cross-section of legal life. But I don’t actually think that’s the case. What you’re really getting is an intense sales pitch from numerous directions. Every element of the legal profession with a law school presence is there for a reason: you’re a valuable demographic, and they’re trying to sell you something.

What you’ll often find offered to you is an image or a model of the profession. You’re already familiar, for example, with magazines that promote a certain type of career and lifestyle as the norm, when in fact the profession is far too fragmented and diverse for any one style to be predominant. Buy into that image if you want, but don’t mistake it for the mainstream of Canadian law practice.

There are other sales pitches going on, too: consider this or that law firm for your summer and articling positions. That’s your call — in fact, it’s all your call, in fact. It’s not always easy, but try to remember that the practising profession is far more diverse, nuanced and complex than the images pitched to you can express. Don’t feel boxed in by an illusion of limited choice.

There are as many different legal lives as there are lawyers, and you can choose any one of them — or reject them all and create your own. It’s your career, not theirs.

This post originally appeared as the editorial in the 2006 law student issue of National magazine.

Rage against the machine

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Posted in: Competition, Technology

You’re surely familiar with those lists of famously bad technology predictions that make the rounds by e-mail every so often. One of the most commonly cited is Digital Equipment Chairman Ken Olsen’s 1977 observation: “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”

Amusing, sure, but rarely quoted in the proper context. Olsen was talking about the undesirability of household super-computers that would control every aspect of our lives. He was fully aware of the desktop PC and its potential as a powerful business tool; his point was that there are certain aspects of our lives that no rational person would want to delegate to a machine.

So when you hear someone say, “Computers will never be able to replace lawyers,” consider what that might mean. Could a computer someday stand and cross-examine witnesses in court? Could it deliver wise counsel to a CEO preparing for a takeover bid or a spouse preparing for a custody battle? Could it form a trusted advisor relationship with a family business over 20 years of service?

Probably not. But how many lawyers are doing that now?

Here’s what many lawyers are doing today: they’re guiding testators through wills, assisting on house purchases, and filing complicated forms for everyone from immigrants coming to Canada to companies going public. They’re answering client questions by applying established legal rules to fact situations and predicting likely outcomes. They’re resolving disputes by finding appropriate financial settlement points between parties.

In short, they’re facilitating transactions — and in the 21st century, transaction facilitation is machine work. Just ask your instant teller, or your e-mail server, or Amazon.ca — or the secretary you haven’t needed since Windows 95 came out. Raise your hand if you see something in that previous paragraph that a sophisticated software program simply can’t do — and be assured, software has become extraordinarily sophisticated.

The threat to our profession isn’t from computers replicating what lawyers can do. The threat is from lawyers replicating what computers can do.

When we apply specialized knowledge from legal databases, use logical analysis skills to answer a question, or escort a client step-by-step through a complex process, we are on computers’ turf. When we display sincere empathy, use real wisdom and intuition, and connect with our clients as people, then computers can’t touch us.

For the moment, anyway.

This post originally appeared as the editorial in the October 2006 issue of National magazine.

The purpose-driven lawyer

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Posted in: Law School, Purpose

The myth of the rich lawyer is remarkably widespread. That’s odd, considering the fact that while some lawyers are very well off, many others simply make a decent living, and some sacrifice potential income for a greater purpose.

These days, only the independently wealthy emerge from three years of legal education debt-free. Tuition is higher than it’s ever been, and textbooks aren’t exactly cheap either. Add in the cost of living in the metropolitan centres where many schools are located, and you can see why law school has become a major financial investment.

The schools do their part to ease the burden — bursaries and grants for lower-income students are greater than ever before, for example. But they need help if universal accessibility to a legal education is to be preserved, something that is a legitimate objective for our profession.

You can appreciate why the schools resist calls for tuition freezes. The convergence of government funding cuts, globalized competition for top professors and students, and aging facilities in need of renovation or replacement means that law faculties have to maximize their revenue sources. Many law firms have stepped forward with generous grants and sponsorships, but the bar can’t fill the funding gap alone.

The ideal solution would strike a balance, providing schools with sufficient financial flexibility to forge competitive programs while also pursuing the worthy goal of a truly diverse profession that reflects Canadian society. These are not diametrically opposing objectives, and through consultation and innovation, that solution can be found.

