alt.legal: Alt Trek, The Next Generation (Of Law Students)

Yes, law school enrollment is dropping dramatically, a continued effect of the Great Recession. The traditional legal market is flat, and even though the number of lawyers is growing at the modest rate of 1.3%, legal demand remains flat, resulting in a decrease of overall productivity, and that means less jobs. Law schools are, accordingly, having trouble attracting the same talent. I have heard of top-30 schools instituting remedial skills programs to help 2Ls who struggled through their first years, due to the declining competitiveness of entering classes.

My colleague Joe Borstein and I – and many others in the alt.legal movement, and the ABA – have long believed that understanding the world of legal innovation and technology is a competitive advantage for young lawyers to succeed in practice. Enterprising law schools are beginning to agree, and finally, we are seeing graduates entering the practice with experience and training in innovation and technology.

These are the voyages of the alt-equipped lawyers, who are boldly going where no lawyers have gone before.

I recently discussed these issues with Daniel Linna (Michigan Law, J.D. 2004, former federal clerk and Honigman litigation partner), who is a Professor of Law in Residence at the Michigan State University College of Law.

Ed Sohn: Start with a little bit about yourself. Where did you get your start and how did you get here?

Dan Linna: After college, I had this IT career going, where I learned a lot about business systems and the value of data and evidence. But I always had this dream of going to law school, even though, like many people, I frankly had no idea what lawyers really did. When I first went to law school, I thought I was going to be a prosecutor, but I ended up on the Biglaw path.

So I graduated from Michigan Law, clerked for a Sixth Circuit judge, then I went to Honigman for nine years doing litigation and bankruptcy work, including a lot of troubled supplier litigation for GM. Eventually, I made equity partner at Honigman, I was finding success developing clients, and I wasn’t really looking to do something else.

ES: Sounds like a pretty successful career as a lawyer, by most accounts. Why teaching?

DL: I enjoyed my practice but I had also started teaching as an adjunct—negotiation at the University of Michigan and then litigation at Michigan State. Then, this opportunity came to become an assistant dean of career development. I started to think about ways I could join the law school and continue to teach, but also get students more proactive about their careers, get them ways to differentiate themselves.

I took that job, joined Michigan State, and we have done some exciting things. In career development, our “gold standard” placement increased 13.64% in just two years. Now, I’ve moved out of career development to focus one hundred percent of my time on teaching and building up LegalRnD – The Center for Legal Services Innovation.

ES: What is LegalRnD?

DL: Our first goal is to train 21^st century, T-shaped lawyers: lawyers with deep substantive legal expertise but also broad knowledge of other disciplines. Just having deep legal expertise isn’t enough to differentiate you—you have to work with multi-disciplinary teams to be successful. Process improvement, project management, data and analytics, knowledge management, technology… these are the foundational skills.

Our second goal is to conduct research and development.  We want to be writing and doing scientific, empirical research on the delivery of legal services.  And our third goal is to engage with the legal industry to deliver innovation, finding partners to test our research out.

ES: What are some of the outcomes from LegalRnD?

DL: Our students working with LegalRnD have been able to make some good progress in real-world contexts. One example is when we took a team of law students to the 55^th district court here in Mason, Michigan, outside of Lansing. We did a Kaizen event, worked with the court clerks and the chief judge, and we conducted some training in Lean. Focusing on process improvement, we were able to map out the landlord-tenant litigation process from the perspective of a self-represented tenant. In one week, we identified pain points and made some improvements in a short time period.

Another good example is working with Elder Law of Michigan, specifically with their hotline. Like most legal aid organizations, their demand was far beyond their ability to meet it. So we went in again with Lean resources, mapped out the process, and working with their lawyers and others in the organization implemented several improvements around how calls came in and how legal advice is dispensed.

It’s all gone really well, and again, this is all out-of-the-classroom experience and training.

ES: How ready are incoming students for this type of education?

DL:  Students are scared by the reality of the legal industry and the state of its traditional job market. That’s why, for those of us who believe in legal innovation and technology, we need to be better at explaining what it is we’re doing. We need to get students excited about the need for deeper and broader legal services.

Ultimately, law students do want to make the world a better place and help people even if there’s lots of reasons students don’t end up doing that (law school debt, among other things). We excite students about how lawyers can leverage legal innovation and technology to serve more people and deliver more value to the public.

ES: How else can legal education be better?

DL: Generally speaking, the traditional law school curriculum prepares students for traditional skills—writing, legal analysis—but doesn’t prepare them with other skills needed to deliver legal services, like understanding technology.

Career development is also crucial. I joined as an assistant dean in career development, and what we did in that office has been very successful, getting students to think about their careers very early and ask important questions. How do I develop the knowledge I need for the type of law I want to practice? What’s my background, and how might that differentiate me in the marketplace?

There’s also lots of room for more specializations. It helps provide training with a specific focus, instead of just taking classes to pass the bar. There’s bar prep to help you pass the bar; law school should be about investing into your career.

Another important point is teaching the business of law. I had a great legal education at Michigan, but I had no idea how the legal-services world worked. I represented GM during my time at Honigman and when I started, I didn’t understand the nature of their internal legal team filled with senior, expert lawyers. I was naïve about those things, maybe because I didn’t know many lawyers, but my time in law school didn’t help much.

This is a real need, understanding models for delivering legal services. Corporate legal departments are embracing legal operations and pushing their law firms to innovate. And it’s not just important from the law firm perspective. If you’re a prosecuting attorney or a public interest lawyer, it’s even more important to understand the business of delivering legal services, because you have to make the most of limited resources.

ES: Do you have any parting advice for law student readers?

DL: You just have to be really proactive. I strongly encourage students to read The Start-Up Of You, or at least the summary of it that’s online. Figure out answers to some big questions, like what kind of work you want to do and in what region you want to practice. You have to think about this as early as possible so that you can start networking in that practice or region.

Understand what people you’re working with will want from you: data, metrics, advanced analytics, technology. If you can understand that world, it will help you get a job!

Finally, it’s really important that you identify what you’re passionate about.  Yes, assess the marketplace and understand what’s in demand, but you can do that without losing touch with what you’re passionate about—they are not mutually exclusive.

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Ed Sohn is a Senior Director at Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent two years in New Delhi, India, overseeing and innovating legal process outsourcing services in litigation. Ed now focuses on delivering new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about ediscovery, legal managed services, expat living in India, theology, chess, ST:TNG, or the Chicago Bulls at edward.sohn@thomsonreuters.com.