What skills do the next generation of lawyers need?

[divider height=”30″ style=”default” line=”default” themecolor=”1″]

Our resident law-tech enthusiast, Jonty, writes about his experience attending Legal Cheek’s The Future of Legal Education and Training Conference held on Wednesday 23 May 2018. The original forum post can be found here.

[divider height=”30″ style=”default” line=”default” themecolor=”1″]

I was lucky enough to get taken along to this all day conference yesterday which featured both a cracking guest list and free breakfast & lunch, an all-round win really.

I thought you may find it helpful to hear a little bit about some of the things that were mentioned, as it’ll directly affect you all in the near future. You have to bear with me though, I lost some of my notes from the day so there will be parts mostly from memory.

Session 1

The morning session was all short talks (around 10 minutes) about innovation in the industry & what kind of future it may hold.

We heard from David Halliwell (Director of Knowledge & Innovation Delivery at Pinsent Masons) who spoke at length about how the roles within law are changing. He pointed some of the roles now available include legal technologists, legaltech project managers and legal engineers (although Scottish firm Cloch Solicitors are trying to trademark the term apparently, so be careful how you use it!). He went on to talk about how this reflects the move in the industry from the traditional route and how it may well open up to a point where we have far, far more roles on offer within law firms.

Next up was Isabel Parker (Chief Legal Innovation Officer at Freshfields) who spoke on the topic of diversity, namely cognitive diversity. The idea of pushing creativity within firms, rather than mechanical operatives. She mentioned the need to look for out of the box candidates, rather than hiring within their own image. So, on that note, I think we can expect more and more paths to pop up as the magic circle and others look for a different kind of thinker.

Parker also spoke about the need for law firms to encourage more people to get involved with technology but also to allow solicitors in firms the freedom to play (and fail) with technology. On that note, David Halliwell spoke about how Pinsent Masons have set up a programme which allows solicitors to have a coupon inhouse which counts as a “discount” against their billable hours targets, thus hours they plug into lawtech sessions are hours they don’t have to try to make up elsewhere.

Third session was from Shruti Ajitsaria (Head of Fuse at Allen & Overy). Shruti was probably my favourite speaker of the day and is generally just a great source of friendly information – if any of you want something to put on your CV you may want to look into (politely) contacting her to find out if you can go down to Fuse to see what they do down there, as she mentioned she was open to the idea yesterday of solicitors coming in and I doubt she would mind law students contacting her too.

Shruti spoke about how she got to opening Fuse after working as a derivatives solicitor at A&O for a long time and becoming frustrated at the lack of tech coming through. She mentioned an example of frustration during the GFC. A&O had a ton of derivatives agreements, which were created in Microsoft Word, printed off, signed and filed away somewhere. They had thousands of these, with 90% of them being pretty standard with identical clauses. After the crisis began, clients would need to know what the contract said about e.g. insolvency. So they would have to dig out the derivatives contract, from thousands, flick to the right page to find the insolvency clause. Or they needed to know whether the contract was signed. So they would have to dig out the derivatives contract, from thousands, flick to the right page and check whether it was signed etc. She said a simple monitoring program which could have automated this would have saved them hours of time but the problem was this was how derivatives had always been done and change is a difficult thing to push in law firms.

Fuse works with all departments of A&O and encourages them all to work with the tech companies and try to create something, with the end goal to try to develop a better work/life balance for their lawyers and attempt to cut down on the 60/70/80 hour week by moving the time-consuming manual labour over to technology.

Last up in the session was Julia Salasky, (founder of CrowdJustice) who worked for Linklaters and the UN before growing frustrated with the lack of creativity with which she was able to do her work. Everything is very much how it has always been, so she wanted to do something differently. She spoke a lot about having an entrepreneurial attitude and what that means; she basically boiled her most important lessons down to not being afraid to fail and accepting that there are some fires which you can’t put out as you work. Sometimes you have to let the fires in the business burn whilst you concentrate on other areas.

[divider height=”30″ style=”default” line=”default” themecolor=”1″]

Session 2

The second morning session talked about the skills that the next generation of lawyers need/the current missed when they were hired. It featured research from BPP and talks from Jo-Anne Pugh (Director of Strategic Design at BPP), Adam Corphey (Head of Innovation Technology at BPP) and Mark Collins (Global Head of Knowledge Management at Herbert Smith).

They had conducted research before the conference with 77 legal entitites (inc. Global firms, National firms, Regional firms, Small/Boutique, in-house etc) to find out exactly what they felt were missing. The 9 areas they highlighted for future candidates, with the ones they chose as most important in bold, are:

• Commerciality – i.e. commercial awareness, understanding the law firm is a business, understanding business trends etc

• Tech/Digital skills – i.e. the ability to analyse tech and data, awareness of lawtech (with exposure to it a big plus in their eyes – you can get exposure by heading to demo events etc)

• Written Communication – Interestingly, they said written communication is a major area which needs improvement upon hiring. They said the ability to write concisely with attention to detail just isn’t there in new hires, even when simply drafting written comms in the form of emails, and they spend a lot of time developing this.

• Client facing skills – Personally think it’s a bit of a weird one for them to have highlighted. It doesn’t seem an area that students can work on that heavily? Maybe Jaysen will disagree and come up with examples of how to develop these skills but personally believe this is something which law firms should expect to teach, not expect future candidates to have.

• Flexibility & Resilience – I think probably obvious that adaptability is a big skill to be sought out by firms at the moment. With Lawtech & the SQE coming in, there seems a lot of change to be afoot in the legal industry and they want candidates that they feel can deal with this.

• Professionalism – Not just how you present yourself at interviews (appearance, etiquette etc) but also other areas too such as your social media presence, as social media begins to play a bigger part of day-to-day professional life and moves away from being a totally separate entity.

