Skills you need to have for the legal jobs of tomorrow.

Its not a very long list.

One of the questions that comes up often in my conversations with lawyers is not “do I have to upskill?” but “what do I have to upskill for?”. This question doesn’t carry the same meaning today as it did even say, a decade ago. Then, it meant some combination of “what areas of law should I focus on?” and “where should I go and work to apprentice?”. Now, it is more along the lines of - “How do I continue to stay relevant?”, “how do I rescue myself from a career plateau?”, or “how do I get to do the legal jobs of tomorrow, and not yesterday?”

There is a certain degree of framing involved in terms of “what problems should I be solving?” or “what should I really care about?”. But the answer in my view is agnostic to considerations of sectoral preferences. The answer should be for all lawyers no matter where they are situated, or what their work entails. The sort of skill set summary that needs to find its way into our law school curriculum of the 21st century, now far overdue.

I feel there are two that count as the most important:

Design.

Here, I could be accused of repackaging age-old concerns regarding “professional training” with a better sounding phrase, but I am not. Young lawyers struggle to build businesses or understand the ones that they work in, not because the law or legal processes are professionally intimidating, but because they are unable to think of how a service or a product is designed. Successful lawyers and legal service firms often pay attention to how their services are designed, how the users experience them and how it contributes value. The idea is not new, and the best lawyers/law firms incorporate practices that reflect the design thinking of their successful founders or partners. Unfortunately, the lesson rarely trickles down deep and gets lost in the imagination of minions say, as “organisational policy”. While that could still be sustainable - if you are building a career or growing a business, how you design your service offering is often the difference between growth and death. How you distinguish your vision from that of others and what you choose to implement and how, and why?

Overemphasising legal skills is an old bane of the profession. Most quality service offerings are great not because of the legal skills of the persons involved but their ability to design and manage a meaningful platform, for those who require them and those that provide them. A specialised team (say in a law firm) that allows you to experience niche problems and develop expertise exists not because someone got very good at X area of law but because someone thought that this could be an interesting way into a client problem statement and designed a solution around it. Technology now allows for the creation of “legal products”. Whether a service or product, the differentiating factor between one that works and doesn’t lies in its design.

While it is common for law schools to offer programs combining management and science with the law, it is intriguing that design is still an afterthought in a world where the success or failure of most lawyers today more than ever depends on how they design their careers, their businesses and customer experiences.

I predict that the most successful use of a legal education over the next few decades will involve its application in the development of products, and also to some degree - flourishing in roles that involve re-designing and re-imagining how services are structured and delivered. We cannot afford to be under-prepared and irrelevant by not starting to think about design today.

Sales.

An old complaint that lawyers have about each other. We are good at selling but not. Marketing and selling are both ignored (even discouraged as irrelevant) in the legal education track, and in most continuing professional education efforts. The legal profession no longer works like a narrow artisanal offering and cannot sustain itself only as a word-of-mouth, reputation and status driven lifestyle choice. These feudal traits are unnecessary for the people who matter - the customer. Putting the customer first and in front is the hallmark of a salesperson. The art of selling is after all, much more than about closing the sale. It involves a study of connecting with the purchasing decision.

The purchasing decision is the most important aspect of every legal business. Even more important than say, the decision of a court, though more going your way could help a favorable purchasing decision. No body of work speaks for itself, and your best customers don’t necessarily come to you. Your ability to define and grow your boundaries is almost entirely dependant on the mini-sale transactions that are inevitable in your day. That you are not trained to a basic level to navigate the world of marketing and selling to those that matter the most (if it needs to be said again, your clients), how do you not feel handicapped and terrified, especially even before you are able to have that “body of work” that can do some speaking.

For young lawyers to find their first clients, for older lawyers to be able to have better clients, and for newish lawyers to identify what legal product or solution might work - an inch of dust will settle and nothing will move without developing your style and art of the sale.

Design might be seem like aspirational skill, but sales is a skill for survival. You may be less successful riding on other people’s design coattails but might pass legibly with honours on the strength of commitment. Ignore sales at your peril - you will cut yourself a thousand times if you aren’t in a position to sell yourself, your ideas and your business the way you should.