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The Future? | | | What does it look like? | |
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> | | | | The problems of the current system are myriad, and we have heard them enough in class and seen them in our readings to know what they are. Clients are demanding lower fees, and firms are continuing to expand. Globalization is providing companies with access to legal resources at lower rates and making the U.S. market less competitive. Technology is speeding up this process. But where do I fit into all of this? What kind of lawyer can I be?
I don't know what kind of lawyer I'm becoming. I don't know what kind I am becoming because I don't know what my options are. I understand what people mean when they say that the current system is unsustainable. I understand why it is unsustainable. I just have trouble figuring out what that post-white-shoe world looks like. Will attorneys become free lancers? Will they be subcontractors hired for a single matter, bidding with a prime? Will lawyers break apart into smaller boutique firms, only to begin the process of merging and creating megafirms again in a couple of decades?
Or, maybe instead of thinking about what it is going to look like, maybe I should be thinking about what it could look like? Somewhere out there, someone has at least a vague vision of these alternatives, right? Here is one guy's take on the future. He compiled a set of seven characteristics he believes will be common among successful legal careers in the future, including having multiple clients, greater specialization, an increased focus on preventing problems instead of litigating them, and "a high degree of connectedness." | |
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I think this is a pretty good start. You can see a good deal, by standing on this not-so-giant's shoulders and using your own telescope. | | | What can we do differently? | |
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< | Mentorships
As far as first-years are concerned, I think there are steps we could take and questions we could ask that will make the future at least fathomable. Simple things, like mentorships, could do this for us. | >
> | Mentorships Experiential Learning | | | | |
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> | As far as first-years are concerned, I think there are steps we could take and questions we could ask that will make the future at least fathomable. Simple things, like mentorships, could do this for us.
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"Mentorship" is the name of a relation, I suppose, like "friendship." But if we have to make a neologism out of "mentor,"—which denotes not a relationship, but a person, like "teacher," or "friend,"—we're probably better off following the modern tendency to make verbs out of nouns, reflecting the compression of being into activity under discipline of time that is modernity. In that case, we would make "mentoring," which is an activity, like "teaching" or "collaborating." In fact, mentoring is teaching through collaboration. Clinical legal instruction is mentoring, while celestial legal instruction is not. Hence my increasing unwillingness to practice celestial legal instruction, in which I was trained. | | |
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> | | | | Mentorship is a tremendously underrated resource. We should look to those with greater experience, who can teach us the skills (and help us to meet the people) we need to succeed in whatever arena we choose. Someone out there has knowledge that will be valuable to you. Why reinvent the wheel when someone else can hand you their experience and let you build upon it? This makes sense from an employer's perspective, as well. Instead of having employers invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in training us during the first few years as associates, law schools should provide students with real life opportunities to engage in solving real world problems. Maybe if we entered the world as profit-centers, as opposed to costly drains on resources, firms wouldn't have so much trouble getting clients to pay for our work. | |
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Correct. But once you are a "profit center" (which we could define in a less inscrutable fashion as "once you have a self-sustaining practice") the terms on which you would "associate" yourself with such an entity would have to be different, too. Your self-sustaining practice has equity. If you associate with a larger practice, it must purchase that equity. In the negotiation over the sale of the equity, you are also negotiating the degree of your power of independent operation. None of this is unprecedented in any way: law practices in every legal system (except at the level of dinosaur scale and adaptability that has been fashionable as an employment destination of Columbia students for the last little while) have been growing and shrinking by this means since forever.
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> | "Mentorship" may be too narrow a word for what I envision. Perhaps an "Apprenticeship," managed by mentors whose collaboration is devoted to enhancing an experiential work-study program is a more accurate description. The Law School Firm is one way of providing this kind of collaborative instruction. By enabling students to opt out of a third year of theory-loaded academia and instead doing high-stakes, real world work, you allow students to acquire skills that make them valuable to clients and make them viable as agents of change. Providing law firm mentors to guide and direct client work would allow students the degree of autonomy we need to build confidence and, of course, augment our professional networks. Furthermore, you enable them to demonstrate lawyerly ability, as opposed to mastery of issue-spotting. Rather than allowing success or failure on an exam to be the metric, it would be the success that follows "failure" (or, simply, "mistake") upon which we would base the effectiveness of our education.
Another option is the Law Without Walls program. Students collaborating with practitioners, academics and one another in order to solve contentious legal questions, utilizing a broad range of resources, contributes immensely to both the education of the students involved, as well as to the overall knowledge and creativity available in the legal market. It also serves as a model for the way we should conduct business in the future. Global collaboration and study is imperative in 2013, and it is at least as important to learn to navigate technology and modernity as it is law firm recruiting dinners - especially since only one of those affords us autonomy in the future. This model forces a shift in the power structure and a new delivery system for high quality talent. Rather than funneling us through the hallowed halls of Big Law, we empower ourselves to circumvent these over-chlorinated pools of talent and, instead, broaden the base from which we select collaborators to truly provide the most effective service. Nothing against Big Law, there is no question that the full-service model has its advantages and can teach smart attorneys to work even smarter - and these sweeping generalizations do not apply to every branch of every big firm - but everyone, even shareholders, should be thinking of new ways to improve upon the service we provide. Lastly, this kind of a shift in the concentration of power allows young attorneys with an interest in social change to effectuate those changes by connecting with like-minded individuals and drawing from a broader archive of human knowledge. | | | Think about the Client |
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