The New Skill Set

The Post-Normal Times is a column that follows trends in the legal industry, legal technologies, legal innovation, and access to legal services and offers insights into how new lawyers can turn them from agents of change into agents of opportunity. 

Legal practices, from large to small, and from private firms to corporate and agency legal departments, are under increasing pressure to do more with less—to be more efficient from top to bottom. This has led to the introduction of new types of people and practices in forms quite alien to legal practice as recently as a decade ago. It is not at all unusual these days to find a law firm with a COO, CFO, and CIO. And I have written in this column about implementing new disciplines such as legal project management into legal practice.