The Maryland Bar is providing free training on defending mortgage foreclosures and the opportunity to represent homeowners in distress.  (Hat tip to Carolyn Elefant over at MyShingle).   As Carolyn mentions in her post and in her book, taking on pro bono matters via a bar sponsored program is a great way to gain substantive and practical experience, not to mention self confidence.  Further, since most pro bono trainings are staffed by local experts, it’s also a great way to network and find a mentor.

On a similar note, PLI is offering a free online CLE on Defending Foreclosure Actions.

As before, we’ll add these and similar programs and CLE’s to a separate page going forward for easy reference.

In keeping with our belief that a baseline understanding of statistics, finance, and economics is a required element in your tool set, I implore you to check out the following:

Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason, merges public policy, economics, and of late some statistics at Marginal Revolution.

Carl Bialik over at the WSJ and Gelf Magazine to name just a few, examines the way numbers are used and abused in The Numbers Guy. I was initially drawn to visit for a statistics quiz, based on Leonard Mlodinow’s book, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Take the quiz, read the book (it’s great primer), and check out Carl’s interview with Mlodinow here.

If you’d like suggest other blogs or sources relevant to beefing up critical yet seemingly ignored skill sets, please let me know. Also, look for a static page aggregating this and similar info to pop up soon.

Over at Law21, Jordan Furlong outlines six core skill sets necessary to practice law competently. Here’s the list, with excerpts of his explanations. The remainder is certainly worth reading and contemplating.

1. Collaboration skills. This isn’t just about “working well in a team,” essential as that is. This is about the ability to function in a multi-party work environment such that the process and outcome transcend the collective contribution — the whole surpasses the sum of the parts. Thanks to technological and social advances, this is how work is going to be done from now on.

2. Emotional intelligence. Clients need our empathy, perspective and personal connection to feel whole and satisfied; colleagues need our engagement, respect and understanding to be their best and help us succeed; everyone needs us to listen better than we do.

3. Financial literacy. There’s no excuse for lawyers to remain so steadfastly clueless about money: running a business, balancing a ledger, understanding tax principles, working with statistics, calculating profit margins, even explaining the rationale behind their fees.

4. Project management. It’s a growing refrain among clients, a chorus of frustration that most lawyers have zero skills in project management. Some lawyers wouldn’t even be able to define it: planning, organizing, and managing resources to successfully complete specific objectives while maintaining scope, quality, time and budget restrictions.

5. Technological affinity. Gerry Riskin recently called out the legal profession in a timely post on this subject: “too many lawyers pride themselves on their IT incompetencies, believing that it makes them somehow charming and brilliant.” … Here is a fact: technological affinity is a core competence of lawyering. If you can’t effectively and efficiently use e-mail, the Internet, and mobile telephony, you might as well just stay home.

6. Time management. A substantial part of lawyers’ difficulties in this regard lie with their inability to prioritize their tasks and manage their time. Lawyers are terrible at saying “no,” they’re awful at delegating work into more efficient channels, and amazingly, many are still compensated not by the tasks they accomplish but by how long they take to do them.

Law schools need to teach them; governing bodies need to test for them; law firms need to make their lawyers expert in them. They’re not optional, there are no excused absences, and the test is starting right about now.

Notwithstanding that the ability collaborate effectively is somewhat dependent on a fair degree of E.Q., project management skills and technological affinity, this is a great list, confirmed in part by Northwestern’s recent decision to incorporate a portion of this into their curriculum. This six-pack is particularly important to a solo or small firm attorney, as these are what will allow you to deliver (and just as important, to show) value to your clients.

If you’re still in law school, I’d certainly suggest taking some courses in accounting and finance at the business school, and keeping tuned to our channel here at NextLex. In time, we’ll be pointing you to useful information out on the interwebs, and also delivering courses and primers to help you acquire these skill sets.

We might be a bit late to this discussion — it’s been over two weeks since Northwestern Law announced a minor overhaul in their curriculum. In short, NU has decided, after much feedback from managing partners, that finance, statistics, strategy, communications, and project management skills should be included in the legal curriculum. There’s also a two year substantive work experience requirement between undergrad and law school to apply.

