Increasingly within the self-employed economy, and amongst start-up and scale-up communities, businesses require a commercial adviser who really understands their business and can guide them through legal and commercial pitfalls, dot the I’s and cross the T’s on detailed legal drafting, and provide solutions.
However, lawyers and professional services firms appear to be out of sync. In the legal industry, training focuses on minimising risk rather than changing the approach to deal with the new economy. Both detailed drafting and providing commercial advice are two big-risk areas, because they require good knowledge and experience. Where does this experience come from? Senior lawyers are focused on billable hours and so on the job training is not encouraged. They may provide simple drafting, proofreading or administrative tasks, but ultimately success is measured in billable hours, rather than in improving and properly training junior lawyers, hence enabling better work to be done at lower rates.
Lawyers to highlight problems and only the seniors to provide solutions? This possibly limits negligence but then how do junior lawyers learn or gain confidence or commerciality? What are the reasons for this? Perhaps if the junior lawyer gets too good, the client might believe they can get the same work at lower cost and form the relationship with the junior lawyer? Alternatively, if the junior lawyer builds relationships and expertise, they may leave and set up on their own, possibly taking clients with them.
This somewhat defensive approach does not seem in the long term best interests of the client and nor of the firm. We are seeing more and more lawyers leave the bigger firms - and even the profession – due to the absence of training, limited access to clients and mundane work. The vast sums invested into recruitment and early stage technical training are lost when firms do not follow-up with post-qualified on the job training and development. Furthermore, huge amounts of money are then spent on lateral hires (in terms of recruitment fees and guaranteed minimum drawings) when there is, consequently, a dearth of decent lawyers coming through from the ranks to fill the higher levels.
This defensive strategy, which seeks to avoid risk by limiting on the job training and development, does not deliver what the market requires and it does not save costs. Furthermore, a group of risk-averse, under confident, frustrated junior lawyers without a commercial skillset perpetuates the risk culture that firms are supposedly seeking to avoid.
Instead, the approach needs to be longer term - senior lawyers must be appropriately incentivised for spending time on training junior lawyers as they come through. Firms must be confident enough to take a bet on retention. This longer-term approach has been seen before. In the last global recession, the most robust companies were often the family-focused businesses in Germany, adopting a Mittelstand (Middle Ground) approach, focusing on good training and long term investment.
Currently our big law firms focus on short term profit rather than long term structure and prosperity. For some, this approach works well. For most however, it does not. Ongoing training for lawyers and other professional advisers should be more than a ‘nice to have’. It is a critical piece of the successful development of the services profession wrestling with how best to survive and prosper in the high growth economy. Problem solvers are in very short supply because, paradoxically, the risk of creating them, is perceived as too great.
Authored by David Farquharson, Co-Founder and Partner at Ignition Law.
(Source: Ignition Law)
Image by NYPhotographic
