The legal regulation revolution

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Posted in: Change, Innovation, New Lawyers, Regulation

Almost exactly three years ago, when hardly anyone was talking about a pandemic, I wrote about the California State Bar’s brand new Access Through Innovation In Legal Services Task Force, of which I remarked:

The chances that California’s task force will result in fundamental reform to law firm ownership rules in the United States are higher than they’ve ever been. That doesn’t mean they’re particularly high. … It would be foolhardy to bet against the lawyers [opposing change] here. But if you were ever going to make that bet, this would be the time to do it.

Sixteen months ago, hours before the NBA cancelled its 2019-20 season and North Americans finally began to realize how much trouble we were in, I wrote about a plethora of legal regulation reform task forces, of which I said:

By end of day on March 31, ten American jurisdictions, three Canadian provinces, the ABA, and the US Conference of Chief Justices will have either launched task forces to examine legal regulation reform or have taken significant steps towards encouraging such reforms or actually implementing them. … This wasn’t so much a series of cause-and-effect occurrences as a tectonic shift in the subterranean landscape of the law, manifested in several locations in less than a year.

Today, as North Americans venture briefly out of lockdown (rest assured, we’ll be back wearing masks and socially distancing throughout the fall and winter), we’re seeing the results of these committees, task forces, and other reform efforts arrive, during one of the craziest periods of upheaval the legal profession has ever experienced. It seems like the right time to step back and consider the extraordinary shock-waved landscape of legal regulation change, and what it means for everyone.

This is a long read, folks. Settle in as we look at four different dimensions in which law firm ethics models, legal services regulation, and lawyer licensing and competence standards are all beginning a process of transformation.

1. Regulatory changes that affect lawyers’ businesses

The star of this show is the state of Arizona, which last August repealed rules forbidding lawyers from sharing fees with, or making equity ownership in law firms available to, people who aren’t lawyers.

The state Supreme Court opened the doors to non-traditional legal services providers, and by the following spring, had authorized three such providers to begin operations, all of which were essentially multi-disciplinary partnerships with lawyer owners. Nine other applications were reportedly pending as of May, including one from online legal services giant Rocket Lawyer, although the Supreme Court’s Committee on ABS has convened just once since then and has issued no new approvals.

Setting aside for the moment Arizona’s other reforms (further below), note that three professional services firms whose owners included lawyers were the first to take advantage of the removal of Rule 5.4’s restrictions on non-lawyer ownership. This is not the apocalyptic scenario prophesied by ABS opponents — unethical fly-by-night “non-lawyers” pouring into the market to swindle unsuspecting clients with ten-dollar wills and empty promises.

But it is consistent with the experience in England & Wales, where the legal profession “has used the flexibility [of ABS] to innovate and diversify,” a British analyst observed. “Many firms convert to an ABS structure to enable non-lawyer (including corporate) owners, even as far as setting up Employee Ownership Trusts. … The profession has also used the opportunity to offer a greater breadth of services to clients through joint ventures and non-legal expertise. We’ve also seen other professionals, such as accountancy firms and financial advisers, become ABSs to add legal services to their menu of services.”

It took awhile for the English and Welsh legal profession to grasp that ABS was an opportunity for lawyers, rather than a threat to the profession or to the public. But grasp it they did, and today, more than 1,200 ABS licenses have been issued, many if not most to entities with lawyers owning or involved with them. The ABS reforms of the Legal Services Act 2007 are 14 years old. It’s not an “experiment” anymore. It’s just the way things work now, and they work just fine.

It should take the Arizona legal profession considerably less than 14 years to see the advantages of ABS status. Your law firm can bring in more professional talent; you can offer more professional services; you can deepen your capital pool; and you can spend more on marketing and technology. Arizona’s lawyers will get it, and once they do, other states’ lawyers inevitably are going to want the same opportunity. (See Florida, below.)

2. Regulatory changes that affect the wider legal market

(a) Sandboxes and Laboratories

As I told ABA Bar Leader the other day, the legal profession and the legal market are no longer synonymous, and the divergence of these two sectors is going to widen and accelerate in the coming years. As fascinating and potentially momentous for lawyers as Arizona’s move is, there are other developments in other states that will have a more profound impact on the supply side of the legal market, by opening doorways to the legal market for people who aren’t lawyers and companies that aren’t law firms.

You know about Utah’s groundbreaking regulatory sandbox (recently given an extended seven-year runway), which has already approved more than two dozen non-traditional applicants to deliver legal services in the state. Utah deserves immense credit for stepping forward as the first mover in the regressive and protectionist American legal market. But while they were first, they will be very far from the last or biggest.

California has been talking about a sandbox for a few years now, and I’m hearing some encouraging signals emerging from the State Bar of California’s Closing the Justice Gap Working Group that’s developing recommendations in this regard. California, with more than a quarter-million (!) licensed attorneys, would make a massive splash if it jumped into this pool, although that likely won’t happen before the Working Group’s reporting deadline of September 2022. Utah, meanwhile, is already out there swimming around, inviting others to come on in, the water’s fine.

Florida listened. And it’s hard to overstate how important is the Sunshine State’s entry into this space. The June 2021 final report of the Florida Supreme Court’s Special Committee to Improve the Delivery of Legal Services (note carefully the names given to these task forces) recommended the creation of a Law Practice Innovation Laboratory Program. Structured similarly to Utah’s sandbox, Florida’s laboratory would run for three years (based on experiences elsewhere, expect that period to be extended) and would invite both new and traditional providers to experiment with innovative legal services provision currently prohibited by regulation.

But the Committee went further. It also recommended allowing non-lawyer law firm employees who directly support the firm to take a minority ownership interest in the enterprise. This is a half-step towards true reform — “passive ownership” (e.g., outside investment), which is needed to really enable expansion at scale, remains verboten — but a half-step by a giant is still a long stride.

And Florida is a giant: The state has 77,000 lawyers, and although a surveyed majority of them don’t want to see anything change about legal regulation, lawyers don’t own or control the legal services sector, so while their opinions on these topics are interesting, they are not determinative. It’s to the Committee’s credit that it recognized that.

The Florida report’s Laboratory recommendation cited not only Utah’s experiment, but also two developments north of the US border. Last August, a British Columbia Law Society Task Force recommended the creation of a regulatory sandbox, which received the green light a few months later. BC’s innovation sandbox has already approved six applicants, garnering positive attention for its early commitment to increasing access to justice. Earlier this year, the Law Society of Ontario approved a report from its Technology Task Force recommending a regulatory sandbox in Canada’s most populous province, albeit one restricted to legal services that are “technology-based.”

These two provinces will help lead a much-needed transformation of Canada’s legal regulatory landscape (more on that below), but they’ll provide encouragement to US reformers as well. Those reformers might now also include the State of Washington.

Washington once held the unofficial title of the US’s most progressive legal regulatory jurisdiction, thanks to its late and lamented Limited Legal Licensing Technician project. Now, it’s climbing back into the race. In June, the Washington Supreme Court’s Practice of Law Board released a blueprint for a legal regulatory sandbox. The proposed sandbox would open the door to applicants with non-lawyer partners, although it also comes with a caveat: Successful candidates for the sandbox must show an access-to-justice component to their service. (A similar requirement was briefly floated for the proposed California sandbox, which I consider unnecessarily restrictive.)

I wrote about regulatory sandboxes at Slaw late last year, as well as earlier this year here at Law21, so you can peruse those posts for my further thoughts on this topic. But my overall view is that sandboxes’ most important contribution to the regulatory reform effort is to “normalize” change.

Every jurisdiction that develops a sandbox makes it easier for others to do so; every sandbox that finds a non-traditional legal services provider safe and reliable begins to reverse the demonization of “non-lawyer providers” that the legal profession has been engaged in for decades. Utah got things started; Florida has pushed ahead hard; and California could change everything next September. But I think other dominoes — North Carolina? Illinois? Connecticut? — will fall before then.

(b) Legal Para-Professionals

But wait, there’s more! Modelling their efforts on Washington’s LLLT program, and following (whether they realize it or not) Ontario’s groundbreaking licensing of independent paralegals in the 1990s), a number of American states have created and/or authorized legal paraprofessional programs as a direct response to the access crisis.

From New York State’s pioneering Court Navigator program, to Utah’s new Licensed Paralegal Practitioner program, to Legal Technicians in New Mexico, to Legal Paraprofessionals in Minnesota, to New York (again) potentially licensing social workers to perform legal tasks, to Ontario’s (again) potential Family Legal Services Provider Licence, regulators across North America are recognizing the vast range of legal needs that lawyers are either unable or unwilling to meet, and are arranging for technically trained professionals to start filling that gap.

Arizona requires special mention in this area, thanks to two innovative programs. The first is the establishment of a Licensed Legal Advocate, who can give limited legal advice on civil matters stemming from domestic violence, including protective orders, divorce, child custody, consumer protection and housing. LLAs are to be trained through a pilot program created by the Innovation for Justice Program at the University of Arizona College of Law.

Even more noteworthy are Arizona’s new Legal Paraprofessionals, authorized as part of the same reforms that swept away Rule 5.4 restrictions on law firms. The Legal Paraprofessionals will practice as affiliate members of the Arizona State Bar and be subject to the same ethical and rules considerations as lawyers.

Arizona Supreme Court Justice Ann Timmer has made the point that lawyers shouldn’t oppose legal paraprofessionals — they should hire them, to get basic work done more cost-effectively. And we come back again to the idea that lawyers and law firms — and ultimately, their clients — can be prime beneficiaries of these changes.

3. Reports recommending changes to lawyer licensing and bar admission

This topic intrigued me long before I wrote a report for the Law Society of Alberta last year recommending numerous amendments to the province’s licensing and competence assurance system. So when I read about the remarkable proposals delivered in June by the Oregon State Bar Board of Bar Examiners’s Alternatives to the Bar Exam Task Force, I immediately recognized them as potentially revolutionary.

The task force asked the state Supreme Court to endorse two additional pathways to licensure as alternatives to the bar exam:

I’m concerned that the initial reaction of the Supreme Court to the recommendations was lukewarm, judging from the comments of its chief justice. The task force was correct to note that these proposals do not seek to replace the bar exam and are, in fact, much more rigorous and reflective of practice-ready competence than is the exam. I hope the court’s “mulling over” period is a short one, because these proposals represent an extraordinary opportunity to overhaul the unfair and ineffective bar admission system.

The Oregon Supreme Court might take further notice that it is not the first judicial body to receive such a request. Also in June (what it is about that month?), the New York State Bar Association’s Task Force on the New York Bar Examination released its Third Report and Recommendations, which was approved by the NYSBA House of Delegates that same month.

Media coverage of the report centred on its call for the state to withdraw from the Uniform Bar Exam and develop its own bar admissions test, in a section that included a brutal takedown of the UBE and the National Conference of Bar Examiners. But more importantly for our purposes, the Task Force reiterated its belief that:

New York should consider providing two alternative pathways to admission: (a) a pathway for admission through concentrated study of New York law while in law school; and (b) a pathway for admission through supervised practice of law in New York.

Attainment of minimum competency to practice law in New York can, we believe, be demonstrated by law school achievement as well as by actual practice experience. An examination is not necessarily the exclusive means to judge minimum competence. Alternative pathways should be considered either as stand-alone alternatives or as complements to a written examination.

As far as I can tell, the report is now in the hands of the New York State Court of Appeals, which has been asked to appoint a working group in conjunction with the Board of Law Examiners to develop a New York Bar Examination. Will the Court of Appeals also consider the report’s recommendations concerning law school study and supervised practice? Your guess is as good as mine, but everyone, including the Supreme Court of Oregon, should watch closely. Because also watching New York is … California.

