“I’m working on myself, by myself, for myself.”
— Harvey Specter, Suits
When I was 17, I played golf almost every day, and one day during a round an extremely successful businessman at the club told me that if I wanted to be any kind of success I should take an MBA. At that stage, I had already signed up to read law and I was coming from a family where no-one had been to university before me. My father had done well in business without any qualifications (other than a pilot’s licence that he worked day and night for in his late 40s), so I started life with the misguided preconception that you either hustled business without qualifications or you got qualified in something very technical and didn’t need to get a formal business education.
I now look back at my decision to take an LLM and think to myself, what information do I use from my LLM in my day job? I am searching for the longer term value of it. I am seeking its return on investment. It would be wrong to say it has been without value, because it undoubtedly helped me get my first legal job, but I don’t think I attribute much more to it than that. It made me look good on paper.
On the premise that one day my career would progress to legal counsel in a business environment or partnership in a law firm, my year on the LLM would almost certainly have been better spent doing an MBA and honing my mind to focus on business strategy, management techniques, accounting matters, and leadership skills.
We currently find ourselves in a place where digital disruption and artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the way we are all practicing the law, and they will continue to do so. Law firms have to adapt quickly to a technological revolution and equip themselves for a new horizon. Some legal functions are set to become entirely automated, but that’s not to say that lawyers will become extinct. Lawyers may just end up with more time to focus on other aspects of their wider business. There will be more time to think about how the application of our knowledge can be better deployed to meet the needs of our clients.
I know for sure that, as a partner in a law firm, I never have enough time to do all of the things I would like to do to develop the business. I could do so much more if I were freed from some of the more monotonous processes that I face each week. The wave of change is exciting; it is not something for lawyers to be scared of, but it does shift the balance of skills that lawyers are required to have in order to advance their careers.
Instead of time spent on jobs like updating documents for changes in law, there will be extra time for strategising on how to win new business, more time for investment into training people to outstrip the competition, and additional time to spend with clients.
It won’t be easy to rewire lawyers, who are traditional creatures by culture, but if law firms and businesses employing lawyers want to succeed, they will need to re-tool the profession for the brave new world ahead.
I am a fan of rewriting the rules of entry into the legal profession. Undergraduate law degrees, in my opinion, should be taught in two years, with a business skills course bolted onto the third year, and the UK’s legal practice course should incorporate more of an apprenticeship-based approach to teaching by allowing students to sit within the non-legal functions of businesses and law firms during the course, to understand the practical challenges faced in a broader commercial context.
That sort of bold reinvention of the profession’s foundations won’t happen fast enough for the young hopefuls studying law now, though. Those people need to be dynamic and make smart choices about their educational needs based on the direction of the tides. Those choices are not made easy by the intellectual snobbery in the profession, which will, in some quarters, be resistant to a shift of balance away from the raw acquisition of legal knowledge.
Acquisition of legal knowledge is fundamental, but is it is simply one of three pillars of equal weighting in legal business. Those pillars are:
1) Acquiring knowledge (both in a classroom and in an office/courtroom);
2) Applying knowledge to achieve the optimal outcome; and
3) Packaging legal knowledge and application of legal knowledge to sell to clients.
All of three pillars apply to in-house lawyers in the same way as they apply to private practice lawyers. I hear complaints all the time that companies with in-house counsel often exclude their lawyers from discussions, negotiations and disputes that they should be party to because the lawyers at hand are not commercial enough in their application of knowledge and their packaging of their service to the business. All lawyers, as a business-facing resource and service function, need to be wired to solution-driven thinking, and business skills training could help bridge gaps between the inclination of lawyers to identify risks without properly quantifying them or seeking ways to mitigate them.
Some law firms in the UK have already dabbled with adding MBAs and MBA components to their graduate intake training programmes, and others are experimenting with “earn whilst you learn” approaches to becoming a solicitor, but it has not universally caught on. There is also a debate over when in a lawyer’s career the MBA skills are best acquired. I would argue that a greater degree of business skills training is required at entry level, but more importantly, I think all partners in law firms should be required to complete MBAs to improve the management functions of firms.
Lawyers must become better business people, but as Harvey Specter in Suits says, “the only place success comes before work is in the dictionary”.
Jayne Backett is a partner at Fieldfisher LLP in London specializing in banking transactions, with a particular focus on real estate financing. Fieldfisher is a 600-lawyer European law firm, with a first-class reputation in a vast number of sectors, specifically, financial institutions, funds, technology and fintech, retail, hotels and leisure, and health care. Jayne has a depth of experience in mentoring and training junior lawyers and has a passion for bringing discussions on diversity in law to the forefront. She can be reached by email at [email protected], and you can follow her on Twitter: @JayneBackett.