• Time & Self-management – Law firms want, more and more, someone who can demonstrate that they can manage themselves and their time effectively. They mentioned examples such as demonstrating project management skills (even on a small scale such as planning and organisation of group activities).

• Teamwork – They highlighted the various real functions of what they meant by this. They don’t just mean playing in your local football team but rather displaying emotional intelligence and a desire to work within a team to better serve firms who are, increasingly, working across business functions with mixed teams.They also said email has begun to destroy internal social interactions and they want candidates who would prefer to walk across the office and actually talk to the person they need to.

• Creativity – The final skill they selected as important, they want candidates who are creative and have new ways of thinking. Try to figure out ways of displaying this on your application but, also, take it with a pinch of salt given I’m not entirely convinced they mean they want an entirely new breed of candidate, rather a slightly creative variant on the ones they get now.

[divider height=”30″ style=”default” line=”default” themecolor=”1″]

Session 3

The afternoon session had an intense two hour session on the SQE.

To begin with Julie Brannan (Director of Education at SRA) began with a discussion about why the SQE is necessary. She highlighted the big drop-off of student numbers between graduation with a law degree and commencing the LPC, pushing forwards the idea that whilst some of these graduates will have simply chosen a career outside of traditional law, it is unacceptable that the current method of LPC/TC means many will simply not be in a position to take a gamble, thus those of a certain social class will be discouraged from pursuing a career in law. She also highlighted the LPC pass-rate of white candidates (80%), Asian candidates (50%) and Black candidates (40%) as further proof that change is necessary to try to counter-balance the current situation.

However, details were light on the ground as to what the SQE will consist of. We know it’ll be 2 parts with 2 years of qualifying experience necessary. The 2nd part may be more focused on practical skills picked up by the experience, so in theory it would be done at the end of the qualifying period. The qualifying period is still up in the air, but it seems experience gained under the supervision of a qualified solicitor will be enough. In short; the SQE is coming but nobody seems to know what it’ll be.

After this it got fun (or irritiating depending on which side of the fence you sit on) as Thom Brooks (Dean of Durham Law School) had a rant about how the SQE is similar to Brexit – nobody asked for it and the details as to how it’ll happen are nil; SQE means SQE. After this, Richard Moorhead (Chair of Law & Professional Ethics at UCL) stood up and similarly offered a criticism of the SQE; how nobody really knows what is going to happen or what the effect will be. He called for a slow transition into it, a testing of areas alongside the current system. Crispin Rapinet (Training Principal at Hogan Lovells) similarly echoed the criticisms of this approach to change within the industry. He stated it’s impossible to move forwards and plan without any detail.

Maeve Lavelle (Director of Education & Community Programmes at Neota Logic) offered a different perspective on the SQE’s introduction, talking about how change is necessary within the industry from both a social perspective (given the increasing lack of access to justice but also diversity issues within law) as well as discussing the need for cognitive diversity within the industry, which is unlikely to happen quickly or at all if change isn’t embraced.

After this we heard more of the same criticisms of the SQE from Chris Howard (Professor of Legal Education at KCL), a discussion on the importance of pro bono projects from Linden Thomas (CEPLER Manager at Birmingham Uni) and a general talk about the value of a law degree from Andrew Francis (Professor of Law at Leeds Uni).

[divider height=”30″ style=”default” line=”default” themecolor=”1″]

Session 4

The final session of the day was quite interesting and featured a panel discussion of apprenticeships are affecting other industries and what training/development is happening within them. Euan Blair (CEO of Whitehat), Keily Blair (Director of Regulatory & Commercial Disputes/Head of Legal Training at PwC), Iain Gallagher (Senior Manager of Emerging Talent at Santander), Sam Harper (GC at Deliveroo) and Samuel Gordon (Research Analyst at Institute of Student Employers) had a general discussion about the pros and cons of apprenticeships, and whether the legal sector would introduce them or not. I’m not really going to detail out the points because my notes are pretty crap from this section of the day and also I’m not sure how relevant it’d be to you lot given your aspirations but the end takeaway from this session was that apprenticeships can be great or terrible, it depends on the person. More firms should do it as it can encourage social mobility far more than most other initiatives but it seems unlikely we’ll see the legal sector introduce them in any meaningful manner.

[divider height=”30″ style=”default” line=”default” themecolor=”1″]

Final thoughts

To be honest with you guys, it was a really great event and I was pretty lucky to be brought along to it. A lot of influential people were there to speak to and a lot of differing opinions to be heard.

The one thing that really struck me though was made apparent in Session 3. A lot of people talk about the need for change in the industry but when it comes down to it, people don’t really want it to happen because it may threaten what they have now. I got the impression, from sitting in that room and listening to senior legal figures mocking the SQE and the SRA within the safe confines of the echo chamber of the conference, that it didn’t matter what changes were really submitted, if they were wholesale then they would find criticisms of it and paint it as bad.

Not to try to defend the SRA, as I think they’re doing a pretty poor job of selling the SQE given the total lack of information they are releasing, but I think the approach they’re taking (drastic changes) are a better way of doing it than minor tweaks here and there. There isn’t much to dispute that the current system favours a certain background (ethnic, class and educational) and that this needs to be combated. A major overhaul followed by tweaks to actually make it work is, in my opinion, a more realistic approach to solving the current issue than to try it the other way round.

Anyway, thought I’d throw my two cents in at the end there, hopefully there is some information within this entire post that people find useful on how law firms are thinking about the future.

[divider height=”30″ style=”default” line=”default” themecolor=”1″]

[blog_teaser title=”” title_tag=”h3″ category=”” category_multi=”” margin=”1″]