In June — of course — a Joint Supreme Court/State Bar Blue Ribbon Commission on the Future of the California Bar Examination was established “to develop recommendations concerning whether and what changes to make to the California Bar Exam, and whether to adopt alternative or additional testing or tools to ensure minimum competence to practice law.”

And the members of the California commission have made it clear they want to hear from the NYSBA Task Force — maybe because the first mandate given to the commission was to determine “whether a bar exam is the correct tool to determine minimum competence for the practice of law, and specifications for alternative tools, should the commission recommend that alternatives be explored and adopted.”

Hey, did someone say “minimum competence”? Say hello to the Law Society of Ontario’s Competence Task Force, which published a report (in guess which month) titled “Renewing the Law Society’s Continuing Competence Framework”. The report identified key themes that it might use to create new competence programs and requirements, and is actively seeking input from LSO members into these questions. As it happens, I’m an LSO member, and I do have some input, and I’ll address this report and its implications in my next Law21 post.

But suffice to say that the LSO has seized upon the fundamental underlying issue in all of these developments: What are the minimum competencies required to receive or maintain a license to practise law? Sooner or later, every inquiry into the nature of the law degree, the validity of the bar exam, and the effectiveness of the lawyer licensing process is going to come back to this question.

4. Developments relating to the structure and governance of legal regulators

One of the reasons — maybe the main one — that California has even been able to convene and support committees and task forces considering sandboxes and re-regulation is the massive restructuring applied to the State Bar of California back in 2017.

Formerly a unified bar, where lawyer membership was obligatory and the lawyer regulatory and advocacy roles existed uneasily side-by-side, the SBC was split into two organizations: the California Lawyers Association, to represent lawyers, and the newly re-commissioned State Bar of California, to regulate them. The new SBC immediately set about addressing governance reform to deliver on its public-protection mandate, commissioned a groundbreaking report into legal market dysfunction by Prof. Bill Henderson, and hasn’t looked back since.

We’ve not seen structural reform on this seismic a scale in any other US jurisdiction since California’s big split. But it’s worth noting an interesting recent development in Texas, where a circuit court of appeals ruled earlier this month that the Texas State Bar is mostly justified in requiring lawyers to pay membership dues.

As Prof. Milan Markovic noted, the court found the Bar could not apply mandatory dues to activities outside the Bar’s “core regulatory functions,” but most of the Bar’s activities were germane to those core functions, so they need only stop engaging in the “non-germane” ones (including law reform advocacy). Neither side got what it really wanted from the appellate decision, and the matter will return to the trial court.

But the circuit court did point to other remedies: “Texas can directly regulate the legal profession and create a voluntary bar association, like New York’s; or Texas can adopt a hybrid system, like California’s.” Several other major states also have unified bars, and litigation similar to this case is apparently underway there. It’s likely that the plaintiffs in those cases, and perhaps the courts hearing them, will take note of the circuit court of appeals’ suggestions in this regard.

The reason I’m going into such depth here is that I view California’s 2017 decision to split its unified bar into two organizations as immensely important for US legal regulation.

It seems unlikely to me that a state bar or court-appointed entity with both regulatory and representative functions will ever truly reform regulation, because reformation carries too many risks of potentially undermining lawyers’ dominance of the legal market. The conflicts of interest are too large to overcome. Lawyer regulation and lawyer representation simply don’t belong under the same roof.

The Clementi reforms in England & Wales that eventually resulted in the Legal Services Act 2007 were driven in part by a well-founded conviction that the Law Society of England & Wales was not dealing properly with client concerns and complaints about lawyers’ performance, precisely because of its dual role. Among Clementi’s recommendations was the separation of representation from regulation. Canada drew that distinction almost a century ago, vesting regulatory authority in statutorily created law societies and coming up with the Canadian Bar Association to represent and advocate for lawyers. Achieving the same outcome in the US — no time soon, I grant you — would truly be a paradigmatic change.

And even in Canada, longstanding regulatory traditions might be in jeopardy. Earlier this month, the Law Society of British Columbia announced it had retained British consultant Harry Cayton to “conduct an independent review of law society governance and how it meets the needs and priorities of a diverse public and legal profession.”

Mr. Cayton is well-known in BC, thanks to his Inquiry into the College of Dental Surgeons of British Columbia, which recommended a thorough overhaul of the governance and regulation of these and other regulated health professionals and which was accepted by the government soon afterwards. Key among those recommendations for our purposes was this: Regulators’ boards should be smaller, should be appointed not elected, and should draw only half their members from the profession they regulate.

This is dramatically different from the status quo in Canadian law societies, whose directors (“Benchers”) are almost all lawyers who are elected by other lawyers in public campaigns (a small minority of Benchers are appointed from outside the profession). Whether this system ever worked to benefit the public interest, it’s increasingly evident that some current and prospective Benchers represent only the interests of lawyers and use their campaigns to fight regressive ideological battles.

Canada’s regulatory system for legal services has always been dominated by lawyers. I have no idea what conclusions Mr. Cayton will come to when he analyzes governance at BC’s legal regulator in light of the law society’s public-interest mandate, and I would never presume to pre-judge.

But I’ve been advising law societies here for quite some time now that diminishing or even removing lawyer control of law societies’ boards of directors would utterly change the nature of legal regulation in this country — in my opinion, for the better. As was the case in California, and as was suggested by the Clementi Report, there is too much potential for disqualifying conflict of interest, and the appearance of regulatory capture, when lawyers are effectively in charge of deciding how legal services are to be provided, and by whom.

Conclusion

There’s little value in proclaiming a revolution is underway once the citizenry has flooded into the streets with banners and protest songs. It’s kind of obvious, at that point, that change is upon us. Likewise, I don’t see any point in waiting until a majority of North American jurisdictions allow non-lawyer ownership of law firms and the widespread delivery of legal services by non-lawyers is commonplace. That day is closer than it’s ever been, although it’s also not going to be tomorrow: Plenty of jurisdictions, like Indiana, are still holding the line against regulatory reform in legal services.

But I think the tipping point has been reached. In the same way that we’re not going back to the pre-COVID world or the pre-remote-work office, we’re not going back to the pre-sandbox, pre-Arizona era of legal services regulation. There’s too much momentum now. There’s too much genuine interest among lawyers in regulatory positions (not to mention in law firms) in doing things differently. There’s too many precedents set by other states and provinces for decision-makers (especially judges) elsewhere to ignore. This train is headed in one direction.

The pandemic is forcing every one of us to re-examine our lives, to rethink our assumptions about what we do and how we’re doing it. Revolutions are starting to break out all over, as big as generations and as small as you or me. I’ve been urging lawyers for years to look around at their businesses and ask, “If we weren’t already doing it this way, is this how we would do it? If we had never done this before, is this how we would start?” And now we’re all asking those questions, as a society. We’re all asking those questions, as a profession. I’m asking this question, of you.

I think today, right now, is the time. It’s time to leave behind who and what we were, and embrace who we want to be, what we can be, and what everyone else out there needs us to be. It’s time for change.

 

The CASE for standards of supervised practice in lawyer licensing

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Posted in: Competence, Licensing, New Lawyers, Regulation

Speaking to a US-based regulatory conference last month, I remarked on a key difference between the Canadian and American lawyer licensing systems: “In Canada, we decided that nobody should be allowed to practise law until they’ve spent a period of time performing supervised lawyer work in a legal services environment.”

This mostly refers to the “articling year,” a decades-old tradition in Canada that mirrors similar customs in most other countries that require a person to complete a term of supervised practice or apprenticeship before they are granted admission to the profession. (Canada has a few other supervised practice options, which we’ll talk about a little later.)

In the United States, one of the very few countries that don’t have a similar requirement, interest in supervised practice as a replacement for the bar exam spiked during the pandemic and led several states, including California, Florida, and Illinois, to temporarily grant bar admission to aspiring lawyers if they completed hundreds of hours of practice under the supervision of an experienced practitioner.

A few Americans would like to see supervised practice become a permanent alternative to the bar exam, and I’ve often heard US lawyer friends comment admiringly on our articling requirement. But the reality of articling is less admirable than it might appear from a distance. In theory, it makes sense for an experienced practitioner to oversee an aspiring lawyer’s learn-the-ropes performance of lawyer tasks, providing valuable experience and feedback to the trainee while ensuring the client is competently served. In practice, that’s not often how it works.

A supervised practice requirement for bar admission is terrific only if it’s done properly, fairly, and systematically. As I’ll describe below, articling in Canada is riddled with problems on all these counts. So I want not only to encourage countries that haven’t adopted supervised practice requirements (🇺🇸) to do so, but also to challenge Canada (and other countries) that do mandate this step to be more conscientious and vigorous about making sure it actually works.

Here are the most serious problems afflicting articling in Canada:

1. Unsafe and unfair: A survey in 2019 by three western provinces found that about a third of all articling students had experienced discrimination or harassment during their articling term, while another province’s survey in 2018 placed the total at more than a fifth; both these surveys likely under-report the extent of the problem. Moreover, systemic discrimination in law firm hiring means racialized students and internationally trained lawyers have a harder time accessing articling positions. The excuse of “cultural fit” has allowed hiring choices in articling to reinforce traditional barriers into the profession against women, minorities, and immigrants.

2. Absence of assessment: Standards of acceptable competence outcomes for an articling term in Canada are a very mixed bag. While each province provides lists of what a student is expected to learn, do, and experience during articling (see examples from Nova Scotia, Alberta, Ontario, and British Columbia), only some reference the Federation of Law Societies of Canada’s National Entry to Practice Competency Profile for Lawyers, while others simply state that the student should receive “practical experience and training” in these areas. More importantly, assessment amounts to little more than the supervisor’s prospective promise (or retrospective assurance) that everything on the lists will be or has been covered off.

3. Fewer opportunities: Articling positions generally are diminishing, leaving a growing number of bar applicants unable to fulfil this requirement and start their careers. Corporate clients have led market changes that reduced the demand for low-skilled lawyer labour: they have insourced basic legal work, re-directed that work to law companies and ALSPs, or fed it into the fast-growing maw of legal technology. Over the last couple of years especially, firms themselves have followed suit, reducing further the entry-level tasks available to novice lawyers. Ontario’s articling shortage prompted the approval of alternatives like an Integrated Practice Curriculum at two law schools and a Law Practice Program in two cities; British Columbia and Alberta are now examining new supervised practice options for similar reasons.

In some ways, articling is to Canada what the bar exam is to the United States — the traditional final stage in the licensing process, so rooted in the professional culture that its rampant flaws are ignored or excused on the grounds that “we’ve always done it this way” and “if I had to go through it, so does everyone else.” If we want to maintain our status as a self-governing profession that purports to apply robust, verifiable competence standards for admission to its ranks, then we need to do better than that.

Whether we’re Canadians talking about improving on articling or proposing superior methods of supervised practice — or whether we’re Americans looking to create a supervised-practice requirement of our own for bar admission — we need to establish a threshold standard for supervised practice, one that would satisfy skeptical outside observers that newly licensed lawyers demonstrably possess the entry-level knowledge, skills, and attributes of law practice.

