Wonder why I've been away for so long? Let me explain in today's Lawyers & Liquor post : "Like An Old Bra, I Have No Support."

Welcome back to another week of wonderful wastrels in the practice of law! I’m your host, the Boozy Barrister, and this here is the grand return of Lawyers & Liquor to the World Wide Web. I’d like to take a moment today and speak about the thing that’s been on the forefront of my mind over the past few months as I’ve drowned in a sea of manila folders and legal pads, and that’s the importance of…

This isn’t the intended purpose of The Teaching of Law Practice Management and Technology in Law Schools: A New Paradigm, but this paper from the Chicago-Kent Law School’s symposium on Justice, Lawyering and Legal Education in the Digital Age is a solid primer for any lawyer practicing today. 

The paper’s intended audience is law schools. Fingers crossed that this audience embraces these suggestions and acts upon them. Even an incremental introduction into the curricula will do much to improve the lives of lawyers and the folks we serve.

In the paper, authors Richard Granat and Steph Kimbro describe many of the most pressing and valuable practical skills a 21st century lawyer must possess. In so doing, they offer a guide to all of us seeking to create agile, efficient, forward-thinking practices. [And while not a benefit noted by the authors, I also suggest that possessing these skills helps lawyers achieve a healthier blend of work and non-work life. Technology and management skills definitely have served me in this way.]

Note that the paper doesn’t tell us how to do any of these things, really. Just that we need to understand that these skills are essential to developing a successful contemporary law practice.

Here’s my summary of the skills identified in A New Paradigm:

business planning and law firm business modeling

project management and operations management

management of outsourcing 

mastery of technology tools: how to select tech for smart lawyering, e.g. client portals, collaboration technologies

understanding of information architecture of law firms: e.g. data structures, law firm metrics

understanding of ethical rules relevant to the use of technology

ability to undertake client development via social media tools, websites, blogs — selecting these tools and following best practices

ethical and appropriate use of lead generation websites for lawyers

ethical and appropriate use of payment systems, such as online and electronic payment platforms

As a profession, we can’t afford to wait for law schools to get the memo and start teaching these crucial skills. I suggest each practicing attorney is obligated to understand those areas on the list above relevant to his/her practice. And for many of us, this is pretty much the entire list.

I even suggest that those in bigger firms are foolhardy to rely on others to know these things for them. This reliance breeds a false sense of competence, and perhaps this understanding prompted the revised Comment 8 to ABA Rule 1.1: “To maintain the requisite knowledge and skill, a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology, engage in continuing study and education and comply with all continuing legal education requirements to which the lawyer is subject.” [emphasis added]

Even my 70-year old father who’s been practicing for about four decades realizes that he must know how to operate his email account, draft a document from scratch in Word, and access and manipulate digital client files in his paperless system. And this is a man who, but five years ago, still dictated EVERYTHING. With a dictaphone. Onto itty-bitty cassette tapes. Including emails. For someone else to type and send.

It seems so incredibly obvious to me that anyone who wants to excel at his/her practice must embrace these skills — regardless of how you measure excellence, or the size of your firm. As this paper also points out, most of us practicing do so as solos or part of a very small firm, and more of us may be going the way of small law as various economic and other forces take their respective tolls on the profession. Which suggests that fewer of us will have the luxury of relying on others to manage our practices, anyway. So what are we waiting for?

I believe all of this is incredibly exciting stuff. Never before have lawyers had so much control in the palms of their small law hands. And even BigLaw clients are expecting their counsel to have fundamental legal technology skills — or they won’t get the work. 

None of us — not the 70-year-old small town lawyer who’s been practicing for 40 years or the 30-year-old BigLaw associate on the brink of making partner — is safe from the perils associated with ignoring the importance of these skills.

So what as a profession do we do about this?

Richard and Steph start with the most obvious: make law schools teach these skills. Even those students bound for legal academia will be better teachers if they understand what the people they’re teaching face when serving clients out in the real world. Because most law students aren’t going into academia, or a federal judgeship. Seriously. There is room in the ivory tower for this stuff.

But we can’t stop there. Because there are over a million of us out here wielding our law licenses (hopefully for good, not evil) and we aren’t going to be the best we can be without these skills.

Here’s what you can do about it:

Undertake to teach yourself these skills. Pick one and start there. Go slowly. Go purposefully. But go.

Demand that your bar association(s) of choice offer more good CLE on these topics. The percentage of technology and practice management CLEs is so small as to be almost unmeasurable. The percentage of good CLEs on this topic is even smaller.

Seek other sources for education on these skills. Frankly, you’re likely to get A LOT more out of a workshop that doesn’t offer CLE credit than one that does. Because the traditional system of CLE delivery is for the most part terrible.

Find mentors — lawyers and other professionals who have the skills you need — and ask for help. Based on my personal experience, lawyers with these skills really, really like sharing their knowledge with others. 

Find lawyers like yourself who also want to learn these skills and do it together. Pretend you’re back in law school and create a study group. Share the research, get together on a regular basis, and teach each other. 

Not an exhaustive list, but it’s a start. And that’s all you need — a start.