But consider the potential cost of failing to achieve that balance. Legal careers dedicated to ensuring fairness and justice form the foundation of a just society and express the best ideals to which this profession can aspire. They stand for the proposition that law can be the key to better lives for people fighting obstacles most of us will never know.

If we allow these types of careers to become inaccessible for all practical purposes, we will have lost more of our professional soul than we realize. It’s been said that the test of a society is how well it treats its most vulnerable members. The test of a profession is how much it’s willing to invest in that effort.

This post originally appeared as the editorial in the July/August 2006 issue of National magazine.

Moving targets

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Posted in: Globalization, Technology

Mobile lawyering, international trade mechanisms, and Asian outsourcing all revolve around twin forces — technology and globalization — that have reduced the significance of physical distance and national borders for legal practice. The four walls of a lawyer’s office no longer contain a practitioner, and the borders and coastlines of our nation no longer impede the flow of legal work.

Had you predicted in 1996 that lawyers ten years’ hence could routinely connect with clients from a coffee shop, using only a laptop and a portable phone, you would have been considered a little odd. Had you gone further and suggested that work routinely doled out to articling students could in 2006 be handed instead to legal operations in Bangalore and Mumbai, you would’ve stopped getting invitations to parties.

The new theater of operations for lawyers is no longer national, or even continental as NAFTA had foreseen, but truly global. This will affect not just large-firm lawyers, but also solos and small-firm practitioners, because the market’s expectations of what lawyers can do — in terms of speed, location, expertise and cost — are ratcheting up. Global standards are incredibly demanding.

Lawyers need to recognize this and try to keep clients’ expectations realistic. The challenge is that from now on, “realistic expectations” is going to be a moving target.

This post originally appeared as the editorial in the June 2006 issue of National magazine.

A to Z: 26 trends for the legal profession

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Posted in: Billing, Clients, Competition, Generations, Globalization, Innovation, Law School, Leadership, New Lawyers, Satisfaction, Technology

This article was co-authored with Mélanie Raymond, then-Senior Editor of National, and appeared as the cover story in the April/May 2006 edition of the magazine.

The legal profession is turning upside down, and many of the familiar landmarks are disappearing or bring replaced by brand-new structures. There are so many changes afoot that National’s editorial team could match each letter of the alphabet to a development that presents a threat — or an opportunity — for lawyers. Twenty-six trends, 26 letters: which ones matter the most to you?

Associé (Partnership)

It’s always been the Holy Grail, the ultimate goal for lawyers starting out in private practice It has been considered the final step in a lawyer’s transition from simply an employee to a partner. But this is all changing, thanks to systematic and generational change.

Equity partnerships (partnership without capital investments or draws), salaried associate, permanent or advisory associate — new forms of quasi-partnership are born every year. The journey to the associate level is accelerated in some firms, delayed in others. Methods vary from one firm to another, from one individual to another.

And increasingly, there are lawyers who choose to not aspire to partner status at all — for whom client development, firm management, and the additional responsibilities that go along with being a partner hold little or no appeal. Will partnership become obsolete? No, but flexibility, rather than tradition, will rule this ancient institution from now on.

Runners-up: Asia, Latin America Continue Reading

We mean business

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Posted in: Clients, Competition, Law School

I’ve been in legal journalism for more than ten years now, so I’ve heard pretty much all the clichés about the law (I’m guilty of having used more than a few myself).

My current favourite is the lament, “Law isn’t a profession anymore; it’s a business.” Lawyering is at least 400 years old, and I’m willing to bet that veteran lawyers were carping about this back in 1606, too:

“The honour of our calling’s much abused;
My time’s misspent in making clients pay.
The law is aught my eldest son should choose;
‘Tis but a petty busy-ness today.”

The increasing commoditization of legal services alerts us to the rising competitive tide that subjects lawyers to the vagaries of competition and client demands, just like any other business. But some lawyers would rather bad-mouth their insolent clients and try to ban their upstart competitors than accept the reality of the modern marketplace and look for ways to profit from the opportunities it presents.

The law is a business. It’s a professional business, to be sure, infused with high standards, strict ethics, a sense of vocation, and a duty of community service, all of which set it apart from other careers. But it’s absurd to pretend that the wonderful professionalism of law somehow makes its business side unnecessary, unseemly or unworthy of attention.

