Canadian Lawyer 4Students

C A N A D I A N L a w y e r 4STUDENTS AUGUST 2017 55 a problem more quickly than we think, warns Krista Jones, man- aging director of the work and learning cluster at Toronto-based technology innovation hub MaRS. She predicts that these technol- ogies will change junior jobs in the legal industry within a three- to five-year time frame. Technology disruption follows a common pattern, she warns, and disruption in legal practice will be no exception. "We have seen these new business models spinning up overnight and requir- ing skills that are not [traditionally] in demand, and then we see this race to commoditize the skills," she says. e technology industry moves at bullet speed, and where it sees an opportunity, the commercial world leaps on new developments in tech and automation to gain competitive advantage. Jones wor- ries that the academic site may not keep up. "Our education system is not structured for real-time skills development," she says. Law firms may have no choice but to adopt these technologies if they want to stay competitive, says Smith. Where one firm leads and wins competitive advantage, others will be forced to follow. Client demand may also exacerbate this race to automate. Cli- ents want more for less from legal firms. Deloitte's recently released its "Canadian Legal Landscape 2017" report, interviewing 100 in- house counsel lawyers and representatives from law firms across Canada. e research found that almost half of chief legal officers are currently using alternative fee arrangements and expect to in- crease their use in the next year. Almost two thirds of law firms said these new arrangements are not as profitable as hourly billing. "One way in which firms are understanding that is they are writ- ing off the hours of junior lawyers, because clients don't want to pay to the same degree to train junior lawyers," says Cristie Ford, associate professor and director of the Centre for Business Law at UBC's Peter A. Allard School of Law. ese shis in client demand threaten a long-standing unspo- ken arrangement between in-house departments and law firms, says Smith. "In-house departments are very reliant on the law firms to do the bulk of the training and have relied on the law firms to port some of the talent at the associate level to in-house roles," he says. Smith believes that this could create competition for talented law- yers between law firms and in-house departments. e former may be less willing to give up senior associate talent for in-house clients because a scarcer training process has le it thinner on the ground. Deloitte's figures bear this out. Seventy-two per cent of firms noted staff retention and succession planning as key priorities, and half of all legal firms pointed to staff retention as an issue. All signs point to a lack of direction on this issue, as half of the firms surveyed said that they are not tackling it, oen because they don't know how to. Axiom's Friedman expects in-house departments to pick up the slack by hiring associate-level staff earlier on for lower rates. at would effectively see in-house departments taking on more of the training burden. Is there a way for the stakeholders — the law firms, the law schools and the students themselves — to turn these challenges into opportu- nities from a skills and careers perspective? Many commenters are optimistic. Shelby Austin, who leads the strategic analytics and modelling practice at Deloitte, describes her- self as an "aggressive optimist." She acknowledges the role that au- tomation will have in shiing legal employment models — the dia- mond model features in Deloitte's report — but she adds that there are upsides for all stakeholders in a technology disruption scenario. Ultimately, the onus will fall on students to take ownership of their careers as the landscape shis for legal talent, and Austin says that there is no shortage of opportunity. "e thought that the pie is shrinking rapidly is a little overstated," she says. "With a law degree, they're going to have access to spaces that no other degree would give them and that the qualifications that they have in law school prepare them for a number of opportunities." ese opportunities may lead them down alternative career av- enues, says Peter A. Allard's Ford, who also considers herself op- timistic about the current changes. "It may be that there are other career paths, whether it's in legal project management or thinking about the intersections between social issues and a broader con- ception of justice and the law or thinking about the intersection of technology and law that are really promising," she says. Axiom's Friedman advises law students to become more busi- ness-minded. "As in-house departments rise in sophistication, there's a lot of management components to what these lawyers are doing, so understanding different trends and thinking around management is really important." Shiing skills requirements for legal students will entail new approaches to study, suggest several experts. Friedman highlights features 4S

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