Lawyers search for an edge, the thing that differentiates them and attracts more clients. In a world with lots of lawyers, having an edge can make the difference between being the rainmaker and just getting wet. Lawyers in law departments are not immune. Clients want more from in-house lawyers than the ability to revise a contract. They want real world savvy, politically adept, strategic thinking lawyers who will give their businesses advantages.
Not a problem for you, though. You went to a top law school, got the highest scores on anything that came your way, and are employed at (or did your finishing-school stint at) a top law firm. With all the firepower you pack, clients are sure to appreciate your edge as an elite lawyer.
The Rules of the Game Changed
Except, now clients don’t value introverted, grade curve bending, legal atom smashers as much. In a recent article published in the Harvard Business Review, Heidi Gardner presented the results of her research showing collaboration helps drive law firm and individual lawyer results. Dr. Gardner, a distinguished fellow at the Center on the Legal Profession and a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, included three law firms in her research. Summing up the results of her study, Dr. Gardner said:
For a firm, the financial benefits of multidisciplinary collaboration are unambiguous. Simply put, the more disciplines that are involved in a client engagement, the greater the annual average revenue the client generates… My research clearly shows that professionals who contribute to colleagues’ client work sell more services to their own clients.
Collaboration and its related skills pop up in another context. In a recent Fortune article by Geoff Colvin (“How to build the perfect workplace”) collaboration shows up as a key attribute for the new “it” worker:
As technology takes over more of the fact-based, rules-based, left-brain skills — knowledge-worker skills — employees who excel at human relationships are emerging as the new “it” men and women. More and more major employers are recognizing that they need workers who are good at team building, collaboration, and cultural sensitivity, according to global forecasting firm Oxford Economics. Other research shows that the most effective teams are not those whose members boast the highest IQs, but rather those whose members are most sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of others. MIT professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland, a renowned data scientist who directs that institution’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, has aptly summed up the new reality: “It is not simply the brightest who have the best ideas; it is those who are best at harvesting them from others. It is not only the most determined who drive change; it is those who must fully engage with like-minded people. And it is not wealth or prestige that best motivates people; it is respect and help from peers.
Wait a minute, what they say can’t be correct. You learned your skills in the “look left, look right, only one of you will survive” world of law school. You honed your abilities in the “whoever has the most billable hours wins” arena of the law firm. You have negotiated one-on-one with counterparts in other top legal organizations around the world and have shown that you can pin anyone in the intellectual wrestling match of law. How can it be that clients now want team building, collaborative, and culturally sensitive people?
The New Role of the Knowledge Worker
If culture change is difficult, and there is no question that it is, re-training lawyers is more difficult. Take someone who for 20 years has been graded and coached to succeed on their own and who has done well and then tell them it is time to collaborate and you will get a frosty look. Dr. Gardner touches on some of the barriers to collaboration in law firms:
it’s no secret that the organizational structure, compensation systems, and cultures in many, if not most, professional services firms favor individual contributors rather than team players. Up-or-out promotion systems encourage rivalry among junior associates, and the competitive values become so ingrained that the winners find it counterintuitive to collaborate when they become partners.
The harsh reality all knowledge workers face is that a computer can beat the pants off of us when it comes to performing certain tasks.
Trying to outperform a computer just won’t work.
When I was a paralegal, I led a team of paralegals finding, reviewing, sorting, and organizing documents for a big case. When the lawyers needed documents from the long rows of filing cabinets, they came to the paralegals and asked. We spent so much time with the documents we could pull out what the lawyers wanted using our indices and collective memory. Today, simple Boolean searches in the document database would do a much better job than we did. This simple story is being repeated every day, but in ways that involve more advanced concepts than simple document searches.
As the quote from Geoff Colvin points out, lawyers are not unique in confronting a market seeking new skill sets. Think of the changes financial analysts face. In the past, financial analysts would create complex spreadsheets, sifting through reams of data to find those nuggets that would guide the business. Today, computers using big data sets and sophisticated software can find nuggets that would have fallen through the analysts’ screen. The analysts’ job is to figure out how to interpret and use those nuggets. The consulting world has confronted this change. Large strategic consulting firms would use teams of junior consultants to crunch the client’s data. Today, that work is either in-sourced with the client’s computers doing the crunching our outsourced with small boutique firms using computers to do the crunching. The consulting firm’s job is to help interpret and apply the results.
Lawyer 1.0 Meet Lawyer 2.0
Lawyer 1.0 was the “left-brain” lawyer, but lawyer 2.0 must be the “right-brain” (and left-brain) lawyer. That doesn’t mean the lawyer can skip having the legal skills he or she uses today, any more than the financial analyst can skip knowing how to manipulate numbers. It means the lawyer will offload on to computers the routine, repetitious, and left-brain oriented work as fast as the computers can pick up doing that work, and focus on the skills which computers can’t do today.
The beauty of technology is not what it takes away, but what it gives. Many people describe technology by talking about the things it removes from our daily lives. We don’t have to do this task or the other task, because the computer will do it for us. Tired of doing the same thing over and over again? No worries, we can program a computer to do the task over and over, and the computer won’t get tired. It will take that mundane work away from you.
While it is great to stop doing the boring and repetitive work, assuming that your entire revenue model isn’t built on doing boring and repetitive work, the real treat is gaining the time formerly spent on that work. This is time that you can put to good use by exercising that skill set computers still can’t replicate: being human.
I’d like to see a computer hug and comfort a client.
Maybe the day that the robotic hug equals the human hug will come, and perhaps that day will get here sooner than we think, but it isn’t here today. As people, lawyers have the edge on computer when it comes to interactions. People like interacting with people. Even when the computer can do something more quickly, more accurately, and more cost effectively, humans prefer humans. We connect with people; we interact with machines.
The Introspective Lawyer
The struggle between Lawyer 1.0 and Lawyer 2.0 may be more difficult than between Analyst 1.0 and Analyst 2.0, because of the way lawyers define themselves. Most analysts I know see what they do as a stepping-stone to something else. Financial analysts (and the same can be said for analytic roles in marketing, operations, and other areas) learn how to find and analyze data as part of skill building. Their goal is to move into more strategic roles, perhaps ending up as the CFO. As their careers progress, they give up the number crunching work that is more routine and time consuming.
Most lawyers, however, typically do not see themselves moving on to roles outside the law. For many reasons, the routine and time-consuming work lawyers do tends to stick with them throughout their careers. Sure, some law firm partners and some senior law department attorneys escape from that work. But, the vast majority of attorneys draft pleadings and contracts and do other similar work until the day they retire. These lawyers define themselves by the work they do and they have revenue models built around doing this work. It is difficult to move from that role to one where the work is less tangible and the primary focus is on interpersonal skills.
That assumes, of course, that the lawyers want to move to those interpersonal skill roles. Many don’t. It becomes even more difficult when the revenue model must move from effort (time spent) to value. These are two of the many reasons why moving from Lawyer 1.0 to Lawyer 2.0 will not be easy for lawyers.
Perhaps the biggest reason lawyers will have difficulty with the change lies in the problem of seeing the future with computers. Most lawyers are skeptical that computers will take over much of what they do. Even when confronted with the significant advancements made in technology during the past two decades, they still find it difficult to see a future involving technology. For many reasons (read Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow) these lawyers will maintain the status quo.
For clients, that leaves one option — going around the lawyers. That circumnavigation trend has started and will continue. The only real question is whether lawyers will get past their status quo bias quickly enough to salvage their future.
