“We are tired of the existing narrative; we want to create a positive one,” declared Professor Bill Henderson earlier this month at the second-ever Forum on Legal Evolution hosted by Northwestern Law School. The “narrative” in question is that the current model of legal education produces graduates who are ill-suited for the current and future legal employment market. In his latest meditation on the future of the legal industry, Richard Susskind expresses a fear that “we are training young lawyers to become 20th-century lawyers and not 21st-century lawyers.” Specifically, law schools are continuing to churn out graduates prepared to become “bespoke, face-to-face, consultative advisers who specialize in the black-letter law of individual jurisdictions and who charge by the hour” rather than the “flexible, team-based, technologically-sophisticated, commercially astute, hybrid professionals” the market demands.
At the latest Forum, Bill Henderson was joined by consultant Bill Mooz in laying out a practical, concrete plan to address this disconnect between a rapidly evolving present and a profession notorious for “moving forward by looking backward.” The invitation-only Forum is a symposium on emerging technologies and best practices with the goal of earlier and wider adoption of successful innovations. The implicit spirit of the Forum is one of sober incrementalism and trialability–rhetoric calling for an upending of the status quo was notably absent.
The two Bills began their portion of the program (“The Call for a College of Legal Operations“) by defining some general challenges facing law graduates: high debt levels and uncertain employment outcomes. Henderson posited that the legal services industry is afflicted by Baumol’s Cost Disease, which describes how, in times of rapid technological progress, the cost of goods falls while labor-intensive services (e.g. lawyering) get more and more expensive.
Their proposal asserts that while the skills required for the law grads to thrive demand something beyond the conventional law school curriculum, the deeply entrenched cultural constraints of legal academia thwart much in the way of internal systemic reform. Hence a College of Legal Operations as a needed complement to traditional doctrinal education.
So about those graduate employment prospects:
chart: Forum on Legal Evolution
The better the growth prospects of an employment category, the more likely to require knowledge of operations. (“Operations” being defined as a multi-disciplinary function that optimizes legal services delivery, comprising everything from data analytics, vendor management, litigation support, and more.) The field of legal operations–which has been termed a “quiet revolution” in the practice of law– is being created by practicing lawyers and others in a somewhat ad hoc and experimental fashion, with organization such as CLOC and ILTA serving to promote awareness of trends and best practices. The Henderson/Mooz proposal would formally acknowledge the crucial and growing importance of operations to the profession by establishing a curriculum of “operationally oriented boot camps,” internships, and certification programs.
The boot camps are to be taught by expert practitioners and organized into “modules’ focused on a different competency (Business, Process, Technology, and Data). The boot camps prepare students for the internships with law firms, service providers, and corporations (10-week internships for 2Ls, seven months for rising 3Ls). Four schools have tentatively agreed to take part in the pilot program for the College are Northwestern, Indiana-Maurer, Colorado and Osgoode Hall (Toronto). Among the corporations signed on are Microsoft, Walmart, Archer Daniels Midland, and Shell. Buy-in from corporate legal departments is key: “paid internships are the rocket fuel which will allow legal education to catch up.”
As Henderson noted in a recently chat with Joe Borstein, “The challenge for all of legal education is that these new opportunities are not packaged up and institutionalized like the old OCI process. But that will happen over the next half generation.” The success of the Henderson/Mooz proposal would be a pragmatic and concrete step toward that future. On its face, their proposed College would be a rigorous one and, let’s face it, current law students aren’t exactly cultivating a life of leisure. There’s only so much time in a day or years for a JD, so something would have to give. If the assumptions in this proposal are correct, eventually operations education will be less about “complementing” doctrinal education than reshaping it.