Unsurprisingly, the reactions are mixed. Bruce MacEwen and Jordan Furlong took up the discussion with measured analysis and reporting, with Inside Higher Ed and TaxProf Blog providing considered insight as well. Comments at Above the Law were unsurprisingly less thoughtful yet surprisingly (considering a presumably younger audience) more pessimistic about its benefits.

I’m still sitting on the fence. On the one hand I applaud the move, both because I’d like to think I would have been drawn to such a curriculum, but also because solid business skills are crucial to understanding the real scope and strategies involved with clients problems. Moreover, the statistics and finance components are intriguing because I would hope it signals an increased focus on quantifying the value of legal services.

On another level, though, I’m wondering what would attract students to this type of program, and skeptical that the actual practice of law within the large firms advocating this shift will change with it. For myself, the attraction would have been that the skills developed would enable me to do more in my law degree than just practice law. As I started researching (belatedly) what attorneys do day to day, even in highly quant oriented areas like derivatives and tax, is not particularly strategic, certainly not in the junior ranks.

I started taking courses at the business school and studying on my own as a means of ensuring I would be marketable in areas outside of the law, which promised greater creativity and a better risk/reward equation. My hunch is that I’m not alone, particularly among law school grads who would be wooed from law to banking / PE / management consulting or into even more entrepreneurial pursuits. Unless the actual practice of law becomes more innovative and creative, with more client contact and advisory experience early on, I wonder if a larger move like this would actually exacerbate associate attrition.

Unfortunately, I seriously doubt that the big firms in favor of this shift are willing to reexamine their business models. No doubt their support is a proxy for clients’ outrage over arguably exorbitant associate salaries and a lack of confidence in attorneys’ actual understanding of their businesses. Hiring a graduate of this program presumably allows the firm to justify its fees under the guise that associates have a better understanding of their businesses. That isn’t enough.

Hopefully I’m wrong. Maybe this is a chicken or egg situation, whereby more well-rounded business attorneys enable a changing firm structure. I’m willing to bet, though, on increased attrition from firms, and continued success of smaller, more nimble firms which embrace the Creative Class, or the Conceptual Age, or the Millenials, or whatever we’re calling them these days.

It’s been said before — many many times over — but it’s worth repeating briefly. Law school teaches you to think critically, maybe to write well, with a heavy emphasis on legal analysis. Unless you were lucky enough to have a robust clinical program, chances are you didn’t get much in the way of client contact, negotiation experience, or even the mechanics of filing motions. Consequently, if you’re considering going solo, or even a first or second year with the rare chance to handle a matter on your own, you’re probably a bit hesitant.

But what, exactly, are you afraid of? The technical aspects of practicing law aren’t what we would consider rocket science. It is doable. Chances are you just need some confidence, an understanding of what really scares you, and some methods for handling your anxieties.

Enter The Successful Solo Mindset: Overcome Your Fears to Achieve Your Professional Goals. Carolyn Elefant from MyShingle and Lisa Solomon from Legal Research and Writing Pro are delivering a course to combat precisely this set of fears. It’s certainly worth checking out. Here’s the course description:

Many lawyers and professionals long to hang out a shingle, but fear holds them back. Other lawyers may face an opportunity to take their practice to the next level - perhaps to hire that first associate or take on a case outside of their comfort level - but rather than embrace these challenges, they hold back or proscrastinate about making a decision. In this course, we’ll identify some of the fears that solos and solos to be face, such as:

–fear of failure
–fear of asking for help
–fear of loss of financial stability
–fear of “what others will think”
–fear of embarrassment

Next, we’ll examine the mindset of successful solo lawyers and entrepreneurs and devise a plan to address each of the fears that prevent you from achieving success. This program will not only offer the inspiration you need to break free from your fears, but will also provide intensely practical steps on how to reach this goal.

Here’s the logistical and sign up information:

Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Time:	1:30pm - 2:30pm
Location:	Your office, car, home or anywhere you have a telephone

The cost for this program is $97.

To register, visit http://legalresearchandwritingpro.com/products and add a Silver Membership to your cart.