As I approach the end of my years in practice, I find myself thinking a lot about the next generation of lawyers entering the profession: what they bring, what they face, the challenges they are most likely to encounter. And most especially, how they will choose to carry the profession forward––in short, how they will lead.
Unlike my generation (I graduated college and law school in the 1980s), which presumed that the future would largely repeat the past (only faster, better paid and with longer hours), the rising generation will have a choice to make about whether to continue on the same path or take a new direction. Complicating that choice is that alternative paths or better options are not clear, without risk or widely accepted.
The next generation knows things will change; further, they know they won’t succeed by continuing to do things the way lawyers have always done them. They will need to drive large-scale strategic change, calling on leadership skills that are not usually on display in our profession.
Lawyers in my generation often confuse leadership with management, or with the role they’ve earned over the course of a successful career. But being named executive partner or general counsel or lead prosecutor doesn’t automatically confer leadership qualities, even if the post may demand them.
It’s true that you can learn to lead––it’s not just an attribute that a few people are endowed with, even if some people do have natural leadership talents. If you are thoughtful and empathetic, if you listen and are open to new information or options and if you are inclusive in your approach, you can earn the confidence of followers when you decide to lead. And you’ll note that those qualities can be exercised from pretty much any position within an organization––you don’t have to be on the top rung of the ladder to be a leader.
Next-gen leaders will need to not only demonstrate their ability to grow successful practices like many of my generation did: they will need a new vision to inspire legal teams to rethink how they work, influence others and serve clients. To do this, next-gen leaders will have to unleash the potential in their teams, rewarding their creativity and resilience and demonstrating how the impact of their efforts is far greater than the effort and inconvenience required to make changes.
The old brand of leadership is known for exhorting others to do more and bill more, often at the expense of personal well-being and attention to practice improvements. But doing more work that historically generated a lot of lawyer hours is not a strategy for success going forward; in the future, much of the “operational” work (meaning necessary, but not strategic work) will be performed faster and at drastically lower cost by technologies, clients using DIY systems and teams made up of experts who aren’t lawyers.
Next-gen leaders will have to convince their teams and their clients that changing the way they work, as well as focusing all their attention on strategic and higher value work, is not only realistic, but far more sustainable and lucrative over time. And that messaging will be tough to sell, nonetheless articulate. Many of us are still figuring out what is truly strategic versus operational work for each of our clients: next-gen leadership will need to communicate clearly how current teams can stop what they’re doing (which is really hard) and then articulate, define, support, enable, and reward change that moves teams in the direction of delivering only higher value services (which isn’t easy either).
It’s hard to make a commitment to change––to build a new professional future––when, for many amongst us, the target is still unclear, and the rewards lawyers reap seem firmly attached to continuing to do the work we’ve done in the past. So, what can we all do to help the next generation succeed as leaders who must forge a new path forward?
Sounds obvious, but this is the most important step. As Warren Buffet famously said: “It’s hard to convince a bunch of millionaires that they’re doing something wrong.” Listening to and encouraging change leadership is difficult for folks at the top, especially when those at the top define current success. But leadership is all about the vision for the future. While legal leaders have to be present, with an eye on current work, that focus can’t be at the expense of preparing to move successfully toward something “next.”
This “current” focus in our legal institutions, from law schools to leading law firms, is crushing the life out of any kind of significant change of course or alternate approach threatening “the way we’ve always done it.” My generation has effectively milked (and if we’re honest, even bilked) the system and our corporate clients for decades with overpriced services and business models built to serve lawyers, not clients. Our profession won’t withstand the stewardship of another generation following the same tired and abusive model.
Clients know there are better ways to get their work done; and when we’re being honest, most lawyers know it, too. The fact that it’s hard to change is not an excuse for kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with later, as if solutions and our clients will wait until a more convenient time. Leaders in this generation are effectively blocking any meaningful progress at re-inventing legal service and systems. Leaders in the next generation will be defined by their ability to break the hold of current leaders, energize the team and build consensus around a vision and get started.
My generation needs to either lead change with the next generation’s agenda in mind or get out of the way.
Job one for next-gen leaders is building new skills and mindsets in current teams and developing the experiential training and educational offerings necessary to assure that those entering the profession in the coming years are better prepared than we are for future change.