I recommend that regulators and bar admission overseers create such a standard and integrate the following four elements into their lawyer licensing processes. And because people seem to like acronyms, I’ve arranged these elements to make my CASE that supervised practice standards should be:

Consistent: To ensure fairness, the supervised practice experience should be as similar for all licensure candidates as can be practically achieved. There is unacceptably wide variance in apprenticeships today: One articling student might benefit from a highly positive work environment with mentoring and support, while another might wind up in a barely functional law office, purely through the luck of the draw (or non-relevant hiring factors). This variance is a direct consequence of outsourcing a key element of the regulatory role to the private sector; either much tighter controls and parameters must be placed and enforced on law firm apprenticeships, or the whole process must be centralized under direct regulatory oversight. Which leads to:

Accessible: A supervised practice system that is unavailable to some licensure candidates is unfair; a system in which the inability to obtain a supervised practice opportunity is directly correlated to one’s race, ethnicity, or country of origin is unfit for the profession. There must be systematic assurance that everyone who wishes to become a lawyer can meet the mandated requirement of supervised practice. Moreover, affordability must be considered. Today in Canada, some supervised practice options pay much better than others, while others are unpaid altogether. This wide variance in the financial cost of apprenticeship is another barrier to entry into the profession.

Safe: We can’t continue to send young people into workplaces where they will be subjected to harassment, discrimination, or abuse, and simply accept it as “part of the experience.” It’s especially egregious that we tolerate this treatment of novice lawyers with no power or leverage, unfamiliar with legal culture and dependent upon their supervisors’ approval to complete their training and start their careers. If regulators are going to require vulnerable bar applicants to enter into legal workplaces, they must regulate and closely monitor those workplaces to guarantee they are safe, secure, fair, and free from exploitation. It’s no excuse to say ensuring that kind of system would be “too expensive.” If we can’t afford to provide safe apprenticeships, then the requirement should be abandoned altogether.

Effective: At the end of the day, even if all these other flaws can be addressed, no supervised practice system should be considered valid unless it demonstrably develops in its participants the competencies required for bar admission. It’s not enough to require principals to sign a document attesting that the student has “successfully completed” articles — such assurances have been rote for decades. Most regulators specify the competencies that articling must inculcate, but there is little or no independent assessment or determination of competence outcomes during or after articling. The absence of an evaluation framework converts what ought to be a thoroughly vetted development process into a mere rite of passage.

The problems I’ve listed here are serious; but they are not insoluble. With time, effort, resources, and creativity, not only can we overcome these challenges, we can institute a powerful, effective, and resilient system of professional formation.

  • Consistency and Accessibility can be improved by creating a centralized and closely monitored supervised practice environment — perhaps a “teaching law firm” where licensing applicants can provide legal services to underserved segments of the population while receiving experienced oversight, active feedback, and professional supervision from trained lawyers. Licensure applicants may freely choose to obtain their supervised practice qualification elsewhere, but an entity like this, open to all comers, would guarantee that nobody who wants to become a lawyer is denied the chance to meet this requirement.
  • Safety can be improved by requiring those lawyers who wish to act as the principal supervisors of apprentices to successfully apply for the role. Criteria for successful application could include previous experience in a supervisory or mentoring role, contact information for a former supervisee, and completion of an online training course (I made these recommendations to the Law Society of Alberta in a report last year). An equally valid approach would involve proactive management-based regulation, already in place or in development in several states and provinces.
  • Effectiveness can be improved in several ways, not least by reviewing and adapting the Solicitors Regulation Authority‘s best-in-class Threshold Standard and Qualifying Work Experience Record Template. The template in particular points in the right direction, because it empowers the licensure candidate to record those daily and weekly activities that advance the candidate towards achieving the specified levels of acceptable competence. Make this record accessible in real time to both the candidate’s supervisor and, importantly, the regulator, and you move closer to effectively measuring the candidate’s acquisition of entry-level competence.

Reforming a system of supervised practice, or creating a new system from scratch, is obviously a daunting prospect. Opponents of the reform (or creation) of a supervised practice requirement would object to the cost and complexity of the effort.

But in a profession that grants what is effectively a universal and permanent license upon admission — revocable only upon amply demonstrated proof of multiple serious transgressions — lawyer licensure is the single most important moment in the regulatory function. Everything hinges on the standards (if any) that we choose to set and enforce up until, and at, this moment.

I think there’s tremendous value in the proposition that “nobody should be allowed to practise law until they’ve spent a period of time performing supervised lawyer work in a legal services environment.” But if we’re not willing to back up that sentiment with action, then we have no business telling ourselves or others that we have a legitimate lawyer licensing system — and we shouldn’t force every new cohort of lawyers to pay the price of our self-deception.

Frugal innovation in lawyer formation

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Posted in: Law School, Lawyer Formation, New Lawyers

More than a decade ago, in a post that captured the imagination of hardly anyone, I wrote about the need for “frugal innovation” in the legal services sector. Chief among the problems with the legal market, I said, is lawyers’ insistence on offering ever-more-elaborate services to ever-fewer people at ever-higher prices, ignoring the growing population with straightforward legal needs but little time or money to address them. Frugal legal innovators, I wrote,

will figure out the resource restrictions under which most people labour and will modify their products, services and delivery systems accordingly. They will relentlessly simplify and de-accessorize legal offerings, constantly asking themselves: Can we make this easier? Are there steps we could remove, features we could do without, elements that add cost without adding equivalent value? 

I trust this book is no longer than it needs to be.

Ten years on, I’m still waiting for the legal profession to recognize and meet this opportunity, although I’m encouraged by the success of consumer innovations like UpSolve and Hello Divorce.

But what I want to do in this post is apply the same reasoning to the lawyer formation process. What would frugal legal education and bar admission look like? What if we had only a very limited amount of time and money with which to train and licence new lawyers — how would we do it?

Let’s start by identifying the problem to be solved. Whatever its other merits and demerits, there are two things we can confidently say about lawyer formation in North America, in its current form:

1. It is too long. Hardly anyone believes that three full years of law school are necessary to provide foundational knowledge for the lawyer licensing journey. Most Canadian jurisdictions require an additional one-year articling term before admission, but that period of time is arbitrary: pandemic-shortened articling terms were deemed acceptable last year, and an alternative pathway in one province lasts just eight months.

To be clear, I believe new lawyers need much better and more detailed preparation for their careers than we’re giving them; but we’re using the current allotted amount of time poorly. We don’t know how long it really takes to fully develop a lawyer, because we’ve never purposefully designed a unified, end-to-end lawyer formation system.

2. It is too expensive. The average US lawyer starts their career $145,000 in debt. For the average Canadian lawyer, the figure is at least $71,000. Licensing fees add to this burden. But the cost of lawyer formation is driven less by features intrinsic to professional development, and more by the business models of the institutions that oversee and administer education and licensure. Lawyer formation doesn’t require labs and chemicals and machine shops; but you wouldn’t know that from its price tag.

Most people need significant socio-economic advantages even to contemplate the possibility of a legal career and devote several years to its pursuit. If you are not independently wealthy, heavy debt will drive you into higher-paying jobs with intense billing pressures or force you to take on work outside your expertise, ultimately to your and your clients’ detriment. The barriers scattered throughout lawyer licensure have produced a legal profession that is disproportionately white. And I need hardly add that the foregoing system will not produce affordable legal services.

How can we fix this? One way forward would be to “frugalize” the lawyer development system. What if we placed strict time and budget limits on the process of developing lawyers? What if we maintained (or ideally, raised) our thresholds for qualification as a lawyer, but radically downsized the time and cost required?

Assume that someone wishes to become a lawyer, but has, say, only 18 months and $18,000 to do it. Under our current system, that’s simply not possible. So let’s come up with a system in which it might be. Here are a few ideas to get us started.

● Move law school online, period. Subtract from a legal education the institutional overhead, room, board, and travel costs of attending a university in person. Subtract the time inflation caused by adherence to the law school’s semestered teaching timetable and its insistence on one-to-many, physically proximate knowledge transfer. The result would be an at-your-own-pace online law degree (of which, thanks to the pandemic, we’ve already seen proof of concept), faster and radically less expensive than the current version.

● In the alternative, individual legal academics and practicing lawyers could sell standalone courses approved by regulatory authorities, accessible online 24/7 with built-in knowledge assessments, on a core of mandatory subjects plus many others. Students could assemble their own qualifying law degree from multiple providers, learning as their schedule allows from their chosen experts in their preferred areas. Let’s stop thinking of law school as “a place you go to” and start thinking of it as “a developmental experience.”

● Our current system makes students spend three years in a classroom before even glimpsing the life of a lawyer. Lawyer education and experience could instead be administered concurrently, not consecutively, saving time while enhancing learning. The online courses described above could be interspersed with asynchronous skills and training modules and simulated virtual practices relevant to each course subject — here is an outstanding example. Or combine this idea with the next one:

● During or after completion of this online trifecta, we would find ways for aspiring lawyers to swiftly and affordably gain in-person lawyer experience. Regulators could require practicing lawyers to offer unpaid four-month internships to duly-registered law students as a requirement of continued licensure. Or they could coordinate similar opportunities with legal aid or public interest organizations in the student’s home town or nearest city. The goal is to help students learn the law and experience the law simultaneously.

● A purely online experience would, however, fail to provide the socialization element of lawyer development, whereby aspiring practitioners build friendships and networks by learning and working together. These elements have real value, so the frugal lawyer development process would require and help enable regular in-person (once the pandemic allows) meet-ups in larger communities, or Zoom sessions among more geographically dispersed students, or better solutions waiting to be invented. Distance legal education has a long history.

This is just the barest outline of what a frugal lawyer development system might look like — obviously it has gaps and flaws. But while some of them can be filled and fixed, others don’t need to be. Frugality, as I argued back in 2010, is not about doing the same things you did before, only more cheaply. It’s about re-envisioning what you’re trying to achieve and and re-engineering how you’re going to achieve it.

There’s a growing consensus that lawyer licensing requires radical reconsideration. So which elements of lawyer licensure add cost without adding equivalent value? Cavernous lecture halls in limestone buildings? Qualifying credentials burnished by a coat of arms and a football team? Hazing rituals disguised as entry examinations? You could probably assemble a pretty lengthy list just based on your own certification experience. Undertaking this effort collectively, as a profession, could lead to extraordinary advances in our theory and practice of bar admission.

The pandemic has already demonstrated that we can educate, train, and license lawyers differently than we did before. This is a golden opportunity to convert that temporary experience into a permanently better one.

Lawyer competence in three dimensions

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Posted in: Competence, New Lawyers

Suppose that a person has obtained a law degree from a recognized and accredited law school. Suppose further that this person has successfully completed the bar admission process in their jurisdiction and has been admitted to practice by the relevant authority. Are you satisfied, all other things being equal, that this lawyer is competent to practise law? I’d imagine you are.

Now, let’s start making other things less equal — but more realistic.

Let’s say this lawyer has been hired by a very small law firm where the staff consists of a part-time administrator and a legal secretary, subscriptions to major research databases have lapsed, and there is no centralized system for case management or deadline reminders. The lawyer is quickly buried under extensive drafting and research work on short timelines by impatient partners whose feedback is rarely constructive.

Let’s say further that this lawyer owes more than $150,000 in student loans, must commute (in non-pandemic times) 45 minutes each way to the office every day, has had to assume responsibility for a chronically ill parent who requires frequent trips to the hospital, and is increasingly dependent on painkillers to relieve crippling headaches and backaches at the end of each day.

Do you still think this lawyer is competent? You might say that technically, yes they are — the knowledge and skills they possessed upon their call to the Bar are all still there. But here’s a different question: Would you feel confident about hiring this lawyer to solve your problems or carry out your important tasks? Would you be comfortable — given their circumstances — that the lawyer could effectively apply their knowledge and skills to get the job done cleanly and correctly?

