T-shaped lawyer là gì

I first discussed the idea of T-Shaped Lawyers at the ReInvent Law NYC 2014 Conference (video) and fleshed out the idea in an article in the ABA Law Practice Magazine "Big Ideas Issue," July/Aug 2014. The concept has become a popular way to discuss skill development for lawyers in the 21st century.

A T-shaped lawyer has deep legal expertise (long vertical bar of the T) but also has enough knowledge of and appreciation for other disciplines (shallower horizontal bar of the T) such as technology, business, analytics, and data security to better problem solve and collaborate with professionals with expertise in those areas. Changes in the legal market, lawyer ethics, and new jobs for lawyers demonstrate the need and demand for T-shaped lawyers in this century.

The T-Shaped Lawyer discussion continues:

  • Law Made: https://lawmade.com/articles/video-what-is-the-tshape-professional/

  • The T-shaped Lawyer and Beyond: Rethinking legal professionalism and legal education for contemporary societies, by Elaine Mak: https://www.amazon.com/T-shaped-Lawyer-Beyond-professionalism-contemporary/dp/9462367981 (Dec. 2017)

  • In-House T-Shaped Lawyer: https://www.inhousecommunity.com/article/t-shaped-lawyer/

 A research group has also built on the T-Shaped Lawyer model to suggest a “Delta Model” for lawyer competency, which adds “personal effectiveness” (soft skills like emotional intelligence) as a key area of competency.

The Times They Are a-Changin’ goes the Bob Dylan song – taking into account recent events specifically in South Africa over the last two weeks never have truer words been spoken. The legal profession has been in a state of flux for at least the last decade and the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have further disrupted how lawyers do business.

Clients have over the last few years evolved to expect lawyers, whether in-house or in practice, to add more value than just legal skills and to have some of the following competencies:

  • being able to effectively use technology to provide efficient and cost-effective services;
  • excellent change management and business leadership skills;
  • being able to mitigate business risk;
  • understanding the language of business and knowing the client’s particular business well;
  • being able to project manage their own matters;
  • being diverse;
  • having solid government and regulator relationships; and
  • having strong interpersonal skills.

The evolving nature of legal work is further influenced by digitilisation and technology. This has accelerated over the last two weeks as lawyers have been forced to work from home and embrace technologies such as Zoom, Teams, Box and e-signature and scanning apps such as Cam Scanner and Genius Scan whether they are comfortable with using them or not.

Lawyers are also facing a challenge to their monopoly of certain services from alternative service providers or technologies. The automation of legal work by using technology is removing labour intensive tasks and standardizing and simplifying processes which has increased efficiency and changed how legal services are sold. The work that used to fill unending billable hours for junior lawyers such as legal research is fast disappearing and clients are no longer willing to pay for this or to pay for candidate attorney “learning” time on their matters.

In order to meet the nuanced expectations of today’s clients and survive the onslaught of technology and digitilisation lawyers have to acquire new skills, qualities and mindsets which epitomize what has been dubbed the “T-shaped lawyer”. T-shaped lawyers will be able to cope with challenges to the legal profession because they will have deep legal knowledge and academic skills (the vertical column of the T) together with a broad knowledge of other complementary disciplines such a technology, the environment, psychology, economics, human resources, change management and leadership, business development, risk management, project management etc (the horizontal column of the T). T- Shaped lawyers as such possess interdisciplinary competences which enable them to stay relevant and be able to answer new legal questions that arise.

The intersection of traditional legal skills and relatively new disciplines can, for example, be seen in the following:

  • legal cases which deal with climate change and the use and protection of personal data;
  • legal cases which consider the legalities of cryptocurrencies; and
  • using Blockchain technology to conclude real estate transactions.

So how do lawyers become T-shaped?

University

The starting point should be University as that is the bedrock of every lawyer’s legal training. These T-shaped elements should be infused into the curriculum of law schools. South African law schools already allow law students to first complete a 3 year degree in other fields such as a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Commerce followed by a two year Bachelor of Laws degree. This goes someway towards providing legal students with a more well-rounded education. There is however no consistency in terms of what all law students learn. Some students opt to only do a straight four year Bachelor of Laws degree.  The students who first complete a Bachelor of Arts degree may not be exposed to finance or accounting and those who complete a Bachelor of Commerce degree may not be exposed to psychology or politics for example. 

A 98 page report on “The State of the Provision of the Bachelor of Laws (LLB) Qualification in South Africa” was published by the Council of Higher Education in November 2018. The CHE Report found that there is a serious lacuna in the legal education system concerning the inculcation in students of critical thinking and basic writing and communications skills. Amongst other things, the CHE Report recommended that:

  • all law faculties/schools should undertake a curriculum reform exercise; and
  • serious consideration should be given by the Department of Higher Education and Training, in consultation with all relevant stakeholders, to extend the duration for the attainment of an LLB qualification from the current minimum of four years of study to a minimum of five years of study.

I would go a step further than the CHE Report and recommend that all law students should be required as a minimum to take introductory courses in other disciplines such as psychology, business, risk management, human resources, technology, politics and government relations, finance, accounting and project management etc. as part of their qualification.

Practice

Lawyers who have completed their traditional legal education should proactively seek to fill relevant gaps in their skills base by completing online or face-to-face courses in the afore-mentioned disciplines. Legal knowledge managers in law firms and banks should look to train lawyers not only in traditional legal skills but also in the above-mentioned complementary disciplines.

Working in a different department, office, city or country will also assist lawyers with their interpersonal skills, diversity exposure and understanding of their business. Early in my career I moved from Johannesburg to New York to work for a Global Elite law firm and it was best thing I could have done for my career.

Another suggestion for the more bold is to move out of law all together for a few months or even years and go into sales, teaching, finance, human resources, project management, technology etc. Secondments or detours into these different fields will stand lawyers who have a long-term view of their legal careers in good stead. The second best thing I did for my career was to do short secondments to different clients in the banking, energy and real estate sector as well as to lecture at a University part-time. Becoming a T-shaped lawyer is an ongoing endeavor however and I am constantly looking at ways to expand the horizontal column and deepen the vertical column of my T.

The core competencies that successful lawyers of the future will need to have is broad interdisciplinary knowledge as well as the ability to understand, embrace and adapt to constant change. Those who fail to raise the bar in this regard do so at their peril – The Times They Are a-Changin.