Many lawyers, of course, have an ingrained aversion to business. I’m certainly not the only one who entered law school with an undergrad degree rich in Arts courses and bereft of Business and Science offerings, along with a résumé that leaned heavily on summer jobs and our nation’s food services industry. Even my friends with B.Comms say that their degrees don’t help them find clients, manage business relationships or keep the overhead in check.

Accordingly, since law school teaches nothing about running a business and most Bar admissions courses offer little beyond Trust Accounting 101, it’s no wonder many of us end up uncomfortable with the demands of making a living as a lawyer. I’ll bet the growing number of “mature students,” who enter law school with years of work experience, will be the ones best positioned in future to ward off competitive threats.

In the meantime, legal organizations of all stripes could (and some already do) help by offering business training to lawyers, building their confidence and shortening the learning curve. When lawyers start to acquire and implement basic competitive tactics, then “commoditization” will have a much better chance of someday being relegated to the cliché bin itself.

This post originally appeared as the editorial in the March 2006 issue of National magazine.

China syndrome

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Posted in: Competition, Globalization, Innovation, Technology

China is shaping the world we live in — along with India, Wal-Mart, Google, RSS, Wikipedia, wireless, and the World Wide Web 2.0. It’s not just manufacturing jobs moving to Asia, it’s white-collar professional work, too. And that’s just the start of it.

From what I can tell, we’re poised on the edge of great upheaval: economic, political, sociological, geopolitical, even climatic. The world in 2016 won’t be simply the world in 2006, aged ten years. It’s going to be a whole new construct, difficult for us to navigate and completely foreign to anyone who doesn’t remember, say, the chaos of the Second World War. The safety nets are being removed.

As Thomas Friedman argues persuasively in The World Is Flat, we’re looking at an economic and power shift away from North America and Western Europe and towards Asia — from Russia down through China and on into India. Services and skills previously believed to be safe from foreign competition are getting commoditized and relocated at an astounding rate.

Competition is now global, and that includes lawyers. The General Agreement on Trade in Services will eventually get around to dealing with legal services. When it does, then some of the largest and most powerful law firms in the world are going to draw a bead on our legal community. Anyone who thinks there won’t be a Clifford Chance or DLA Piper office in Canada within a decade or so is not paying attention.

The Internet continues to change everything. Information — accurate and otherwise — circulates around the globe at epidemic rates. We’re approaching the point where you can’t sell simple knowledge anymore — not unless it’s specifically tailored for a client’s individual use and comes bundled with wisdom and good judgment. And even then, it’ll be a crowded marketplace.

This isn’t meant to be fear-mongering — but it is meant to focus attention very sharply on the need for all Canadians, including lawyers, to be ready for anything. The best advice I’ve gleaned from the analysts watching these events unfold can be summarized by these priorities:

• Innovate. Don’t wait for the competition to make the first move, because your competitors are legion and lightning-quick. Use technology.
• Learn. Add new skills constantly. Increase your CLE intake, especially online and in podcast form.
• Collaborate. Network like crazy. Get involved in joint ventures. Share ideas and efforts over the Net. The day of the lone wolf is ending.
• Specialize. Non-lawyer providers of legal services are multiplying. Upgrade your offerings beyond their reach.
• Stand out. Distinguish yourself through your services, your client relations, your delivery, your personal touch. And whatever you do, don’t compete on price.

This post originally appeared as the editorial in the January/February 2006 issue of National magazine.

Speed kills

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Posted in: Billing, Satisfaction

In every survey the Canadian Bar Association conducts, we hear lawyers talking about “work-life balance.” I’ve always found this an odd term, actually, because work and life aren’t two sides of the same coin — life is the coin, and work is one side of it. Or better yet, life is a pyramid or a tetrahedron, and work is just one facet.

What lawyers are struggling to express with this phrase, I think, isn’t so much a search for “balance” as a reaction against the overwhelming pressures of law — pressure from clients, employers, regulators, suppliers, creditors ,and, oh yeah, family.

This pressure never eases, and it usually rises — if we don’t control expectations, they overpower us. Accordingly, for most lawyers, anxiety is the standard operating mood.

Many lawyers are over-pressured and unhappy, I think, because they’ve ended up with an assembly-line approach to their work. They’ve discovered that the reward for greater efficiency in their job is not more time off, but more work. They don’t get to enjoy the time that their increasing expertise saves — they just plow it back in to the next file on the desk.