You might be less sure. I know I would be. And that’s why I think we need to start re-conceptualizing what we mean by “lawyer competence.”

I spent much of last year researching and writing a report on lawyer licensing and competence for the Law Society of Alberta. One of the things that struck me during that process was that we define lawyer competence solely in intellectual terms — as the possession of minimum levels of knowledge and skill sufficient to satisfy regulatory requirements.

Possessing that knowledge and skill is obviously important — but it’s also incomplete, because it fails to appreciate that what matters to the client and to the public is not what the lawyer knows, but what the lawyer actually does with their knowledge.

The public is not protected by a lawyer who merely possesses knowledge and skill in a passive, static sense; the public is protected by a lawyer who applies that knowledge and skill correctly and effectively in the real world. The first understanding of competence is technical; the second is practical. I think the second one is better. Lawyer “competence” concerns clients much less than does lawyer “performance.”

I need to be careful here, because when I first discussed these ideas on Twitter, some people thought “performance” referred to the outcomes lawyers obtained for their clients or the experience they delivered. Client outcomes and experiences are super-important, but that’s not what I mean here by “performance” — I mean, can the lawyer actually deliver and implement the knowledge and skills they possess to solve client problems? Can they carry out the work? Can they perform it? That’s where the rubber hits the road — lawyer qualifications meet the public interest at the point of implementation and execution.

If a lawyer possesses what we consider the complete toolkit of competence — all the required knowledge and skills — but is unable to use those tools effectively because of various circumstances, is that lawyer competent to practise law? Our current regulatory model says yes. Clients who are inadequately served by lawyers who cannot apply their knowledge and skills would say no.

Let’s go back to our unhappy hypothetical lawyer at the start of this post. They’re grinding every day in a sketchy workplace with few quality controls or professional standards, and they’re afflicted at home with financial, family, and addiction issues. It doesn’t matter whether this lawyer got a perfect score on their bar exam — they are not in a position to apply their competence qualifications effectively, and that will ultimately be to the detriment of themselves, their clients, and the public in general.

I think regulators should strive to ensure an ongoing level of lawyer competence that encompasses not just the possession of baseline legal knowledge and skills, but also two additional factors that crucially affect the lawyer’s ability to apply their competence: the lawyer’s workplace environment, and the lawyer’s personal well-being. Regulators obviously cannot control these other two factors in lawyers’ lives. But they can take steps to strengthen and reinforce them.

● Workplace environment. Does the lawyer’s workplace help to promote, or at the very least support, their ability to apply their knowledge and skills to client matters? Is the lawyer given adequate technological and staff resources? Does the workplace maintain systems and standards in client intake, matter management, client communication, conflicts checking, and trust accounting? How sound is the firm’s “ethical infrastructure,” its systems and culture of professional conduct? The degree to which these questions have positive answers will affect the ability of lawyers within this workplace to provide competent service to clients.

How can regulators oversee the workplace environments of the lawyers whose conduct they govern? Jurisdictions such as Australia and England & Wales have provided us with one good answer: entity regulation, whereby the individual lawyer is not the sole focus of regulatory oversight. An entity that provides legal services to the public should feature structural standards to ensure and enable the effective delivery of those services. In essence, you regulate not just lawyer competence, but also law firm competence.

● Personal well-being. Nobody pretends that practising law is a stress-free career. But there’s a difference between doing hard work for high stakes (the lot of every lawyer) and suffering from debilitating levels of pressure and anxiety. The latter description fits too many lawyers today: deep in debt, either trying to keep a practice afloat in a pandemic or constantly in fear of being laid off or “de-equitized,” unable to get or remain healthy, and so on. The results, as we already know, can include burnout, depression, addiction, and suicide.

How can regulators improve the well-being of the lawyers they regulate? “The Path To Lawyer Well-Being: Practical Recommendations for Positive Change,” the under-appreciated 2017 report of the National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being, delivers on its title with 44 recommendations (and 88 tips in a separate mini-toolkit) to improve lawyers’ mental, emotional, and physical health. Regulators could implement the four recommendations targeted to them and strongly encourage all other stakeholders to do the same for theirs. They could make well-being not merely one component of competence, as many regulators are now doing, but consider well-being a critical catalyst without which a lawyer’s knowledge and skills cannot be effectively applied.

To be competent means that you can do something. Lawyer competence is functional, not abstract. It has three dimensions: knowledge and skills, workplace environment, and personal well-being. Regulators should start thinking about how they can ensure not just that lawyers possess the knowledge dimension of competence, but also that their personal and workplace circumstances allow them to effectively deploy that knowledge in service to clients. That’s the next step in the ongoing effort to continually enhance the competence of lawyers.

Lawyer licensing and competence in Alberta

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Posted in: Governance, Law School, New Lawyers

I’m very pleased to let you know about Lawyer Licensing and Competence in Alberta: Analysis and Recommendations, a report written by me for the Law Society of Alberta. The law society’s Benchers (the elected lawyer directors of the province’s legal services regulator) accepted the report and all of its recommendations earlier this month. Preparations are now underway to implement the recommendations over the coming months and years.

For the inside story of how I came to write this report, and why it signals a new direction for my own writing and consulting career, please see this companion post. Here, however, I’d like to explain how the report itself came about, what its primary recommendations are, and why I believe it signals an opportunity for other jurisdictions to re-examine their own licensing and competence systems and bring them into the 21st century.

First, some background. Here are the essentials of how you become and remain a lawyer in Alberta:

  • Earn a degree from a Canadian law school or a certification from the National Accreditation Committee of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada.
  • Complete the bar admission program administered by the Canadian Center for Professional Legal Education (CPLED).
  • Complete a term of articling (one year of supervised practice apprenticeship with an Alberta lawyer in good standing).
  • Once called to the bar, annually assess your learning needs, choose a series of learning activities that will advance your proficiency in these areas, and report those activities to the law society.

This combination is unique in Canada: although three other provinces (Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Saskatchewan) also engage CPLED to conduct their bar admission program, only Alberta does not use a “minimum number of CLE hours” system to ensure ongoing competence. (Indeed, Alberta stands alone in Canada and the US on that score.)

But back in February (which seems like a very long time ago), the law society decided to suspend lawyers’ CPD filing requirement while the system itself was reviewed and overhauled. That decision was triggered by uncertainty about whether the “self-assessment and learning activities” system was generating actual learning activity and whether the system had sufficient accountability to achieve that result.

But there were other issues at play. In 2019, the law societies of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan received the results from a survey of current and former articling students in those provinces. The news was bad: About one-third of all respondents reported discrimination, harassment, or ineffective learning environments or experiences during their articling term.

The law society had other concerns, too. It was worried about the degree of competence possessed by lawyers in their first few years of practice. It noted (as have other jurisdictions) dwindling levels of engagement in continuous learning by more senior lawyers. It recognized the dangers of an aging profession with insufficient retirement and transition plans. And it saw that BIPOC and internationally trained lawyers carried heavier burdens in all these areas.

I was engaged in April to write a report analyzing these issues and making recommendations to improve lawyer licensing and competence in Alberta. Although law school and legal education were outside my commissioning scope, I was otherwise encouraged to draw whatever conclusions seemed to me fit and justifiable. Five months, 25 interviews, 80 pages, and 30,000 words later — and with the absolutely irreplaceable support and assistance of law society staff — I handed in my draft report. Three months later (last week, to be precise), the law society accepted the final report and all of its recommendations.

To find out every last detail of this document, I’d obviously suggest you read the full report (or at least the executive summary at the start). But for present purposes, and in necessarily broad strokes, I’ll summarize my major recommendations and observations below.

1. Nobody has a greater impact on a new lawyer’s early career than the lawyer with principal supervising authority during their articling term. Supervising an aspiring lawyer is accordingly a privilege to be earned, not a right to be asserted. Any lawyer who wishes to act as an articling student’s principal should successfully complete an application process and training program to qualify for the role.

2. Articling suffers from several defects and inadequacies, but its biggest fault is that it is the sole method by which Alberta lawyers can gain their required supervised practice experience. The law society should develop new “pathways to practice” that provide consistency, defensibility, and accessibility, to supplement (and conceivably to soon replace) articling, such as a Law Practice Program, an integrated practice curriculum in law school, or a law society-sponsored “teaching law firm.”

3. There is no evidence that Alberta lawyers in their first three years of practice pose an outsized competence risk. But these lawyers, like early-stage lawyers everywhere, are credentialed and sent into the market before they are ready. The law society should provide a mandatory annual fleet of training, knowledge, and support programs in law practice management, business operations, client relationships, and other practical areas of critical importance for new practitioners in their first three years.

4. Articling students and new lawyers receive inadequate levels and types of supervision, particularly when it comes to their formative and restorative development (transitioning to practice, receiving mentorship, maintaining mental and emotional health). Every new lawyer should be automatically “opted in” to one of Alberta’s two outstanding lawyer mentoring programs (with the option to opt out for any reason).

5. Alberta’s self-assessment and learning outcomes CPD system is fundamentally sound and represents best practices in professional adult education worldwide; the province should not switch to an hours-based system. But the current system should be improved, by training lawyers in the art of skill self-assessment, focusing more on learning outcomes than activities, instituting random audit checkups to ensure lawyers’ compliance with their learning activity commitments, and periodically providing mandatory activities for all lawyers in areas of core competence less likely to be addressed individually.

6. Lawyers with more than 20 years at the bar present demonstrably lower levels of competence risk, and senior lawyers generally find most CPD activities lacking in relevance or utility. The law society should provide these lawyers with an optional CPD system that allows them to fulfill their learning requirements by engaging in a program of mentoring, new lawyer education and training, and public legal education and service.

7. Sole practitioners are the backbone of access to justice for individuals and families, especially in smaller communities; but they are unfairly under-resourced and overburdened with management duties compared to their colleagues in larger law firms. Lawyers who wish to start sole practice should be required to complete a training program to provide them with the knowledge, support, and resources to help them practise effectively and competitively. Given the risks to their clients of a sole practitioner’s incapacitation, these lawyers should also be required to create and file with the law society a business continuity plan.

I also made several observations throughout the report (or during my preparation of it) that were not submitted as actual recommendations, but that I felt warranted attention:

  • The airtight separation of legal knowledge and legal practice in law school is fundamentally wrong and needs to be addressed at the earliest feasible opportunity, through a collaborative process involving multiple justice system stakeholders.
  • Lawyers who are Black, Indigenous, persons of colour, or internationally trained suffer systemic discrimination and unfair treatment throughout their careers but especially at the outset. This needs to be addressed and corrected.
  • CPLED’s bar admission program, which focuses on lawyer skills and experience and does not include anything like a “bar exam,” is a best practices model for lawyer licensing that every other jurisdiction should study and emulate.
  • “Graduated licensing” is an impractical solution to a different and fundamental problem: Lawyers enter practice three to five years before they are truly ready to serve clients effectively. We must reform lawyer formation altogether.
  • “Minimum hours of CLE” is an antiquated input-based learning measure that provides no assurance lawyers have learned anything that will help them serve clients or practise law more effectively. CPD programs should abandon it.

There are several other aspects of lawyer licensing and competence assurance that are worth further exploration, but the law society did not engage me to write a scholarly treatise on the subject. My report aimed to be as practical and implementable as could be managed, given the realities of limited budgets, lawyers’ deep aversion to change, and the small matter of the pandemic. Most of all, I wanted to give the people at the law society a realistic blueprint for making incremental but important improvements to the province’s lawyer licensing and competence systems.

