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.

This may be superfluous. Maybe blogs might not need a stated intent circumscribing the conversation. Nevertheless, I started mulling over the possibilities for the NextLex blog space.

I’m inundated with blog fodder, confronted more and more by evidence of a paradigm shift in the practice of law. Topics that, while not always directly related to NextLex proper, could be seen as prerequisites for our very existence. And, like everyone, I’ve an opinion, perhaps even an agenda. But discussing such topics seemed somehow incongruent with our goals. On the other hand, merely providing a “how-to” guide for NextLex, expanding on our grand vision and the multitude of features we hope to bring to the table, wasn’t going to cut it.

Then I realized, to hold back wouldn’t be in the spirit of NextLex. We’re building a community, and communities aren’t built on feature sets that grease the wheels of collaboration. Grease is good, but passion is paramount. So, while we’ll continue to roll out updates and post on what we hope to build, we’re also taking aim at trends in the practice of law, analyzing the micro and macro, exposing the luddites, becoming the revolution that’s already here. We may at times incite controversy, but that’s part of the plan. Without debate, without argument, there’s no challenge and no movement forward, no innovation. And those are certainly goals within the purview of NextLex.

The impetus for NextLex comes from personal experience in the contract attorney trenches, reviewing documents for antitrust reviews and other corporate litigation. The experience was an eye opener – myriad inefficiencies and problems to be solved.

Most importantly, we realized there’s a whole cadre of newly minted attorneys caught in a circular loop – without legal experience with which to get legal experience. Many are willing to work on a contract basis to build substantive and practical skill sets.

Coincidentally, solo and small firm attorneys are in need of just this type of work. They recruit on an ad hoc basis if at all, but nevertheless need to partner with other attorneys or could benefit from outsourcing discreet projects from time to time.

Our goal at NextLex is to facilitate meaningful connections between these audiences and let the magic happen. We also aim to bring efficiency to the document review marketplace, the work you probably do to make ends meet while looking for something more permanent, or putting together a plan to shove off on your own.

To put it more succinctly: our goal at NextLex is to simplify your life and enable your success.

Please stay tuned or subscribe to our announcement list. In the coming days we’ll be adding posts, revealing in more detail what we hope to accomplish and the problems we hope to solve. We’ll also be adding links and content that we hope you’ll find useful and interesting.

Welcome to NextLex, the next step in the practice of law! We are a community aimed at simplifying your life. Whether you’re still in law school, recently graduated, or have been practicing for a number of years, NextLex can facilitate your success.

As a member of the NextLex community you will be able to search and network with other attoneys, seek and give advice, showcase and develop new skills sets.

We’re working diligently to deliver a beta version soon. In the meantime, we’re putting together information and resources we hope you’ll find helpful and/or interesting. We’ve also started a blog (which of course you know as you’re reading it), to keep you up to date on our progress and better articulate what we hope to build.

In the mean time, please don’t hesitate to contact me at jgoodwin@nextlex.net with any questions or comments.