O Shaped (or well-rounded) represents the mindset and attributes of the modern legal professional.

Our purpose is to make the legal profession better – for those who use it, those who are in it and those who are entering it.

O Shaped is highlighting the benefits of legal professionals developing a growth mindset and creating a psychologically safe environment where they can practice a wider range of skills so they can be the best they can be for themselves, their organisations and their clients/customers.

In doing so, we will achieve our vision – to realise the potential of every legal professional to create a more engaged, healthy and inclusive profession.

The legal profession is highly technical and the focus has traditionally been on honing technical legal skills to perfection at the expense of a more rounded development. This inhibits the ability for legal professionals to best service their clients and develop broader life skills.

The near exclusive focus on technical expertise also creates a barrier between legal professionals (in-house and private practice) and those we they are advising (internally and externally). The misalignment between the advisers and business is a theme that has consistently come up in our conversations across the industry. Developing O Shaped Mindset and Attributes will help to break down those barriers and increase alignment between law and business.

Those being advised by legal professionals (internally and externally) want more than just the law, they want to work with legal service providers who understand their business and can create value through business advice.

In order to succeed in a fast-moving, complex world, we need adaptable legal professionals that have the skills to navigate challenges and opportunities including technological advancement, ESG and diversity & inclusion. The O Shaped is focused on working with stakeholders to advance the skills that the legal professional of tomorrow will require.

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The Attributes were distilled from interviews with leading General Counsel in the UK. As the buyers of legal services in a £40bn per annum industry, the voice of the client is crucial and brings to the profession a new focus to the importance of these skills.

Whilst the attributes themselves are not new, the way in which they are brought to life by O Shaped is. The need to develop these skills has often been inhibited by the legal profession’s focus on technical skills and billable hours. By bringing the attributes to the fore, we are opening up the conversation and driving cultural change across the profession.

The legal profession is a people business and the O Shaped Attributes are people skills. The need to build effective relationships empowers teams to create value. In a complex and fast moving world, being adaptable is critical to ensuring that value creation remains possible. With the increasing focus on the importance of investing in and supporting employees (partly driven by the pandemic), O Shaped’s People First approach has brought the criticality of these skills to the fore and is associated with positive and collective disruption to the profession that will best serve its people and its customers.

The Attributes are not only designed to upskill legal professionals, but to enable them to best service their clients/customers who want to work in an O Shaped way with their legal advisers.

The model has been tested in practice. We ran a series of pilots between in house teams and their external law firms where we applied the O Shaped attributes to new or existing relationships. It was clear that a focus on the attributes enabled the teams to build stronger relationships and create value for one another.

O Shaped is a continuous lifelong journey of learning. Unlike technical skills where there is a requirement to master a particular specialism, human and business skills are less tangible, more personal and take many forms.

There is no expectation that individuals will master each of the 12 attributes. Everyone has their strengths – some may excel at effective communication, others at influencing. The combination of these attributes will make for high-performing O Shaped teams.

Although it’s not possible to excel in every attribute, all O Shaped Legal Professionals do need to be capable of building effective relationships. That’s the foundation of everything else that follows. There is no single way of achieving that, but those who do will be much better able to effectively build contacts, connections and teams around them with complimentary O Shaped skills to create an O Shaped team.

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It started life as The O Shaped Lawyer.

More and more in-house legal teams are multi-disciplinary now (Data Protection, Governance, Regulatory and Compliance to name a few). Law firms have a similar multidisciplinary workforce of lawyers and business professionals (such as Technology, Innovation, Business and Development, Learning and Development etc). Focusing on lawyers is too exclusive, does not help to address the ‘lawyer vs non-lawyer’ vernacular and is not very O Shaped.

We are therefore gradually moving away from the O Shaped “Lawyer” to simply O Shaped – our logo reflects that.

It will take some time for O Shaped to replace The O Shaped Lawyer. In the meantime, we have used O Shaped Professional when working with multidisciplinary teams.

O Shaped was founded by Dan Kayne in 2019. It is Chaired by Catherine Baker and supported by 2 Steering Boards – the O Shaped Steering Board, consisting of experienced professionals from across the legal industry and the Future Board, made up of aspiring lawyers, trainees, apprentices and junior lawyers, both in house and private practice.

Steering Board

Dan Kayne (Founder). Catherine Baker (Chair), Neil Campbell, Adam Curphey, Carrie Fletcher, Sophie Gould, Natalie Salunke, Catie Sheret, John Skelton, Claire Stripp and Evelyne Tseng-Shields

Future Board

Katie Barker (Chair), Alice Hartman, Rami Jerrow, Emma Lilley, Harry Mellor, Alastair Nuttall, Holly, Bernie Rivard,

O Shapers

The O Shapers are senior in house leaders who support or endorse the work and vision of O Shaped. Some are actively involved or leading workstreams, others support from the side lines.

