Are lawyers suffering "arrested development," as the cheeky title
of a dead-serious article has it at Legal Week? Professional
development is one of the pantheon of gods whose worship is most often
honored in the breach, or else by procrustean insistence
that junior associates hastily choose a "specialty" in order to maximize
their billable value.
In that and an accompanying editorial,
the following question is essentially posed. Given that:
- Cash compensation alone is necessary but not sufficient
for career satisfaction; - So long as the billable-hour model reigns, time pressures
will continue relentless; and - Pressure to focus on a niche practice is unabated,
then
what can firms realistically do to address the
"growing disconnection between employer and employee across the
legal sector?" The traditional partnership pot-of-gold looks
increasingly distant and improbable, and is no release from time and
practice pressures in any event—"a pie-eating contest in which
the award is more pie," as skeptics put it.
Business as usual is not an option: "The
transition from gentlemen’s club to 21st
century business will continue, at pace." So the pertinent
question becomes not "what needs to be changed?" but rather
the far more interesting one, "what skills do we need to develop in successful
21st-century lawyers?"
Technical expertise will always continue to be a given, your admission
ticket. But as technology continues its innovative march, as
outsourcing begins to loom up faster and faster on the horizon, and
as regulatory reforms (notably, the Clementi Commission in the UK)
open new frontiers in law firm structures, what remains the characteristic
which cannot be readily cloned, imitated, or grasped by a "fast follower?"
Simply, what it’s always been: Deeply trusting human relationships
premised on the lawyer’s ability to communicate with both sagacity
and commercial and economic insight into the client’s issues. This is all the best firms have ever had to sell, and it must remain emphatically more so as commoditising forces nip and cut from below.
And
with this you get a "development" bonus: What
could be more professionally satisfying?