Thanks to the billable hour system, speed has become a matter not only of pace for lawyers, but also of volume. It’s not just the hour you spend at the office — it’s how much billable activity you can cram into that hour. Lawyers fear wasting a single drop of time — it’s the fuel that powers their revenue. The faster they work, the more “efficient” the fuel becomes — and never mind the damage to the “vehicle.”

What’s the bottom line? In the billable hour system, time literally is money. So if we want an easier pace at work and more time for ourselves, we’d better get used to a lower income — unless we’re willing to adopt a compensation system that doesn’t use time as currency.

The lesson here is: own the clock — don’t let the clock own you.

This post originally appeared as an article in the January 2006 issue of the ABA Law Practice Management Section’s Law Practice magazine.

Looking for leaders

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Posted in: Generations, Leadership, New Lawyers

These days, young lawyers are often said to be joining firms and immediately expecting exciting work, handsome paycheques, flexible hours and endless compliments. Their attitude, apparently, is that they can bypass all the hard work put in by their elders and head straight for the reward, while bolting to a higher bidder on a moment’s notice. The phrase “entitlement mentality” gets thrown around a lot.

Rather than criticizing their newest recruits, firms might instead try learning to maximize what this generation has to offer: intelligence, creativity, technology skills and, yes, a solid work ethic. Today’s new lawyers are quite willing to put in the hours — but many need a good reason, one more compelling than “increasing firm profits.”

Today’s new lawyers also understand that associates are a fungible commodity in this marketplace. And when these associates read in the newspaper about senior partners switching firms for more money and more “challenges,” is it any wonder they feel inclined to follow suit?

And this brings us to the heart of this generational rift: leadership.  Today’s new lawyers — and their whole generation, incidentally — are starved for leadership. They’re seeking an actual vision for what a lawyer and a law firm could be, and they will respond enthusiastically to the keynotes of leadership: mentoring, coaching, feedback, vision, and a sense of higher purpose.

If a law firm chose to truly prize leadership, and dedicated the resources to prove it, that firm would have its choice of the very best and brightest young lawyers. It would have to turn them away at the door.

This post originally appeared as the editorial in the October/November 2005 issue of National magazine.

Try anything once

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Posted in: Law School

One of my more vivid law school memories is a first-year public law class with Sheila McIntyre at Queen’s in 1990. Prof. McIntyre, while teaching the core subject matter with her usual brilliance, was also giving many of us our first exposure to feminist legal criticisms and status-quo-challenging legal theory. The discomfort among many students was palpable, and the in-class mutterings became increasingly audible during the first several weeks.

“Look,” she finally said one day (approximately), “this is the only time you’ll ever be exposed to these viewpoints. You’ll be finished this class by Christmas, and then you can take whatever courses you want, graduate, practise law for the rest of your life, and never think about these things again. But at least listen to them now.” After all, she added, “It’s only one term.” She was, of course, completely correct.

These days, when I talk to law students, I hear many of them talk about wanting to follow “alternative careers.” While they’re often no more specific than that, I think what they’re expressing is a resistance to the so-called “big-firm career” — the one with incredibly long hours, loads of corporate work, and very little social value or responsibility. I have a couple of thoughts on that.

First, what some students might think of as “alternative careers” — public-sector work, in-house counsel, small-city or small-firm lawyering — are actually mainstream legal careers in Canada. Only a small percentage of practitioners work in national mega-firms.

The second point is that even if the stereotypes of big-firm jobs were true — and given many large firms’ remarkable commitment to pro bono work and community causes, you should doubt it — you might still consider spending part of your early career there, either for summer work, articles, or even a few associate years.

I articled at a Bay Street firm, an experience I like to call “mutually unsatisfying” — the firm didn’t ask me back, and when the initial rejection shock passed, I figured out I’d be happier elsewhere anyway. Some people like that type of career, others don’t. But the first-hand exposure to big-firm legal culture was invaluable to my career, and on balance, I’d do it again.

Bottom line: expose yourself to as many legal career options as possible, even the ones you think you’ll hate. You’ll have a fuller and deeper appreciation of the legal profession for it. And after all, it’s only one year.

 This post originally appeared as the editorial in the 2005 law student issue of National magazine.