There are more than 175 (and growing) organisations represented within the O Shapers community ranging from FTSE 100 companies with hundreds of in-house lawyers and business professionals to companies with a sole counsel.

O Shaped is a purpose-led organisation driven by our vision to realise people’s potential. We want to collaboratively effect positive cultural change across the legal profession, putting people front and centre of our vision for change.

Our Purpose

To make the legal profession better for those who are in it, those who use it and those who are entering it

Our Vision

To realise the potential of every legal professional to create a more engaged, inclusive and healthy profession

Realising the potential of every legal professional to create a more engaged, inclusive and healthy profession is an ambitious objective that will require the collaboration of the entire legal system.

Our approach is informed by our mission and we are working top down with senior in-house and private practice leaders and bottom up, embedding O Shaped thinking into law schools.

O Shaped is an accelerator for the change, bringing together the different parts of the system to create whole industry cultural change. We will achieve this by:

Partnering with leading law schools to embed human and business skills into legal education

Providing services for law firms, in-house teams and other legal institutions to develop junior talent. In addition, we will work as a connector with law firms and their clients and prospective clients to enable them to build longer term strategic partnerships.

Growing and representing the in-house community who support and endorse the cultural change we are leading. As the buyers of services, the in- house community will be the driver of change across the sector.

Bring all parts of the legal ecosystem together to unblock barriers to change and solve some of the most complex and challenging problems facing the legal profession.

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Modernising legal education is central to O Shaped’s purpose to make the legal profession better for those who are entering it. We have partnered with leading law schools to bring the O Shaped mindset and attributes and the client perspective to life.

The new Solicitor’s Qualifying Exam (SQE) has presented legal educators with the opportunity to incorporate programmes into their portfolios which go further than technical legal skills and O Shaped is working with the law schools to ensure that those programmes include the human and business skills which will support the next generation of legal professionals’ transition into a more modern legal profession.

We are partnering with:

(1) College of Legal Practice – We have developed an O Shaped specific module which embeds the O Shaped mindset, attributes and behaviours into a practical, 121 led coaching approach. The module will attract 20 credits towards a Masters qualification.

(2) BARBRI – we are embedding the 5 OS and the 12 Attributes into BARBRI’s ‘Preparation for Practice’ Programme

(3) BPP – we are embedding the 5 OS and the 12 Attributes into BPP’s ‘Essentials For Practice’ Programme

Law firms are the heart of the legal ecosystem, where the majority of lawyers continue to practice. They have the ability to influence the direction and future of the profession and their involvement with, and support for, O Shaped is paramount if O Shaped is going to achieve its vision.

O Shaped wants to connect the different parts of the legal ecosystem – the collaboration across the system will lead to more meaningful and sustainable change. The relationship between law firms and clients is key to this.

We are therefore looking to partner with law firms who share our vision for change and are looking to embed the mindset and attributes into their own strategic objectives and client relationships.

In May 2022, Browne Jacobson became the first law firm to partner with O Shaped.

O Shaped’s People First approach broadly means two things:

(1) The legal profession is a people business - Building relationships is a critical component of any successful business. Knowledge of the law is not enough and job titles shouldn’t define legal professionals. They need to develop the skills to effectively build relationships.

“If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business”

Simon Sinek

(2) Nurturing, developing, motivating and inspiring. We must care about and ensure the well-being of our people as the premise of putting People First. Not only is this the right thing to do, there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate the business benefits of doing so. Healthy, happy, motivated employees are generally the highest performing employees.

“If you take care of your people, they will take care of your customers, and your business will take care of itself.”

JW Marriott

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The traditional route to qualification as a lawyer remains the most popular one, but there is an increased focus on social mobility and opening up the profession to a more diverse demographic.

Solicitor and Paralegal Apprenticeships are becoming more popular, both with aspiring lawyers and with employers.

O Shaped conducted a pilot with apprenticeship provider Damar in 2021/22 where the O Shaped mindset and attributes were added into the standard paralegal apprenticeship offering. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive about the inclusion of O Shaped and we are now exploring a more formal relationship with Damar to embed O Shaped into apprenticeships.

The intention is to broaden our relationship with apprenticeship providers (such as law schools) and employers of apprenticeships (mainly law firms but increasingly in-house teams too). The apprenticeship levy makes this affordable for many more organisations.

The human and business skills of O Shaped are pervasive and apply across professions. Whichever route people take into the profession, including the increasingly popular options of legal technology, project management and operations, these skills will make apprentices and students more employable in the future.

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