The mobile lawyer

Shortly after reading The Road Ahead in the latest Law Gazette (I will come back to that in a later post), I read Jordan Furlong’s post Lawyers in the smartphone era in Law 21.

I cannot help but feel somewhat depressed by Furlong’s vision of the future for lawyers, the consequence he anticipates of two smartphone-related developments.

The first is that thanks to smartphones, every lawyer is going to be mobile.It’s true that the Blackberry has already made itself a significant presence in the lives of many business lawyers, for better and for worse. But as a general rule, the lawyer’s center of gravity remains where it’s always been: her office, where she keeps her desk, chair, landline phone, files, books, and desktop computer. That center of gravity is now shifting to the lawyer herself. With the smartphones of the near future at her command, that lawyer will be able to do everything on the road — call, e-mail, Web browse, review files, read cases, write memos, etc. — that she now does in the office. In fact, it’ll be expected of her. A lawyer with a smartphone is a walking law firm — one that hardly ever closes. Lawyers who obsessively check their smartphone messages are considered antisocial nuisances today, but before long, they’ll be the norm. I’m not saying that’s good, but I am saying it’s pretty much inevitable.

In many ways, I think we are already there. It may not be smartphones yet in the UK, but the BlackBerry is ubiquitous, and for many lawyers it is not where their desk is that is important, but where their client’s desk is. For lawyers, as for many other professionals, mobility is essential (although I remain to be convinced by the BlackBerry).

And Furlong’s second impact category?

Among the tens of thousands of future applications [being developed by iPhone, BlackBerry, and others] will be many that deliver legal services directly to clients. For lawyers, this development could represent either a threat (yet another way in which computers are reducing traditional lawyer work to a series of algorithms) or an opportunity (someone with legal knowhow and experience has to design those algorithms; why not a law firm?). But either way, over the next decade, smartphones will become a legal service delivery medium. Now’s the time for lawyers to start dealing with that.

Some people will say that there’s no way a simple cellphone will ever be able to do lawyer work. Some people used to say that about computers, too. So I’ll take this opportunity to update one of my axioms: the problem won’t be smartphones doing what lawyers can do; it’ll be lawyers continuing to do what smartphones can do.

When did you last see your father?

Research, conducted by HR consultancy Hudson UK, shows, if today’s report in The Lawyer is to be believed, that 30 per cent of legal professionals are so dissatisfied with their current role that they would not want to see their children in their job. Martin Luise, director of legal recruitment at Hudson, is quoted in Lawyers’ kids warned against following in their footsteps, as saying,

These findings are very disturbing, especially with the current economic conditions. That so many legal professionals would not want to see their children follow in their footsteps points to a workforce that is both unhappy and lacking confidence.

I don’t agree that the workforce is unhappy (or any more unhappy than any other profession’s workforce). Nor do I think it demonstrates a lack of confidence in the profession. Not wanting your children to follow in your footsteps does not necessarily mean that you are dissatisfied in your job. Instead, it is perhaps a realistic evaluation of where we see the profession in ten years, the opportunities that are available to Millenials that weren’t to us, and, more generally, changing attitudes and expectations.

Although I haven’t actively encouraged my children to consider law as a career; equally, had any of them wanted to do so, I would have encouraged them. A number of my friends (not lawyers) have asked me to talk to their children, and I have, and some are now lawyers. I have also always had trainees, at last count some 50 over the years, so have, at least at second hand, an understanding of what has driven a generation and a half of people to enter the law.

But closer to home, what put my children off, and they have made no bones about this, was the work. “We never saw you when we were little; you were always working” is what the eldest told me recently. That, I replied, is an occupational hazard for the children of a corporate transactional lawyer!

What are universities for?

With two through university and in the world of work, two going through and one trying to decide if and when, universities and university life are much in our minds.

I read Jonathan Bate’s article, The wrong idea of a university, in the first edition of Standpoint, shortly before a recent event, where much was made, by the speakers from our university hosts, of the need to retain graduates in the region and to grow and encourage entrepreneurs. Bate writes,

With Gordon Brown’s restructuring of government departments, higher education is now under the control of the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (“DIUS”). We no longer have a Department for Education in this country. The idea of a university as “a place of teaching universal knowledge” — Cardinal Newman’s phrase — has, it seems, no relevance in Brown’s Britain. Higher education must now justify itself in terms of the “innovation and skills agenda”. Crudely put, academic research must pay its way by generating real returns in the wider economy. The Research Councils’ big new idea, driven by DIUS, is “knowledge transfer”. This is defined as “improving exploitation of the research base to meet national economic and public service objectives” to be achieved by means of “people and knowledge flow” together with “commercialisation, including Intellectual Property exploitation and entrepreneurial activities”.

Fine sounding words from DIUS but deep down, like so much else from this government, absolutely meaningless. One of Bate’s conclusions in his hard copy article (but strangely missing from the website one) is that,

Higher education has been hijacked by the quangocracy: teaching is neglected, research is distorted by bogus assessment methods, and trust in professional judgement is gone.

Priority fruit

If you have read my blog before, you will not be surprised that I don’t agree with Penelope Trunk’s views on BlackBerries, found through another excellent post on Law 21, Core competence: 6 new skills now required of lawyers, but her post Stop blaming your Blackberry for your lack of self-discipline is still worth reading, if only because it promotes the myth of the multi-talented, multi-tasking Generation Y-er

If you want to see a whole generation make great choices about their priorities using the Blackberry, then latch onto Generation Y. They have been managing multiple steams of conversation simultaneously for more than a decade, so they are aces at it. And they are fiends for productivity tips. The most popular blogs are productivity blogs, and David Allen is a rock star in this demographic. So young people are constantly using prioritizing tools to make their information and ideas flow more smoothly for both work and life, back and forth, totally braided.

Blackberries are tools for the well-prioritized. If you feel like you’re being ruled by your Blackberry, you probably are. And the only way to free yourself from those shackles is to start prioritizing so that you know at any given moment what is the most important thing to do. Sometimes it will be the Blackberry, and sometimes it won’t. And the first step to doing this shift properly is recognizing that you can be on and off the Blackberry all day as a sign of empowerment.

Penelope is obviously one of those people who takes her BlackBerry to bed (you will have to read the full post to know why) but she is right about prioritising, and time management is one of those 6 new skills now required of lawyers (although I am not so certain that this is really a new skill: it is perhaps more that the pressure of modern practice means it is even more important).

As for the other 5 new skills required, I will come back to these soon.

Vanity publishing sucks

All too often law firms’ websites (invariably still brochure-ware, however fancy) and their updates and bulletins are more about the law firm and its lawyers, and less about the target audience. At best this is an irritation, and at worse a definite turn off. I know, as I regularly receive unsolicited updates from accountants and property advisers: most of them, if soft copy, are now routed seamlessly into Junk Mail (I have only recently discovered this very useful application in Outlook); if hard copy, they find their way unread into the recycling bin in very short order.

I follow these rules

Think about who your target audience is
Think about what they have told you they want (and not just what you think they want)
Think about how what you are going to tell them will help them (as well as helping you)
Think about what you want to say
Think about the best delivery channel

and then make sure that it only goes to those people to whom it should go (see earlier my post Mailing list hell).