That last point gives me an opportunity to acknowledge with gratitude everyone at the Law Society of Alberta who was instrumental in bringing this report to fruition. Among the lawyers, I want to single out Ken Warren Q.C.  and Stacy Petriuk Q.C., Chair and Vice-Chair of the Lawyer Competence Committee, as well as all their colleagues on that committee; among staff, there are too many people to thank individually, but I want to highlight CEO and Executive Director Elizabeth Osler Q.C. and, in particular, Deputy Executive Director Cori Ghitter, without whom (as I said in the report’s closing lines) the report could not have been written.

I’d welcome any feedback that you might have about this report or the points raised in this post. And if you’d like to read my less diplomatically phrased observations about the state of lawyer development, licensing, and ongoing competence today, I invite you to read about my new career focus and the back story to this report, right here.

The rise of the lawyer

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Posted in: Big Firms, Careers, Ethics, New Lawyers, Purpose, Technology

Earlier this year, I received an invitation to write the epilogue for a book called New Suits: Appetite for Disruption in the Legal World, by Michele DeStefano (founder of the groundbreaking Law Without Walls program based at the University of Miami Law School) and Guenther Dobrauz-Saldapenna (partner and leader of PwC Legal Switzerland and leader of PwC’s global legal tech efforts). New Suits is an enormously ambitious and illuminating exploration of the frontiers of technology-powered legal practice, especially for large enterprise clients and their outside counsel, and I highly recommend that you read it.

Soon to be a major motion picture. Well, no.

Of course, I’m no technology expert, and I felt supremely unqualified to say anything useful about the impact of blockchain, AI, RegTech, and so on. But I thought that lawyers who read New Suits, especially newly called lawyers or law students, might reach the end of the book feeling a little overwhelmed by the scale of change facing them, and wondering whether the legal world of the future would in any way resemble the one they had already entered — and if that world would need, want, or even welcome lawyers.

So I wrote what was essentially a message to those lawyers, to explain what all the forthcoming changes would mean for them, what the new legal world was going to demand of them, and what they should feel both empowered and required to demand in return. With the kind permission of the authors, and with a few small edits, here is that lengthy but heartfelt message. 

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As I was preparing to write this epilogue, an email alert flashed across my screen with a message from a legal technology company. It announced itself in breathless terms: “AI has once again triumphed over a human lawyer.” (The task in question was the screening of a non-disclosure agreement.)

What an appropriate starting gun for this undertaking. The book you’ve just completed has catalogued in amazing detail the changes rippling along the foundations of the legal market worldwide, the technology that’s rewriting the rulebook for practising law, and the market forces that are fundamentally changing the nature of legal demand. Enterprise legal services — that sector of the market devoted to the legal needs of large companies, corporations, institutions, and governments — will never be the same again.

Yet it’s worth pausing to think about the deeper implications of that message. Why does it say “triumphed”? Who’s rooting for the machine here, and why are they rooting against the human? What benefit is being created by the application of this new technology — and who will ultimately reap that benefit? Are we celebrating because a human lawyer will be liberated from drudge work and assigned to deliver wise counsel to sophisticated clients? Or is it perhaps more likely that that lawyer will instead be liberated from a steady paycheque, and that fewer rather than more opportunities for human judgement will result?

We live in an age when the ultimate goal of many corporate activities is to “enhance shareholder value,” a phrase that has become a mantra not just for corporate boards, but also for the equity shareholders of large law firms. But you know, not everyone out there is a shareholder, and not everyone is seeing their value enhanced.

There are some who instead characterize our era as “late capitalism,” and who suggest that we’re entering the decline phase of one system and the gradual emergence of something else, something new. Is either of these opinions correct? What mantras should we be adopting for an enterprise legal market populated by blockchain, digitization, smart contracts, and Reg/Sup/PropTech? What is the real purpose of lawyers in the intelligent machine age?

For lawyers, these are not academic questions, and we should not act as if they are. If you’re a lawyer whose career trajectory is likely to carry you up to or past the midpoint of this century, I believe these questions are vital for you to contemplate. The answers you come up with will determine not just the sort of work you find yourself doing, but also the ultimate ends towards which your efforts will lead you, your clients, and everyone else. This epilogue is intended to help you through that contemplation.

To my way of thinking, there are three critical considerations for you, the 21st-century lawyer, to ponder during this process of discernment — three factors that merit at least as much time and bandwidth as any other. These concepts are “System,” “Service,” and “Self.” Here are my thoughts on each.

1. System

Now and for the foreseeable future, enterprise legal services will be created and delivered primarily through systems. For our purposes, we can define a “system” as an organized structure of interrelated and interdependent methods, procedures and routines, created to carry out an activity or solve a problem. If that concept interests or even thrills you, you’re going to love this line of work. If it puzzles or bores you, you might have a problem.

The reason we’re talking about systems is that we are long past the point where enterprise legal needs can be fulfilled by individual lawyers, sequentially and in single file, working in longhand and billing by the hour. As this book has made clear, both the sheer scale and the growing complexity of companies’ legal and compliance challenges require equally scaled and complex solutions. Enterprise clients compete in high-pressure environments and operate within unforgiving timeframes. They cannot be served in the same way you would serve a family business or a private client.

That’s going to have a profound impact on the types of people who will be drawn to this sector of the legal market. Systems analysts, software coders, design thinkers, and engineers of all kinds will be a natural fit for enterprise legal. People who can grasp the big picture of what the client needs, who can envision processes and flowcharts and logic statements that generate solutions to those needs, and who can build and maintain robust frameworks to contain and run those solutions rapidly, repeatedly, and reliably — those will be the architects and superstars of the enterprise legal market.

If you feel that the foregoing characteristics don’t describe you, then it’s possible that your legal destiny lies in a different direction. But don’t walk away yet! Because it’s also possible, and maybe even likely, that there is a place for you in the enterprise legal market — an important place, in fact.

Analysts and coders and engineers can capture the big-picture needs of a major enterprise client, and they can design and build astonishingly complex systems to meet those needs. But there’s still a role for human judgment here, because no matter how inspired and intricate a system might be, there are two questions that must constantly be asked about it:

  1. Is the system doing what it’s supposed to do?
  2. Is what the system is supposed to do actually the right thing to do?

To be clear, many engineers and software architects have not only the skills required to envision and build effective systems, but also the talent required to monitor, scrutinize, and judge those systems. But not all of them do. The “how” of a system is not the same as the “why” of a system, and both of these inquiries need to be made of, and met by, a legal system on a regular basis. We’ll want to have different people with different skill sets making those inquiries.

Legal systems also age and atrophy and degrade over time. Minuscule errors crawl inside and inaudibly misdirect the intended flow of data or invisibly unravel the logics underlying the processes. Since we can’t see or hear the initial errors, we need to watch the results, over and over again, and ask ourselves whether our incredible machines are delivering their intended solutions and client outcomes. That will require the attention of people who:

  • can detect patterns within a system and find emerging variations therein,
  • have built strong relationships with clients that allow them to understand their goals and priorities, and
  • can integrate these two bodies of knowledge into an effective system assessment regime.

Those are lawyer skills, and they will be needed in the enterprise legal market. But there’s more; there’s also the need to ask whether a system that’s doing what it was built to do is achieving what it ought to be doing.

A powerful and widespread misconception is that if a machine or a system is generating results, those results are necessarily good and trustworthy, because the machine or system is unbiased and objective. You’ve probably heard someone cite the results of some automated process or other as proof in an argument or to defend a political position: “It’s all math, and the numbers don’t lie.”

But it’s not all math, of course, and it never has been. There are already countless examples of how sexism and racism is baked into algorithms and processes by programmers who don’t believe they themselves are sexist or racist, but whose experiences and biases inevitably guide their “objective” decisions.

This problem will become worse as machine learning and data-driven decision-making spreads to judicial, regulatory, and administrative systems (especially for poorer individuals who can’t afford customized assistance). A system that performs exactly as it’s designed, but that keeps rejecting valid compensation claims from people with non-Anglicized surnames, is a bad system. But will anyone notice?

The future of law, especially enterprise legal services, is without any doubt systemic. But systems need people to run them, to remedy them, and to remind everyone else that we build systems to serve people’s interests. And that brings us to our next point.

2. Service

The law is a service profession. Both historically and etymologically, the very notion of “profession” is grounded in service towards others for the greater good. If you’re a lawyer, your central purpose is to serve other people and make things better for them — principally your clients, but not exclusively, and not to the intentional detriment of others.

Now, if you’re engaged (or you plan to engage) in the enterprise legal market, where you’re working for corporations and institutions and governments, you might think the foregoing homily doesn’t apply to you. That kind of thing is for lawyers in family law, or wills and estates, or criminal defence — “People Law,” as it’s been described. Your job, by contrast, is to help grow shareholder value, or improve brand penetration, or eliminate unwanted efficiencies. You don’t serve people so much as you serve productivity. Right?

Well, you can answer that question for yourself. But if I might suggest something for your consideration: No matter how massive and global your clients, no matter how complex and high-value the transactions, no matter how sophisticated and AI-driven the systems you’re using, it’s all People Law. Shareholders are people. Employees are people. Individuals whose lives are irrevocably altered by enterprise legal decisions are people. And you’re not allowed to conveniently overlook them in pursuit of your legal duties.

I don’t think it’s deeply controversial to note that in many parts of the world, perhaps including the place where you’re reading this book, the quality of both private lives and public infrastructure has deteriorated throughout the last few decades. In a world where capital outperforms labour by a widening margin, the rewards of ever-greater productivity are shared by an ever-smaller number of people. Many influential individuals seem to believe that economic productivity should be society’s highest goal. They’ve forgotten that both private corporations and public institutions were created in order to make people’s lives better. They were built to serve us, not the other way around.

I have some news for you, and you can decide if it’s good or bad news: One of your functions, as a lawyer for the people who’ve forgotten this truth, is to remind them of it.

When a corporation or an institution repeatedly crosses the line of acceptable conduct and ends up ruining itself and others, a question that invariably arises in the aftermath is: “Where were the lawyers?” The answer, in most cases, is that the lawyers were either helping to facilitate the client’s actions on its road to ruin, or were studiously looking the other way, having persuaded themselves that it wasn’t their job to challenge the sustainability or wisdom or even morality of their client’s decisions. That the role of a lawyer is to make happen what the client decides should happen. That their job is to serve power, not speak truth to it.

That is the wrong conclusion to reach. It’s wrong because it flies in the face of a lawyer’s ultimate duty, which is not to his or her client but to the rule of law and the courts. It’s wrong because it surgically removes ethical and societal factors from the lawyer’s consideration, transforming the lawyer into a rote enforcer or a random subroutine in the larger system of productivity. And it’s wrong because many people, both inside and outside the corridors of power, can sense when something the client is doing isn’t quite right, and they will look to see what the lawyers are doing — and if the lawyers are simply sitting quietly with their heads down, then that’s what they’ll do as well. People follow our lead in murky ethical situations, whether we want them to or not.

I’m not talking merely about the obvious kinds of scandal and self-dealing, which make even the most battle-hardened lawyer pause and think things over. I’m talking about the unexamined assumption that if the client wants to do something in order to enhance shareholder value, that is the highest and ultimately the only goal worth considering, regardless of the human or social or environmental consequences.

