‘The Legal Team of The Future: Law+ Skills’ is a book written by Adam Curphey, Senior Manager of Innovation at Meyer Brown in London.

I recommend that anyone with an interest in improving legal service delivery should buy the book and start putting its principles into action.

In this post, I explain why.

Legal service teams of multi-disciplinary professionals

The core premise of the book is that we need to move away from talking about skills required of the (individual) lawyer, to the skills required of legal teams.

Developing legal service teams means that we can acknowledge, and call upon, the wide range of skills and experience required to deliver legal services.

This is where the ‘Law+’ comes in – i.e the skills beyond knowing the law and crafting legal advice.

Obviously, knowing the law and crafting legal advice are skills themselves and will always be the fundamental attributes of lawyers.  Clients expect their lawyers know the law and be competent to advise them about it.

But clients are now also expecting other things from their legal advisors.  Sometimes the solutions they are looking for are not purely legal.

For example, larger commercial organizations may also want their lawyers to help them with new processes and procedures which are business focused – such as perhaps helping to create a new risk matrix to help assess the viability of new business projects.   To provide such a solution, the legal service team will need to know about more than just the law.

What are Law+ skills?

Adam has created a model, the Law+ model (page 9 of the book), which is reproduced below with his permission.

As you can see, the model is made up of four quadrants:

• Law + People
• Law + Business
• Law + Change and
• Law + Technology.

In other words as well as knowing about the law, lawyers and their teams need to know other things too, such as how to communicate and collaborate effectively, how to manage and improve processes and how to use and deploy the right technology at the right time.

It is unrealistic to expect anyone to be an accomplished expert in every aspect of all quadrants.  Hence the need for legal teams where people from different specialisms can contribute and apply their expertise to help with the delivery of legal services.

Adam maintains that having entry level competence in all four quadrants is essential for everyone involved in legal services.

As he says on page 39 of the book:

Possessing entry level proficiency in all of the quadrants means being able to understand and communicate with those who are experienced or expert in those quadrants.  This means being able to spot where a client’s problem might go beyond the legal advice and knowing when to involve other specialists to solve it.

Latticed career development

This is a practical book and all the ideas and suggestions in it have real world relevance and application. Where appropriate it also references solid sources of research to substantiate many of the points made.

For example, readers are introduced to the work of Dr Nigel Spencer and Stephen Newton of the Said Business School, Oxford, who came up with the term ‘latticed pathways’ for progression in professional service firms.

What this means is that professionals can spend their entire career in legal services, but during that time they will have different roles and develop different skills.  Hence someone might qualify as a practicing solicitor, then become a legal software developer, then legal project manager and then perhaps head of legal operations.  There are of course many other pathways available as people traverse the lattice.

I am delighted to see latticed career paths becoming more common in the legal service industry.  Indeed its fair to assume that few legal service professionals now in their early 20s expect to be performing the same role (albeit with increased status) by the time they retire.

The connection between latticed career paths and the development of a wide range of Law+ skills is clear for all to see.

Law+ Change

Reading the book I naturally focused on the Law + Change quadrant as this covers legal project management, legal process improvement, legal service design and change management.

The Law + Change chapter is representative of the book in that it provides an excellent introduction to each of these topics and syntheses current developments.

Quibbling with the detail (for example, I prefer a 4-phase LPM model, rather than a 5-phase LPM model referred to in the book) misses the bigger picture.

Project management skills, process improvement skills and change management skills are all now required of legal service teams if they are to be successful.

The fact is that all successful lawyers must be applying elements of project management as part of their practice – otherwise they would not be successful.  However, as Adam points out

Despite this, lawyers rarely see themselves as project managers, which means they can neglect elements of project management methodology that could be helping them in managing matters.

A better understanding of project management and more consistent application of project management methods and techniques helps legal teams serve their clients better.

Something similar can be said for all the other topics and associated skills referred to in the Law+ Change quadrant.

How to develop Law + Skills

Adam offers plenty of advice to the academic sector, law firms, in-house legal teams and individuals about how to start developing Law+ skills.

For law firms and in-house legal teams he suggests creating an infrastructure to support and reward the development and application of Law+ skills.

Adam suggests that law firms can make a start by looking at their salary structure.  They need to make sure they can properly reward lawyers who want to step away from activities traditionally considered to be ‘fee earning’ and attract and retain professionals from outside the legal service sector who can bring specialist skills with them.

Interestingly, one of the themes which came up in during an IILPM survey of legal project managers was that senior legal project managers thought they were worthy of the same status and pay as senior associates, given the complexity of the work they do and value provided to clients.

Adam has lots of other suggestions about how law firms and in-house legal teams can develop their Law+ skills – to find out about those, you should read the book!

Call to action

This brings me to the final point I would like to make about the book.  It is a call to action to develop Law+ skills now.

Adam recognizes that some legal service organizations may be tempted to simply wait until future cohorts of university graduates arrive with these skills, but he points out this is not a realistic option.

The legal services industry does not develop uniformly and at an even pace.  I know of law firms of all sizes which are starting to put more effort into developing the Law+ skills of their staff.  They may not be calling what they are doing ‘Law+ initiatives’, but this what they are doing.  They doing this because they can see how the application of these skills has a direct positive correlation to continued success, including staff retention and profitability.

While it is true that the pace of change in the legal service industry generally lags behind that found in other sectors, it is also true the pace of change within legal services has noticeably quickened over the last 7 years or so.  Arguably the unlooked for effects of the Covid-19 pandemic has necessitated this rate of change to be even quicker.

So whenever you are in the legal services industry, or if you are outside the industry wondering about joining it, I recommend buying and reading ‘The Legal Team of the Future: Law+ Skills’ by Adam Curphey.  You won’t regret it.