O Shaped Lawyer at Legal Geek

by Dan Kayne

CONTEXT

Ever since I set out in my legal career back in the late 1990s, my experience has been that successful lawyers have been defined by the level of their technical expertise, the amount of black letter law they know and the number of billable hours they have achieved in any given financial year. More than 20 years later, we are still having the same conversations as the same measures of success continue to apply. Whilst this is apparently considered acceptable within the profession, it isn’t by those on the outside looking in and it means that lawyers, good people, are getting disillusioned, and in many cases burnt out and leaving the profession and all of their untapped talent with them.

Competence vs Warmth

Some time ago I came across a study undertaken at Princeton University in the States which mapped on the x and y axis of a graph, the competence and warmth of lots of different professions, including lawyers. Lawyers rated amongst the highest in competence and the lowest in warmth, or compassion. Whilst this may not come as a surprise to those of us who work within the profession, we cannot continue to sustain this perception and let’s be honest, reality, of the legal profession for much longer.

There are still too many people in our profession who believe this is how it should be. That we are a profession not a service provider and that somehow that sets us apart from others. I have spoken to people recently who believe that increasing our warmth or compassion might somehow lead to a dilution of our competence, as if the two of these qualities cannot exist in the same time continuum. They are not mutually exclusive. We can be a profession that delivers the highest quality legal advice, but also be recognised as one that cares - about its people, its customers and each other.

If we didn’t know it already, the pandemic has taught us that people are the most important asset we have as a profession. Despite this, I have sadly heard people still say that to achieve their financial targets, we must sweat those assets. On the existing model where time is money and lawyers are incentivised to pad out their hours, then such an approach is regarded as acceptable. But if we want to be a trusted, caring profession we must start to nurture, support and develop our assets, not sweat them.

Skills Gap

For those who genuinely recognise the importance of people, we must take some of the positives from the pandemic and provide everyone with the skills they need to be great people, great legal professionals and ultimately great leaders.

And yet people skills (or soft skills as they are commonly referred to) have always been pretty irrelevant when it comes to training and developing our lawyers. Simon Sinek says there is no such thing as soft skills, that there are hard skills and human skills. Hard skills are the skills needed to perform the job and human skills are about being a good human being. They are the skills which are needed to be great leaders.

The short termism of our profession means that investing time in talent development, that could otherwise be billed, is seen as an expense not an opportunity. People want to be developed, they want to be valued and yet to many in our profession, human skills are all too often seen as a luxury not a necessity.

The O Shaped Lawyer

Back in 2018 I founded the O Shaped lawyer and shared my frustrations around the narrow focus of legal professionals and how out of touch that was with what businesses need. The O represents the well-rounded lawyer that we should all be aspiring to, both for ourselves, our peers and the next generation - someone who can marry technical expertise with the ability to engage with and provide a great service to their customers. As I shared my thinking with peers, we came together with a mantra of People First, then Lawyers. We want to create a profession that we can be proud of - one that leads to people being more included, healthier, happier and more engaged and where we can realise the potential of every legal professional, everywhere.

General Counsel

In 2019 we interviewed 18 Leading GCs and asked them what they looked for when recruiting lawyers or retaining law firms. They didn’t talk about technical expertise – they considered it a given. They talked about communication, empathy, courage, collaboration and value creation. Not only do their businesses and therefore customers want to work with people they can form relationships with, the GCs recognised that these human skills improved the quality of the service they gave and received. It is a win-win.

They felt that by upskilling our legal professionals, from law schools and throughout the legal ecosystem, we could move the profession on from being about the law to being about the business. From being based on knowledge to one that exists to create value for its customers.

Learning and Development

Despite how society has moved on, we continue to train our lawyers for the 20th century. Legal education is in danger of becoming irrelevant, preferring to focus almost exclusively on academia and technical skills rather than preparing our next generation of lawyers for a customer-oriented practice. Ongoing development is a compliance exercise and lawyers are rarely exposed to or have the chance to practice human skills until much later in their careers. This must change.

We continue to assume that the technical experts should become the team leaders, that somehow excellence in the law translates to excellence in leadership. It doesn’t. In fact it’s this fundamental flaw in what is acceptable in the legal profession that makes it unacceptable to those looking in from the outside.

The Role of In House

Many in-house teams get this. Particularly those who work in organisations who deeply value customer service, personal development and instil a real sense of purpose into everything they do. They talk about working across disciplines, opportunities for development, feedback and performance reviews, value creation and they adopt a customer service culture. Such a culture requires a different skill set to one that legal professionals are currently exposed to. In-house teams have no alternative to adapt to the changing needs of their business if they want to succeed. In future private practice will experience the same burning platform. They will need to adapt to the changing needs of their clients or they will be side-lined for those who do.

And as in house teams continue to grow and become more sophisticated, we have the ability and the influence (and perhaps duty) to make change happen across the whole ecosystem. Law firms are prepared to listen and change if clients demand it. Law schools will develop programmes that offer the O Shaped human skills as part of their curricula if law firms ask them to. We can make change happen and we can do it quickly, we just need a more concerted, collective effort.

The O Case For Change

That’s where the O comes in. The O has enabled a growing community to have very different conversations across the profession. We ran a series of pilots between in-house and private practice where we applied O Shaped thinking and we recently published a report from those pilots which demonstrated how individuals had flourished and teams had connected. There is widespread recognition that legal services in the 21st century are so much more than just lawyers and just dispensing legal advice. There is a real willingness across many parts to embrace the O Shaped attributes and invest in building relationships, creating value and being adaptable. We now need to make it happen and we will.

‘Leaders Shape, Victims Grumble’

I heard a quote some time ago that has stuck with me – “leaders shape and victims grumble”. The suggestion being that by taking a proactive, positive approach to change, we can shape our own future, one that can balance the technical with the human skills. Sure, there will be naysayers. Those who want to keep the status quo because it works for them personally, not for those they employ, their customers or the next generation. They will be left to grumble.

By engaging with the industry at large, from law schools to senior leaders, the O is making, leading and landing the case for change. We are highlighting that we can be a healthier, happier more engaged profession that continues to deliver legal advice of the highest standard but in a way that recognises the value of people and the variety of skills and talents that are currently untapped.

We believe that in-house teams will ultimately drive the changes across the profession and have built a growing community of senior in-house leaders who share our vision for change. The newly- formed O Shaped working groups will enable us to deliver against a significant change agenda that will make a lasting difference.

We are reaching the tipping point where O Shaped human skills will become part of our profession’s DNA. But we must do more to ensure change is sustainable. I invite you to join us in collectively making it happen.

I guarantee that there will be those victims who will grumble but I can also assure you that there are plenty of leaders who will O Shape.

Thank you Legal Geek.