Creating a Culture of Openness to Change: Reaching the (Necessary) Future of our Profession

My career has provided me with a front row seat to the drudgery of legal practice and everything surrounding it, everything from how lawyers are educated (generally short of two of the most important skills a lawyer can possess, namely how to practice law and how to run a business), inefficiencies baked into how attorneys capture their time, outsourced discovery and the myriad backgrounds of the lawyers that tend to fill project-based roles, to outdated business operations such as haphazard approaches to recruiting and retention by some of the biggest law firms in the country.

My primary focus, more recently, has been the reasons for the industry’s slow tech adoption (aversion to costs, risks, etc.) and why some companies more than others seem to be winning the lion’s share of attention from the nearly $400 billion U.S. legal services market. Who is doing what differently? What is working and who will be left in the dust once the technology sector of the legal services market reaches maturity?

And what sets legal services apart from, say, any other industry that has been overturned by the advent of technology, most notably A.I.? It is the opinion of this young, recovering attorney that inefficient business models that don’t incentivize innovation begin the moment law students step foot in their 1L classes. So far as Big Law is concerned, the roots of this traffic jam go back as far as how lawyers are trained and the slowly-changing requirement in the U.S. that only lawyers are permitted to own equity in American law firms.

According to Keith Maziarek, Director of Pricing and Legal Project Management at Katten and a founding member of the Legal Value Network (LVN), it is the path law firms take to arrive at their own profitability that causes confusion. “Challenges to profitability are numerous. Examples of such challenges can include client discount demands, inconsistent understanding of profitability models and levers among partners, difficulties in partner/client discussions around expectations and mutually-beneficial parameters, irrational legal department budgeting practices, flawed internal billing processes at firms, and likely several others.”

Keith’s role at Katten, as well as the fact that LVN now has over 1800 members in 14 countries, suggests firms are aware that pricing needs to not only be a separate function within a law firm’s eye toward its own financial management, but bundling related responsibilities including “strategic pricing, profitability, process improvement, legal project management and client value capability” makes sense for a large law firm interested in cementing its status as a forward-thinking organization that appeals to future generations of practitioners as well as the clients they serve.

The response to our current tipping point has been an explosion of new companies seeking to become major solutions-providers as well as a cottage industry of consultants whose purpose is to help firms navigate it all. The latter is where I’d like to offer my two cents specifically and pose a question to Legalverse readers. And that is which vendors, if any, solicit input from associates about how they design their products and services? In other words, are there any advances coming down the pike which are designed to meet associates where they are? Specifically to help lawyers respond to the growing pressure to do more with less? To help reverse the trend of attorney burnout and, dare I say it, dissatisfaction with their work?

This shift toward an emphasis on efficiency is happening whether law firm leaders, long reliant on the supremacy of the billable hour, like it or not and leaders will be smart to strategically adopt technical products with their finger on the pulse of what their attorneys need to derive greater satisfaction from their overall day-to-day^[1].

On the other hand, the billable hour is unlikely to go completely extinct any time soon; however, it has to be only a matter of time before technological advances, and client pressure to adapt, completely eradicate what has always been the legal profession’s knee jerk response to doing things, and that is “the way they have always been done.”

Finally, the legal profession will continue to experience turbulence so long as the industry keeps looking to the past for answers as opposed to the future. What will it finally take for lawyers to learn to pivot faster in the face of rapid changes such as those we’re seeing in the marketplace right now? As another example, what steps are the profession taking to absorb the record number of people interested in joining our ranks^[2], to reduce the constant push-and-pull that characterizes this profession, and to nurture the slowly-developing future of law practice needed to support law graduates’ insatiable (and not unreasonable) demand for well-paying jobs and Big Law’s limited capabilities for meeting these needs?

When all is said and done, will the explosion of innovation (and funding) we are currently witnessing make the legal profession more desirable? Less desirable? Create more opportunity for lawyers to take greater satisfaction in their work as well as opportunity for law grads interested in “non-traditional” career paths to successfully carve new niches for themselves? Only time will tell but I am cautiously optimistic.

[1] According to the 2022 Report on the State of the Legal Market: A Challenging Road to Recovery, published by the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center and Thomson Reuters Institute, problems of recruiting and retaining legal and other professional staff proved to be one of the biggest challenges confronting law firms that year. And the traditional response of throwing money at the problem isn’t likely to work well going forward. Firm employees and lawyers need to feel value and meaning in their work, to feel appreciated and recognized, and to have opportunities for growth and personal satisfaction. They need to feel as if they are making a contribution to something larger than themselves. (https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/law-firms-came-dangerously-close-to-losing-a-quarter-of-their-associates-in-2021) Availability of tools to streamline workflows, reduce repetitive tasks, and allot attorneys with the opportunity to emphasize quality over quantity is a reasonable solution to this problem.

[2] https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/number-of-law-school-applicants-up-an-unnatural-25