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.

Over at law.com, David Curle writes about a different sort of transformation from my response to Prof Sander. Increasingly powerful IT is changing the entire landscape, from the provision of legal services themselves, to the tools which lawyers utilize to collaborate and craft advice. Two specific drivers are worth noting:

“Younger associates and their content-sharing mentality. Much legal work consists of paying young associates to reinvent wheels, and a younger generation of tech-savvy lawyers has no interest in reinvention…they’ll want to use technology to leverage existing technologies.”

“Technology will create the most change for people who have been shut out of legal information sources and services — small business and individuals. These clients don’t offer enough scale to be of interest to existing legal services providers, but technology-based information and service providers are in a position to begin serving that “long tail” of the legal market.”

In some sense, he’s taken the words right out of my mouth. Indeed, the foundation of NextLex is predicated on this trend. But I might take his observations a few steps farther, or at least state what he leaves implicit.

As more and more traditional infrastructure services become replaced by more mobile IT, more and more attorneys will shove off on their own. BigLaw branding should still exist, but the new environment promises to be highly competitive, even chaotic. The ability to adapt and innovate will be not a competitive advantage, but a necessity. (As an aside, solos and smaller firms, with their higher utilization of emerging technologies, are well positioned in this respect.)

To be self-serving for a moment, this is where NextLex steps in: to enable connections, to encourage knowledge transfer, and to help build trust between attorneys in a fragmenting industry.

In a recent article, UCLA Law Professor Richard Sander argues to little controversy that the legal industry is drastically different from the 1950’s; considerable consolidation has led to declining real income among solo practitioners. But he also argues that the marked increase in the number of law students graduating each year coupled with a decline in the overall population of lawyers indicates that many lawyers are exiting the profession in their prime.

While I agree that this dichotomy indicates a problem, I don’t believe the apparent exodus from the law can be attributed to lawyers in their prime. The actual culprit is more troublesome. Seasoned lawyers may indeed be leaving, but far more aren’t even making it out of the gates. Sadly, I’m fairly convinced (though statistics would be helpful to confirm) that this has less to do with an overabundance of attorneys than considerable slack in the system. Neither existing recruiting channels to smaller firms and solos nor the practical skills sets of recent graduates are sufficiently robust to address this challenge.

Nevertheless, I am optimistic; it seems the tide is turning. Seasoned partners and young attorneys alike have been starting smaller shops; much ink has been spilt online to educate and inspire new lawyers to start their own practices. The contract attorney market, birthed as a method of handling document review work, is maturing, moving into higher value added areas and even gaining some acceptance within stodgy big firms.

I am optimistic, as well, because part of the NextLex vision has been crafted to embody this change. We believe that by matching up recent graduates and law students with smaller firms and solo attorneys we can remove some of the slack in the system, providing meaningful formative employment experiences for recent graduates while meeting the recruiting needs of solos and small firms.

As always, if you would like more information about NextLex, or have comments on this post, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at jgoodwin@nextlex.net.