This challenge is made even greater by the rise of systems in the enterprise legal space. It’s easier to call out bad behaviour by an individual than it is to call out bad programming in a system that “objectively” issues eviction notices to the most vulnerable members of the community. There is a role for the lawyer of a commercial client to flag the negative social consequences of the enterprise’s activities, to bring them to the attention of the client’s leaders and insist that they look closely at the human costs of those activities. Maybe the lawyer’s duties extend no farther than that. But they certainly do not extend any less.

Believe me when I tell you that enabling or tolerating socially corrosive activities is the most pernicious trap into which an enterprise lawyer can fall. And it is especially dangerous because it disguises itself as “service to the client,” a salve to your conscience and a False North to your moral compass.

So you need to remember, throughout your life as a 21st-century enterprise lawyer, that if you silently endorse or willingly enable a client to advance its own interests through harm to others or to the obviously greater good, you are losing your way. And as we’ll discuss in the next section, you are also in danger of losing yourself.

3. Self

Early in my career as a legal magazine editor, I wrote in an editorial that the most important person in your law practice was your client. Shortly afterwards, I received a letter from a health and wellness expert who took exception to that idea. The most important person in your law practice, he said, is you. Upon reflection, I’ve come to believe he was right.

It’s easy to overlook this fact — and at times, it can even seem noble to do so. Haven’t I just finished saying that the ultimate role of a lawyer is to serve others? Doesn’t this suggest that a lawyer should strive to diminish herself or himself, to substitute the good of others for the good of ourselves? That seems like it should be an attractive notion to a serving profession.

But self-diminishment and self-negation have proven to be destructive in all walks of life, and especially so in service-oriented professions like medicine and the law. What we need instead is a more fully developed sense of how we should regard our selves, and where we should place our selves, within the dynamic array of needs and priorities of the 21st-century lawyer.

Technology makes this goal more important, not less. The very first promise of the machines we build has been that they will make our lives better — that they will save us time and energy, allowing us to devote these precious resources to enhancing our freedom, leisure, and personal advancement. Raise your hand if you feel like technology has gifted you abundantly with these assets. Raise your other hand if you look forward to the rollout of a new technology in your office and how much you’ll enjoy the extra time it will provide you.

The truth, of course, is that even those technologies that really do save us time and effort rarely do so to our benefit, but rather to the benefit of our employers. Think of all the amazing technologies that have arrived in the law over the last couple of decades, from document automation to contract drafting to e-discovery: Have lawyers enjoyed a windfall of unallocated hours and clear horizons with which to better ourselves and those around us, or to engage in more fulfilling and higher-value endeavours? Or have those “freed-up” hours been immediately captured by others and filled with ever more work, all in service of “greater productivity”? Especially if you work for an employer who measures your productivity in hours billed, and for whom “freed-up time for you” is the last thing they want?

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are going to amplify and accelerate these trends and concerns. Remember that email from the legal tech company I quoted at the start: “AI has once again triumphed over a human lawyer.” Guess who the human lawyer in this story is.

So long as the prevailing philosophy of the corporate world is to prioritize profits over people, it’s going to be your responsibility to look out for yourself — and to look out for your self. There are two areas in particular where you need to focus your efforts.

One is the broad category of your health and wellness. You have to safeguard and strengthen them both. Previous generations of lawyers failed to do that, and they left countless unhappy lives, broken marriages, emotional breakdowns, and substance addictions in their wake. Quite possibly you were raised in a home afflicted by these ills; if not, you almost certainly know someone who was.

Now it’s your turn to run this gauntlet — but you can do better. You can reject the proposition that your highest or only function is to be a cog in someone else’s machine, to forever be on call for those who pay your wages, or to substitute your client’s judgment for your own on a daily basis. You can instead assert that your physical health, mental wellness, and emotional stability have value, apart from and above your work. You can invest in your health the way previous generations invested in CLEs and association memberships. This will pay off throughout the course of your legal career and your life.

But there’s another way in which tending to your self will be important: In understanding and applying your own unique value proposition as a lawyer.

The ironic effect of the rise of automation and systems in the law is that lawyers’ human qualities will actually become more important to employers and clients. Job interviews in the near future are likely to feature the question, “What can you do that our machines can’t?” Previous generations of lawyers shared a common set of basic skills that are now being automated and systematized, which means that from now on, a lawyer’s personal distinctiveness will be more valuable than ever. Your unique humanity will be your best selling point.

In a sense, this challenge will also be the great opportunity for your generation of lawyers. You’ll be able to re-engineer the blueprint, or reformat the DNA, of what it means to be a lawyer. But be warned: As systems and software proliferate, you will constantly be tempted to serve the machines that were created to serve us, to prioritize productivity over people.

You’ll have to resist and reject that temptation. You’ll have to lead the evolution of the lawyer’s role back towards the enforcement of positive social norms, the enshrinement and protection of personal dignity, and the pursuit of service to the improvement of lives. That leadership might be the greatest legacy of the 21st-century legal careers that you will build.

Conclusion

One final thought as we close this book. The greatest responsibility of being a lawyer is that what you do and say matters to many people, far beyond those who pay you for your services. It also happens to be a lawyer’s greatest privilege. That’s always been true of the legal profession, but the clarity of that truth will be especially evident in the 2020s, 2030s, 2040s and 2050s — throughout your legal career.

So here’s what I’d very much like you to remember: What you do matters. Who you are matters. When you speak out, it has an impact. When you fall silent, that has an impact too. Do not let yourself get lost in the noise and complexity of the machine; do not lose sight of the primacy and power of true service; do not lose who you are, and who you could be, amid the upheaval and disruption to come. Out of this chaos, you can forge new meaning and greater purpose. Out of the end of one era in the legal profession’s history, you can launch the start of another.

Your time is nearly here. The rise of the machines is almost over. Now it’s time for the rise of the lawyer.

How to save the lawyer development system

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Posted in: Governance, New Lawyers

I bring news from the places where lawyers gather. In addition to presenting at several law firm retreats in 2019, I’ve also spoken to meetings of law firm administrators, law firm knowledge officers, legal industry analysts, and law students and professors. As you might imagine, these are disparate groups that tend not to agree on a whole lot.

Yet consistently, in audience questions and hallway conversations, one common concern kept arising at all these events — that the lawyer development system is in serious trouble and could be headed towards collapse. This post is intended to describe the problem and propose potential ways for us to avoid what might otherwise be a professional disaster.

Let’s start by defining our terms. By “lawyer development system,” I mean the structured yet largely informal process by which a law student on her first day of classes eventually becomes a confident, competent lawyer providing legal services of value to clients. Obviously, this process stretches well beyond one’s call to the bar: Way back in 2010, I suggested that it takes seven years for a first-day law student to reach that point, although in a brief survey I conducted in 2017, some lawyers said it took an additional five to ten years after graduation before they felt like a “reasonably confident and competent lawyer.”

So by these lights, the lawyer development process requires anywhere from seven to thirteen years of a person’s life, starting from their first day of law school. I need hardly point out that in most countries, we credential lawyers three or four years into that process and expect them to bill well over a thousand hours annually by the end of their fifth. Much of the lawyer development process, therefore, involves experiential learning on real client matters, long before the point of confident competence has been reached.

Most importantly, responsibility for the lawyer development process is diffused throughout the legal ecosystem, with no single entity holding full authority over and answerability for the process and the results. This is what I mean by “structured yet informal” — if it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes an entire legal market (including law schools, bar examiners, law firms, and clients) to raise a lawyer, without anyone technically in charge of the whole process.

I personally think that’s a pretty ragtag way for one of the world’s great professions to sustain itself. But to all the criticisms we can level against this system, one defence is hard to refute: It works. Lawyers are here, and we provide people with legal services, and the world hasn’t ended. It might not be a thing of beauty, but the system works.

Until it doesn’t. What people in law firms and law schools have been telling me over the course of this year is that they’re deeply worried about the lawyer development system. Specifically, they’re saying: “We don’t know where the next generation of lawyers is going to come from.”

Let’s start with one of the legal profession’s oldest truisms: Law schools don’t teach people how to be lawyers. Not only is this inarguably true, I don’t see how it could be otherwise. If it takes an average of 7 to 13 years to really “become” a lawyer, law school can do no more in its three years than get the ball rolling. Law schools are not set up to teach people how to deliver legal services to clients, and they can’t be reconfigured to play that role without gutting them and converting them into completely new entities. If we want to have lawyer development academies that mix classroom instruction with supervised work opportunities for ten years before granting a license to practise law, that’s fine; but that’s not the world we currently live in.

And anyway, law schools haven’t had to “teach people how to be lawyers,” because the profession has effectively outsourced this job to the private sector. Most lawyers’ early development time — say, between three and eight years after their first day of law school — is spent working for more experienced lawyers (usually in law firms) rather than directly for clients. The well-worn path looks like this:

  • Step 1: Get hired as a new associate at a law firm.
  • Step 2: Work really hard.
  • Step 3(a): After a period of six to twelve years, accept an invitation to join the equity partnership, after which you can continue to work really hard while getting a cut of other lawyers’ revenue.
  • Step 3(b): Alternatively, anytime between the first and twelfth year on the job, leave the firm to join (i) another law firm, (ii) a corporate or public-sector law department, (iii) sole practice, or (iv) some other type of employment inside or outside the legal market.

I expect that would describe the path into the legal profession for at least 90% of the lawyers reading this post, as well as for their colleagues and supervisors. It’s so ingrained into the profession that we scarcely notice it anymore. We take it for granted that once we leave law school, a wide range of private businesses will welcome us into the working profession and pay us an annual salary to bill thousands of hours to clients while learning the intricacies and nuances of law practice.

Not every law firm does a good job of developing lawyers, of course. At many law firms, the quality of these early years of lawyer development is pretty abysmal: On-the-job experience substituting for actual training, trial-and-error learning taking the place of mentored instruction, and crushing billing pressures outweighing almost all other considerations. But this system more or less does the job of getting new law graduates from knowing nothing about law practice to knowing something about it, inside a (relatively) quality-controlled environment.

To be clear, law firms don’t play this critical role in the lawyer development system just to help the legal profession. It’s not an act of charity. They do it because they can bill their associates’ time spent working on basic, low- to medium-level tasks, pay them less than the revenue they generate, and pocket the resulting profits. And even though attrition will cost them most of these lawyers over the years, one or two will make it through this gauntlet ready to buy equity in the firm and keep the place solvent for another year. The rest of those new hires will eventually fan out across the legal market and keep the lawyer landscape populated.

This entire system, however, with all its benefits and faults, rests on a single and increasingly fragile foundation:

  • Step 1: Get hired as a new associate at a law firm.

Law schools, bar admission personnel, and (without realizing it) clients all assume that law firms will keep doing what they’ve been doing for years: Hire new lawyers and show them the ropes. The entire lawyer development system hinges on law firms acting as that bridge out of law school. If law firms were to stop doing that, or even to severely curtail their new-lawyer hiring, it’s not an exaggeration to say that this system would simply break down.

I submit that we’ve already entered this process, right now. It looks like this:

1. The “low- to medium-level tasks” that used to occupy associates’ time have been migrating from law firms to more cost-effective performers such as software, ALSPs (including a growing number of law firm spinoffs and subsidiaries), and clients themselves. These tasks are routine and highly procedural, yet law firms still want to perform and bill them the same way they perform and bill highly specialized partner tasks. That value mismatch means firms have difficulty competing for this work. The US economy has been surging for almost a decade, yet “the overall growth trend for demand for law firm services [in that time] has been essentially flat to negative in every year.” That lost demand for law firm hours is very probably “associate work” that is no longer being given to associates.

Courtesy Prof. William Henderson. Click to enlarge.

