*This image was created by ChatGPT*
Over the next decade certain innate personality traits, which the last 50+ years have been viewed as nice-to-haves, will rise to become favored traits – tested for and sought after in the new age of the in-house lawyer/AI assistant partnership. And by starting now to put more weight on these key non-legal traits and innate strengths, GCs will be better positioned for the future.
“The Way It Is”
For the last 100+ years, colleges and law schools have shepherded and groomed would-be lawyers to develop superb legal intellect and key traditional legal research and writing abilities to pass the bar exam and become super lawyers. A small subset of those super lawyers (cream of the crop) ultimately secure positions at top law firms, in-house legal teams, and government institutions. That is “the way it is.” Soft skills are liked, but they have been secondary, or nice to have. Why must we now change precedent and quickly pivot into a new enlightenment era?
Why Change?
The answer of course is generative AI. With ChatGPT, and other AI-powered technology soon to be embedded into every legal tool, a growing list of core legal tasks will be done quickly, and ever more accurately. This growing list includes legal research, document review, document due diligence, contract drafting, and contract review. Based on the pace of change, the AI tool’s ability to perform core traditional legal tasks will grow exponentially month after month. While it is true that these new capabilities currently have the greatest impact on lower-level, tedious, voluminous tasks largely tackled by paralegals and entry-level lawyers, AI capabilities will expand quickly, shifting the legal industry’s reliance on an individual lawyer’s traditional legal intellect.
Enter the rise of the super soft-skilled lawyer. Legal leaders and clients will need courageous, confident, open-minded, positive, creative, collaborative, and entrepreneurial, human lawyers. Lawyers with a sense of character and integrity, who can listen, adapt, and partner with their powerful AI-enabled assistant to deliver quality, efficient, cost-effective results for clients. A powerful duo akin to fictional characters like Luke Skywalker and R2D2, and Tony Stark (Iron Man) with Jarvis.
Demand is there and growing
Over the last 10 years, since I have transitioned from practicing law to legal services, predominantly meeting with in-house legal leaders, I increasingly hear requests that sound something like this:
Contemporaneously, in the last 5 years, I’ve been hearing wise legal voices who call for a framework to teach and train existing lawyers on much-needed non-legal skills/traits.
Peter Connor prescribes training and development to create the “T” Shape lawyer. Dan Kayne suggests a program for more “well-rounded” lawyers called the “O” shaped lawyer.
Both models have one thing in common: A critical need for a framework to upskill lawyers on improving a foundational set of non-legal skills:
Recruiting for future legal teams – a two-pronged approach
Having spent years searching for these “unicorn” lawyers and trying to accommodate my clients, I see a groundswell of demand for the above non-legal skills as must-haves. While I wholeheartedly agree with the idea of developing a framework for training and upskilling existing lawyers on the above skills, I would argue that training alone will not meet the demand and pace of change. Instead, we need a two-pronged, bottom-up, top-down approach.
I hope no one reading this article will infer that I am somehow discounting or minimizing the value of our current legal talent pool, their ability to adapt and learn for the future, nor the immense importance of having foundational legal knowledge/skills. There are countless brilliant, exceptional lawyers who are my clients and friends, and whom I admire very much. They have earned the right to be upskilled and re-skilled into the lawyers of tomorrow. Some have the aptitude and appetite to pivot and, in time, will improve these non-legal, soft-skill muscles. However, some don’t have the innate aptitude to be great at some of the aforementioned non-legal soft skills. And it might be a poor investment to try turning that population’s weakness into strengths. Do you try to convert Mr. Spock to be more like Captain Kirk?
But retraining isn’t enough. Legal leaders should also start earlier by putting increasing weight and time on the early identification of future lawyers with these non-legal skills as their strengths. Colleges, law schools, ALSPs, and legal support companies are flush with individuals possessing these innate soft skills. Having gone to law school, and professionally worked with hundreds of these unicorns, I know they are all around us. But, under the current scheme, early on many of these individuals are incentivized to leave the traditional routes of practicing law, and enter non-legal, business, academic, corporate, and political institutions who value their innate interpersonal, non-legal, “soft” skills. Some are selling you software. Some are influencers on LinkedIn, opened their own business, are consulting, or are running for local offices.
Now that companies can invest in AI-powered tools and legal assistants that can do much of the legal and data analysis heavy lifting, would you not be better off recruiting a different set of 10 to 20%? And if high school and college counselors can now say, “You have amazing team building, leadership, people skills, and business acumen, consider going to law school!” Would that not yield a greater candidate pool of future lawyers?
There are also reliable personality and temperament tests like Myers-Briggs, Gallop’s Clifton Strengths Finder, and VIA Character Strengths Survey, that legal leaders can add to their repertoire of due diligence. There are some cases of AM Law 100 Law Firms already utilizing these tests. Tests like this, combined with traditional due diligence can reveal additional data points and insight on non-legal, soft skills that legal leaders can weigh in the overall decision.
That’s my take. What are your thoughts?
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