Hey guys,
I was lucky enough to get taken along to this all day conference yesterday which featured both a cracking guest list and free breakfast & lunch, an all-round win really.
I thought you may find it helpful to hear a little bit about some of the things that were mentioned, as it'll directly affect you all in the near future. You have to bear with me though, I lost some of my notes from the day so there will be parts mostly from memory.
Session 1
The morning session was all short talks (around 10 minutes) about innovation in the industry & what kind of future it may hold.
We heard from David Halliwell (Director of Knowledge & Innovation Delivery at Pinsent Masons) who spoke at length about how the roles within law are changing. He pointed some of the roles now available include legal technologists, legaltech project managers and legal engineers (
although Scottish firm Cloch Solicitors are trying to trademark the term apparently, so be careful how you use it!). He went on to talk about how this reflects the move in the industry from the traditional route and how it may well open up to a point where we have far, far more roles on offer within law firms.
Next up was Isabel Parker (Chief Legal Innovation Officer at Freshfields) who spoke on the topic of diversity, namely cognitive diversity. The idea of pushing creativity within firms, rather than mechanical operatives. She mentioned the need to look for out of the box candidates, rather than hiring within their own image. So, on that note, I think we can expect more and more paths to pop up as the magic circle and others look for a different kind of thinker.
Parker also spoke about the need for law firms to encourage more people to get involved with technology but also to allow solicitors in firms the freedom to play (and fail) with technology. On that note, David Halliwell spoke about how Pinsent Masons have set up a programme which allows solicitors to have a coupon inhouse which counts as a "discount" against their billable hours targets, thus hours they plug into lawtech sessions are hours they don't have to try to make up elsewhere.
Third session was from Shruti Ajitsaria (Head of Fuse at Allen & Overy). Shruti was probably my favourite speaker of the day and is generally just a great source of friendly information - if any of you want something to put on your CV you may want to look into (politely) contacting her to find out if you can go down to Fuse to see what they do down there, as she mentioned she was open to the idea yesterday of solicitors coming in and I doubt she would mind law students contacting her too.
Shruti spoke about how she got to opening Fuse after working as a derivatives solicitor at A&O for a long time and becoming frustrated at the lack of tech coming through. She mentioned an example of frustration during the GFC. A&O had a ton of derivatives agreements, which were created in Microsoft Word, printed off, signed and filed away somewhere. They had thousands of these, with 90% of them being pretty standard with identical clauses. After the crisis began, clients would need to know what the contract said about e.g. insolvency. So they would have to dig out the derivatives contract, from thousands, flick to the right page to find the insolvency clause. Or they needed to know whether the contract was signed. So they would have to dig out the derivatives contract, from thousands, flick to the right page and check whether it was signed etc. She said a simple monitoring program which could have automated this would have saved them hours of time but the problem was this was how derivatives had always been done and change is a difficult thing to push in law firms.
Fuse works with all departments of A&O and encourages them all to work with the tech companies and try to create something, with the end goal to try to develop a better work/life balance for their lawyers and attempt to cut down on the 60/70/80 hour week by moving the time-consuming manual labour over to technology.
Last up in the session was Julia Salasky, (founder of CrowdJustice) who worked for Linklaters and the UN before growing frustrated with the lack of creativity with which she was able to do her work. Everything is very much how it has always been, so she wanted to do something differently. She spoke a lot about having an entrepreneurial attitude and what that means; she basically boiled her most important lessons down to not being afraid to fail and accepting that there are some fires which you can't put out as you work. Sometimes you have to let the fires in the business burn whilst you concentrate on other areas.
Session 2
The second morning session talked about the skills that the next generation of lawyers need/the current missed when they were hired. It featured research from BPP and talks from Jo-Anne Pugh (Director of Strategic Design at BPP), Adam Corphey (Head of Innovation Technology at BPP) and Mark Collins (Global Head of Knowledge Management at Herbert Smith).
They had conducted research before the conference with 77 legal entitites (inc. Global firms, National firms, Regional firms, Small/Boutique, in-house etc) to find out exactly what they felt were missing. The 9 areas they highlighted for future candidates, with the ones they chose as most important in bold, are:
- Commerciality - i.e. commercial awareness, understanding the law firm is a business, understanding business trends etc
- Tech/Digital skills - i.e. the ability to analyse tech and data, awareness of lawtech (with exposure to it a big plus in their eyes - you can get exposure by heading to demo events etc)
- Written Communication - Interestingly, they said written communication is a major area which needs improvement upon hiring. They said the ability to write concisely with attention to detail just isn't there in new hires, even when simply drafting written comms in the form of emails, and they spend a lot of time developing this.
- Client facing skills - Personally think it's a bit of a weird one for them to have highlighted. It doesn't seem an area that students can work on that heavily? Maybe Jaysen will disagree and come up with examples of how to develop these skills but personally believe this is something which law firms should expect to teach, not expect future candidates to have.
- Flexibility & Resilience - I think probably obvious that adaptability is a big skill to be sought out by firms at the moment. With Lawtech & the SQE coming in, there seems a lot of change to be afoot in the legal industry and they want candidates that they feel can deal with this.
- Professionalism - Not just how you present yourself at interviews (appearance, etiquette etc) but also other areas too such as your social media presence, as social media begins to play a bigger part of day-to-day professional life and moves away from being a totally separate entity.
- Time & Self-management - Law firms want, more and more, someone who can demonstrate that they can manage themselves and their time effectively. They mentioned examples such as demonstrating project management skills (even on a small scale such as planning and organisation of group activities).
- Teamwork - They highlighted the various real functions of what they meant by this. They don't just mean playing in your local football team but rather displaying emotional intelligence and a desire to work within a team to better serve firms who are, increasingly, working across business functions with mixed teams.They also said email has begun to destroy internal social interactions and they want candidates who would prefer to walk across the office and actually talk to the person they need to.
- Creativity - The final skill they selected as important, they want candidates who are creative and have new ways of thinking. Try to figure out ways of displaying this on your application but, also, take it with a pinch of salt given I'm not entirely convinced they mean they want an entirely new breed of candidate, rather a slightly creative variant on the ones they get now.