2. As the volume of (formerly) “associate work” coming to law firms declines, firms respond by employing fewer new lawyers. It’s not as if firms actually need more than a handful of new associates in any given year to become future partners — the rest are hired only to bill hours, and if there are no hours to bill, why hire them? The essential Prof. Bill Henderson crunched the data last year and found that the number of entry-level jobs in private practice in the US declined from 20,611 in 2007 to 16,390 in 2017, a 20% drop. Large law firms, which shoulder about a quarter of first-year lawyer hiring, brought in 139 fewer first-year lawyers in 2017 than in 2007, even though these firms’ non-first-year lawyer population grew by nearly 40% during that time (from 65,212 to 90,867).

3. Now consider that the migration of low- to medium-level tasks from associates to more efficient providers has only begun. The development of technology for automating basic legal work is accelerating, along with growing acceptance (by both buyers and sellers) that legal work should be carried out by the most appropriate performer or platform. The Law Society of England & Wales studied this phenomenon and concluded that “the number of jobs in the legal services sector will be increasingly affected by automation of legal services functions” — in fact, it estimated that over the next 20 years, the equivalent of 67,000 full-time legal jobs will be consumed by technology. Note that the US has about 10 times as many lawyers as does England & Wales.

In “Legal Professionals of the Future: Their Ethos, Role and Skills,” Prof. John Flood writes that “the effect of automation here could be dramatic, in that if junior associates were to be gradually culled from firms, the entire reproduction of the legal profession could be jeopardized, since law firms are structured around associates being promoted to partnership.” Joe Patrice at Above The Law calls this the path towards “the death of the junior attorney,” writing: “Sooner rather than later, firms are going to slow their junior hiring and focus on a narrower range of candidates. … If the training regime for young lawyers isn’t addressed, the population of competent attorneys … will simply dry up.”

Are law firms aware of this issue? Of course. But they are neither structured nor incentivized to do anything about it. They are far more interested in acquiring established partners with mobile clients to boost immediate revenue (even though those efforts frequently disappoint), in shrinking the size of the equity circle (thereby growing profits for those inside), and delaying partnership admission for their remaining associates as long as possible. They are fixated on maximizing short-term partner profitability, and first-year associates could not be further removed from that goal. Rightly or wrongly, law firms do not consider the future of lawyer development to be their problem. They are increasingly less willing and less able to take on this job.

So whose job is it? I come back to my initial observation that the lawyer development system has been outsourced to and diffused among many different stakeholders. Each of those stakeholders will be happy to tell you that it’s someone else’s job to train and develop lawyers; none of them wants to step up and take on this immensely important (and expensive) responsibility. But the outsourced-and-diffused solution has just about run its course, and something has to replace it — something unified, principled, systematic, and clear about its purpose and goals.

For my money, there’s only one correct answer to the question of whose problem this is, and who is responsible for finding a solution. In a self-regulating profession, responsibility lands squarely on the professional regulator. Whether that’s a state bar, a state court, a law society, or a special regulatory board, this entity is statutorily charged with ensuring that the lawyers who deliver legal services to people and businesses are competent, trustworthy, and reliable. That is job #1. If the entity cannot do that, then it might as well close its doors and forfeit professional self-regulation to the government. (Governments might be only too happy to take on the job if they feel lawyers aren’t up to it.)

Too many regulators are currently obsessed with pursuing “unauthorized” legal services providers, or with defending their own territory, or even with laudable goals like increasing access to justice. I submit that none of these activities is as central to the self-regulatory mission as saving and enhancing the lawyer development system, and I believe that regulators should make this their primary focus immediately. Governments can punish malevolent or rogue legal providers through criminal prosecution, and they can increase access to legal services by legislating open markets and restoring public funding for legal aid. But only lawyers can fix the lawyer development system.

How could we go about this? Here’s one suggested route forward for a professional legal regulator to consider.

  1. Drop all the extraneous activities and functions described above and concentrate your limited resources and political will on this subject.
  2. Identify the core professional competencies lawyers must possess at various stages of their development. Canada and Great Britain have already done this for you, although neither jurisdiction has yet implemented these competencies as part of their lawyer admission regime.
  3. Accredit any educational or training institution that will develop these competencies in lawyers over a minimum period of five to seven years at the start of lawyers’ careers. Inform law schools that they can keep their accreditation if they agree to deliver these competencies and prove they can do so.
  4. Invite law firms interested in participating in the development of competent lawyers to submit detailed plans for the hiring and close supervision of lawyers, in conjunction with an accredited competence delivery institution.
  5. Credential lawyers in stages, much as novice drivers are allowed to drive only at certain times and with adult passengers, or as medical interns are licensed only to carry out certain basic procedures. Abandon the absurd fiction that a newly called lawyer is entitled to do anything a veteran lawyer can do.
  6. Be fully transparent about this process to government and especially to the public. Let people access detailed assurances about the nature, quality, and reliability of what they’re getting when they hire a lawyer.

The foregoing is only an outline, and professional development experts can surely improve on it. But I don’t see that the task in front of us can be accomplished by anything much less radical than this. Law schools would fall and rise, creating a brand new educational landscape for lawyers. Professional self-regulation would be transformed into what it should always have been: keeping our own house in order so that society is demonstrably and thoroughly well-served by lawyers. Lawyers themselves would become confident and competent much earlier in their careers, accelerating their timelines for delivering real client value and improving their mental and emotional well-being in the process. By resolving one impending crisis, we can tackle and solve many other lingering problems.

It’s time to stop blaming law schools for not doing regulators’ job. It’s time to recognize that law firms won’t do this job anymore and shouldn’t anyway. It’s certainly past time to stop making clients do this job through lawyers’ trial-and-error learning process. It’s time the legal profession took the privilege of self-regulation seriously by unifying, clarifying, redesigning, and transforming the lawyer development system.

After the millionaires

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Posted in: New Lawyers

Earlier this week, I was gifted with the opportunity to join Mark Cohen and Mitch Kowalski on a webinar panel addressing a course in law firm management for international exchange students at the Bucerius Center on the Legal Profession in Hamburg, Germany. I had the enviable task of opening the panel with remarks around the theme, “What’s ‘broken’ with the classical way of doing things in law?”

In case it’s of any interest to you, especially if you’re just entering the legal profession or on the cusp thereof, I thought I’d pass along my speaking notes, lightly embellished with other observations I offered during the subsequent Q&A period.

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Richard Susskind has come up with many observations about why it’s so hard to bring about change in law firms. His most famous observation is one you’ve probably already heard: “It’s very difficult to tell a roomful of millionaires that their business model is wrong.”

I can attest to the truth of that statement, but there’s something important about it that we often overlook: The room is full of millionaires. And they’re millionaires for a reason: Their business model has been insanely successful.

Look at the AmLaw 100, the most profitable law firms in the United States. You have to go down to #75 on the 2018 list before you find a firm where the average equity partner took home less than US$1,000,000. That’s the average. At least half the partners in the top 74 firms took home more than that.

I like my job, I’m pretty good at it, and I’m one of a handful of people in the world who gets paid to do it. But I can tell you that I’m not making a million dollars this year and I don’t anticipate doing so anytime soon.

I think we need to grapple with these millionaires in the room and figure out what they mean for the legal innovation project. This isn’t just because of the obvious difficulty in persuading rich equity partners to abandon a business model that puts Porsches in their garage. It’s also because those Porsches themselves constitute a pretty good argument that the business model is actually right. It has made tens of thousands of lawyers amazingly rich. So what’s the problem?

From my point of view, the problem is twofold.

The first element of the problem is that the law firm business model has been amazingly successful and remunerative only for an exceptionally small number of lawyers. The great majority of private-practice lawyers work in firms of 20 lawyers or fewer, and most of them do not make a million dollars a year. Many of them earn in the low six figures, sure — but so do good electricians and senior civil servants. Quite a few lawyers earn less, sometimes much less, than $100,000 a year. And almost all lawyers, regardless of income, work really hard, sometimes as hard as the ultra-rich ones who are fortunate enough to have clients with very deep pockets.

The financial rewards of law practice are very unevenly distributed. That’s something law students aren’t often told, but it’s important to keep in mind as you start your careers. A few of you will win the fabulous compensation lottery. The rest of you will be over here with us, redeeming the cup-of-coffee consolation prize. The law firm business model is a runaway success only for a select few.

And rest assured, the millionaire lawyers have paid the personal price required to get there. I’ve known law firm partners who kept photos of their spouses and children on their desk, and thought to myself that they do that so they can remember what those people look like.

The second element of the problem, and I think the more significant one, is that the conditions that allowed many of these lawyers to become millionaires are starting to pass away. The traditional law firm model developed in a particular set of market circumstances. A new set of market conditions is now emerging, and the traditional firm is not really set up to deal with them.

This is an important point: It’s not that the law firm business model itself has suddenly stopped making sense. It’s never made that much sense, really. In most markets, working however you liked and charging whatever you wanted while passing on all your costs to your customers is not normally a winning proposition. But it works very well when you, as the supplier of services, enjoy:

  • exclusive access to the tools that allow people and businesses to accomplish their goals,
  • the exclusive right to sell these services, since you also have the right to regulate new competitors,
  • a client base that experiences extreme difficulty when trying to value your services, and
  • a client base lacking the knowledge, agency, and confidence to assert themselves with you.

In those circumstances, your biggest problem is not how to make money, but how to spend it all before the next truck full of it is dumped on your lawn.

But those circumstances are changing, and with them, the environment in which legal services are bought and sold is being gradually transformed. Call it “legal climate change,” if you like. The law firm business model is a lovely flower that developed and grew tall in the bright sunshine and gentle breeze of a long, lazy summer. But as they like to say in Westeros, winter is coming.

Here’s what’s the market for legal services has been experiencing over the past decade or so:

  • the emergence of new providers of legal services and solutions other than lawyers and law firms,
  • the decreasing relevance of regulatory restrictions against “non-lawyer” legal service provision,
  • the evolution of alternative fee approaches by which legal value can be identified, measured, and priced, and
  • the growth of clients’ confidence in asserting their rights as full participants in their legal solutions.

Lawyers and their law firms need an answer to these challenges. So far, they’ve found very few — mostly, I think, because they haven’t been looking all that hard. The millionaires aren’t looking, I can assure you. They have their eyes squarely focused on their own rapidly approaching finish lines, and they have no interest in accelerating the decline of the machine that prints money for them.

These lawyers are invariably older than average — in some cases, really old. And old people know better than most what the approach of winter feels like. They’re the ones who come up to me following my presentations and say, “I’m really glad I’m retiring in five years.” How delightful for them — I hope they enjoy their remaining years of practice and that lovely summer home in Tuscany they’ve had their eye on. But it doesn’t do much for the younger people they’re going to leave behind.

Soon enough, Richard Susskind’s problem will be solved in the simplest fashion possible: The millionaires will get up and leave the room themselves. Some will go willingly. More of them will go reluctantly, sometimes bitterly. A few of them, to be blunt about it, will be carried out — I’ve heard a number of lawyers “jokingly” say they intend to leave their firms feet-first. The millionaires will move on — though I wouldn’t count on them to be especially gracious about it.

But when that happens, it will leave the room, and the challenge, and the opportunity, to those they’ve left behind — to you. As you contemplate that inheritance, and mull over whether you even want it and what you would do with it if you did, I’d like to offer a few points of advice in closing.