Lawyers already in practice may or may not have the legal experience or know-how needed to work smarter––using technology and data, process and project training, better business and operational skills to help us work better, faster, cheaper and with more quantifiable results. Training, collaboration with others who have complementary disciplines and new resources can help lawyers improve their service delivery and alignment with client business practices. Implementing these kinds of sustaining change practices allows us to continue to do the type of work we’ve always done, but in a smarter and demonstrably better way. If lawyers are rewarded not for billing more hours, but for efficiently solving more problems, we’ll have more time to spend on the services that clients value most––work that challenges us to work at the top, rather than at the bottom, of our law license.
Next-gen leaders will need to invest in comprehensive training for new and mature lawyers to learn new practices, and not just send folks off for a few hours of CLE each year in the area of their current expertise. We need to offer executive and people training for lawyers who will be asked to run fast-moving and agile teams. We need to emphasize the importance of skills beyond law that help lawyers resolve problems, exercise judgement, participate in business decisions and accelerate client goals.
Sustaining changes can also give rise to more experimentation with creative business and practice models that can effectively transform our legal practices to deliver new value: what I would call “higher value” work. This is the strategic and mission critical work that clients need their lawyers to focus on above all else. It includes developing expertise to meet new challenges, as well as business and practice models that are re-engineered to leverage artificial intelligence and multidisciplinary teams, quantify and avoid risk (not just manage or respond to it), and collaborate (with each other, with clients, with government/regulators, with stakeholders and communities) at a level that is both impractical and unimaginable in our current framework.
Higher value projects will require us to build and incorporate skills and experts from disciplines and professions beyond law: business and operations, finance, data analytics, tech, human resources, project and process management, etc. For those early sustaining change practices, adding experts in legal operations to legal teams (as senior contributors and partners, not just as administrative support) can help teams implement sustaining practices that improve the way they do their current work, and then push them toward the practices that will transform the profession into the future.
Closely related to the point above, the next-gen leader’s chosen business model will be one designed with client and user focus as the top priority; it won’t be one based on how lawyers see the world and practice law. There’s an old saying in the world of legal departments: clients don’t have legal problems; they have business problems. And they want their lawyers to be part of the business team that advances the company’s goals, not segregated into small groups of technicians who view the world through the lens of their own expertise.
Thus, the design emphasis for building future lawyer business models will be on aligning with clients’ business models in order to allow lawyers to deliver service that is adapted to how clients—not lawyers—work. The next-gen leader will be thinking more about anticipating what clients need to advance their businesses as a valued member of the business team; they will be focused on the market and systemic risks clients will face; and on how the solutions lawyers deliver can be integrated immediately into their business practices. Next gen leaders won’t build law firms or legal departments that rely on clients bringing them work that is presented with instructions; they will build integrated platforms on which lawyers and their clients can engage together––seamlessly, as a team.
Another requirement for next-gen leaders is transparency and a willingness to admit and correct failures as new-model legal teams experiment with both sustaining and transformative change.
Sometimes, clients aren’t interested in paying for perfection or waiting for legal teams to turn over every stone: they simply want measurable progress toward goals at the right cost, both in terms of cost of services and minimized disruption of business––commensurate with the value of the services provided. The best way for lawyers to demonstrate transparency and the results delivered is to set goals with metrics to measure the legal team’s performance, and then perform regular evaluations and conduct continuous improvement projects.
Without the ability to quantify the value of their work and the results delivered, tomorrow’s legal leaders will not be able to justify their legal team’s role or relevance to clients. Without new models that improve on and then replace old ways of working, lawyers will not only be at a competitive disadvantage as service providers for clients with sophisticated needs, they will also be unable to attract and promote the talent necessary for firms and legal departments to flourish. While this article is written with corporate clients and practitioners in mind, it’s worth noting that similar changes and outsized leadership challenges exist for individual and pro- and low-bono clients and their counsel. Leadership for change in corporate practice will have spillover impact on other practice areas, as well.
We need the next generation of legal leaders to step forward now, to help us re-invent the profession and prepare it and us for future success—so that we may continue to deliver on our profession’s promise.