  1. You don’t have to accept the model that’s been bequeathed to you. It was built by people with different values and priorities than you, in a different world than the ones you’re going to inhabit. Identify and retain the good and the valuable in that model. But be ready to jettison whatever lacks value to you or to your clients, and don’t second-guess yourself once you do.
  2. You should strive to incorporate other professionals and technicians into your new model, both internally (for productivity and quality) and externally (for client service and value). The future of legal services provision is multi-disciplinary. I don’t really care, to be honest, whether everyone in your room ends up a millionaire. But do not allow everyone in your room to be a lawyer.
  3. When building your new model and approach to selling legal services, start with clients. Go out and talk to people about their legal affairs, to business owners and managers about their legal challenges, and listen to the answers. Do not build your new models on the bones of the ones that came before you, or on the latest high-minded theory or management fad. Build them in response to the real needs of real people in the real world.

If you build legal services businesses that respond to current and future environments, to the needs of the clients in the markets that you want to serve, then what you build will be successful and sustainable. That’s all anyone can ask — and really, it’s all you’re ever going to need.

The revenue-neutral associate

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Posted in: Law Firms, New Lawyers, Talent

Last month, while writing an article about professional development in the law, I impulsively posted the following question on LinkedIn:

Quick survey for those of you who began your careers as law firm associates: How many months and/or years did it take before you felt like a reasonably competent and confident lawyer?

The answers came rolling in — more than two dozen in a couple of days. The lowest number of years offered was two, the most was ten, but the frequently cited median was five. Only one person said they never felt unready for law practice; everyone else said, essentially, “It took me years to feel like I knew what I was doing.”

Yes, small sample size and all that, but I think there’s a lot you can take from this. One takeaway is solace: If you felt overmatched and out of place during the opening months and years of your legal career, you were far from alone. Another is insight into the lawyer mindset: For all we try to project confidence in ourselves and our abilities, most of us suffered from impostor syndrome for years after our call to the Bar, and I’m sure many of us still do. A third is confirmation that, yup, law school really does do a terrible job of preparing us to be lawyers.

But what those results also affirmed for me was a strong suspicion I’ve harboured for years now — that expecting new law firm associates to perform billable work is kind of ludicrous.

There’s a widely held assumption in law firms that new associates should be billing hundreds of hours within their first months on the job, and many thousands of hours within their first two or three years. At more than a few firms, an associate’s failure to meet his or her first-year billing targets can permanently dim that lawyer’s prospects in the eyes of management or can even result in early termination. Associates learn this quickly, and drive themselves to generate work that can be added to a client bill regardless of its utility. Because most new associates possess low skill levels, their work product tends to be either (a) utterly rote and low-value, (b) riddled with errors, (c) subject to massive editing and/or discounting by partners, or (d) all of the above.

Clients, of course, figured this out years ago. Some of them indirectly advised firms of the problem when they began refusing to pay the billed hours of first- and second-year associates. Those clients without the confidence or leverage to withhold payment on first-year bills pushed for discounts or just gritted their teeth and signed off. But the message they were sending was the same: “Your least experienced people add very little to your value proposition. We don’t want to pay for their efforts. You should do something about that.”

Firms say they are doing something: investing in professional development, sending their new associates off for business training, and so forth. I’m sure many of these activities pay at least some dividends immediately, and others further down the line. But almost all these efforts share a fundamental drawback: they treat associate professional development as a part-time endeavour. Taking courses and acquiring skills is something associates do in between their “real work” of serving partners and billing hours. They’re expected to generate billable work with 90% of their time while slowly learning how to produce that work in the other 10%. It’s like having to earn a living as a cab driver while still enrolled in driver training school.

This drawback, in turn, is founded on a more serious issue: the common belief throughout law firms of all sizes that inexperienced, low-skilled lawyers should be generating revenue within weeks of their arrival in practice. Law firms that push law schools for better “practice preparation” and train their new associates intensively upon arrival are certainly trying to do right by their associates and their clients — but their good efforts nonetheless stem from an assumption that new lawyers should be “ready to bill” at the earliest opportunity.

I wonder if that’s realistic, and I wonder even more if that’s healthy. I don’t think a person can switch from being a full-time student (even an articling student) to a full-time fee-earner that quickly without experiencing some mental and emotional whiplash. By forcing new lawyers into high-target fee-earning roles this early in their careers, we’re trying to radically accelerate a development process that’s meant to take much longer — maybe as long as five or ten years.

My modest suggestion, therefore — especially modest because I suspect few firms will adopt it — is that law firms consider re-envisioning the role of the new associate, de-emphasizing the importance of billing and emphasizing instead the primacy of training and experience. What I’m suggesting is the revenue-neutral associate.

For at least their first two years in the firm, possibly longer, make the development of skills, knowledge and experience the primary activity and responsibility of new lawyers. Enroll them for months-long training in process improvement, customer service, business management, and new technologies, testing them at regular intervals throughout this period to assess their progress. Send them to client meetings to watch and listen and report back on what they learned, at no cost to the client. Take all the piecemeal, intermittent professional development that law firms provide to associates in between their “real work,” and make that their real work. Take seriously the process of turning raw prospects into polished professionals, because it’s really not a part-time exercise.  (I argued almost ten years ago that we should consider the lawyer development process to be seven years of education and practice, not just three years of education).

Can firms bill their associates’ efforts during this period? Yes, but only work that has legitimate value, and only to the extent necessary to help the firm to recoup some or most of the lawyer’s costs — that is to say, his or her salary, benefits, and associated support costs. That might come to only a few hundred hours in the first year, several hundred in the second, a thousand or more in the third — although smart firms will be pricing their associate-level work on a non-hourly basis anyway, making it even easier to support this kind of role. 

The goal of a revenue-neutral associate program should be that at the end of the designated period — two to four years — the new lawyer has been rigorously and professionally educated, mentored, trained, and skilled to such an extent that he or she can deliver real (if not extraordinary) value to the firm and its clients — and that in doing so, the lawyer has undertaken enough billable work to help cover his or her training costs for that period. A lawyer developed in this fashion will be equipped to provide much more valuable and expensive services than a typical third- or fourth-year associate who has had to figure things out on the job under tremendous billing pressures — if the associate has even stuck around that long.

Would this approach be workable for a $180,000 first-year associate? No — but then again, the $180,000 associate is a market abnormality based solely on big law firms’ desire to draw the attention of the most attractive law school graduates. The reality is that no $180,000 associate, no matter how smart or hard-working, is worth his or her salary — and the billing pressure firms place on these young people to justify their inflated salary damages these assets in their formative years. A revenue-neutral associate would be paid in line with greatly reduced billing expectations — and the promise of much higher-earning potential after a few years of high-calibre development. 

There is precedent for this idea. Back in the late 2000s, firms such as Frost Brown Todd, Ford & Harrison, Drinker Biddle & Reath, Strasberger & Price and the late Howrey LLP all experimented with “apprenticeship models” by which new associates were paid less but received extensive training and mentoring. It was a good idea that unhappily arrived ahead of its time — these programs were launched during the post-crisis recession, when it was hard to persuade new graduates to turn down high starting salaries in favour of lower-paying “training opportunities.” It’s a different world now: Graduating lawyers understand that they need marketable skills and know-how in order to have sustainable legal careers. Law firms that can offer a path to that future will have a competitive recruitment advantage.

This would, obviously, be a major change in how law firms view and use their associate lawyers. But I also think it’s a necessary, and in fact an inevitable one. For decades, law firms have been getting their clients to pay the training costs of their newest and lowest-skilled workers. No other business has the gall to do this — to send customers bills for all the low-value puttering around by the firm’s least useful employees and justify it as “training.” It’s not training — it’s years of immersion in the law firm’s least valuable and interesting activities, subsidized by the client.  

But now that train is coming to a halt. You know all about the myriad game-changing substitutes that have entered the legal market over the past decade — technology that can carry out basic legal tasks, outsourced platforms of flex-time lawyers and managed legal services providers, insourcing of work by corporate law departments themselves. These alternatives have arisen precisely because the market is tired of paying law firms inflated rates for low-value work by low-skilled associates.

Clients want a less costly and more effective replacement for the labour of unskilled yet expensive junior associates, and the market has been more than happy to oblige — it is offering equal or better options for “associate work” at a superior price. These options are not going away; if anything, they’re gathering momentum and increasing sophistication. The hard truth is that the day of the billable young associate is drawing to a close anyway. 

So think about the possibilities of a “revenue-neutral” approach to associate hiring and training, and how it could change the nature of professional development in law firms for the better. Law firms will have to find a solution to their associate-lawyer challenges before too much longer. The sooner this option is considered, the sooner solutions can be tried and a new approach to law firm associate development can be found. 

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Don’t think like a lawyer

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Posted in: Careers, New Lawyers, Purpose

This article was just published in the “I Wish I’d Known” column in the October 2014 issue of Student Lawyer, a terrific publication of the ABA’s Law Student Division. My thanks to Marilyn Cavicchia and Darhiana Mateo Téllez of the ABA for the invitation and opportunity.

“You’re going to learn to think like a lawyer,” said one of my professors in the first week of law school. She didn’t mean it as the threat it turned out to be.

Law degrees might be three years long, but let’s be honest, you’ve begun thinking like a lawyer within one. I still remember, in that first year, walking past a tall ladder propped precariously against a city building and thinking not about the worker’s safety, but about his liability.

It’s a small, insidious change. You start to view others not as people, but as tortfeasors, claimants, or consignees — parts to be played, with fault to be assigned and damages to be assessed. Cases become puzzles, games: Spot the issue! Identify the error! Feel justified as you deny coverage to the quadriplegic accident victim who didn’t see the light turn red. Distance yourself from him with the insulating, all-excusing logic of the law.  [do_widget id=”text-7″ title=false]

Thinking like a lawyer is easy and fun. But I wish that “thinking like a lawyer” had been provided as a complement to my already-installed “thinking like a person” system, not as a replacement for it. I wish I’d been shown the off switch.

Equally, I wish that law school had gone on to instruct me in “feeling like a client.” Few lawyers, and hardly any law students, know what it’s like to be a client — the anxiety, the vulnerability, the isolation that accompanies a problem we don’t know how to solve and whose consequences could ruin us. Many lawyers forget this, if we ever knew it or felt it in the first place.

I wish there’d been a mandatory second-year course called, simply, “The Client.” And as part of that course, each student had to visit a local lawyer incognito for a 20-minute consultation about a hypothetical problem. And to come back afterwards to report: how were you made to feel? Like the subject of a human event, or the object of a legal process? Were you engaged, or just acknowledged? Looked at, or looked through?

And, oh man, the price. What it feels like to ask a lawyer the seemingly simple question, “How much will this cost?” And either the lawyer hedges and quotes an hourly rate that doesn’t help, or she actually drops a real number on you. And in 10 or 15 years’ time, if you’re financially successful, maybe that number won’t faze you. But today, as a law student, with debts and middling job prospects — that number will chill your blood. As it should.

Legal education is a powerful drug; but if you’re not careful, it can drown out your instincts, stifle your emotions, and numb your heart. Law school molds and enhances your intellect, but frequently neglects to enlighten and illuminate your soul. The damage is predictable.

Great lawyers are more than just brilliant tacticians: they’re instinctive, heartfelt, caring, and real. No matter what else you do in law school, start learning how to be a lawyer like that.

Jordan Furlong is a lawyer, consultant, and legal industry analyst who forecasts the impact of the changing legal market on lawyers, clients, and legal organizations. He has delivered dozens of addresses to law firms, state bars, law societies, law schools, judges, and many others throughout the United States and Canada on the evolution of the legal services marketplace.