Canadian Lawyer 4Students

58 AUGUST 2017 C A N A D I A N L a w y e r 4STUDENTS Ours is the era of the technological twin set. e information age is the parent of the consumer mantra, "better, cheaper, faster" — which, in turn, is driving a demand for greater efficiency, greater account- ability and greater customer centredness. What this means is that the Canadian lawyer of the 21st century needs to be a rather different creature than that of the 20th. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that we need to be what we've always been, but more; that our profession needs skills that we've always known, but now it needs them in greater ubiquity. Tomorrow's lawyer — which, of course, actually means today's lawyer — still needs to know the law and how to navigate the legal system. She needs to be able to communicate with brevity and effect — though now also with cultural nuance that was alien to most of us a generation ago. But knowledge of the law and procedure — our tra- ditional stock in trade and the thing that for centuries has conferred on us the stature of a "learned profession" — is no longer enough. To- morrow's lawyer also — at least if he wants to be successful — needs to have a solid level of business acumen and a firm grounding in ex- otic topics with foreign-sounding names such as project management and lean six sigma. Tomorrow's lawyer will need to be an instinctive problem solver. e conventional party line in law school is that we teach students to think like lawyers. We don't, though — at least we don't in a sys- tematic, structural way. What we do is teach students to think in terms of problems. We can throw a mess of disparate facts at students, and by the end of first year, they will almost certainly be able to wade through them and not just separate the grain from the chaff but also point out the legal issues and liabilities involved. at's all well and good. But it's only half the equation when it comes to "thinking like a lawyer" for good law- yers don't just think in terms of problems, they think in terms of solutions. Even in terms of old-fashioned legal education, this was a profound skill gap! In the future, it's going to be a deal breaker in terms of effective client representation. Design thinking is another skill that tomorrow's lawyer will need. To many, this will sound like so much business school mumbo-jumbo. But as design think- ing expert Caitlin Moon has described it (quoted in an American Bar Association piece called "Design ink- ing for Lawyers" by Vanderbilt law professor J B Ruhl), "e focus of design thinking in the legal services set- ting is to match client needs with what is legally feasible in a way that delivers client value and lawyer opportunity." When expressed this way, it seems much less controversial. In fact, it seems like a natural corollary to really thinking like a lawyer. And then, there is tech-savviness. at's what most lawyers are re- ferring to when they talk about "innovation" — how we can use tech- nology to do what we've always done, but faster and less labour-inten- sively. People in the tech world call folk born before 1980 (i.e., the bulk of the Canadian legal profession) "digital immigrants" as opposed to people born aerwards who are said to be "digital natives." is is significant, for it means that most lawyers don't naturally possess the technological reflexivity that clients need. We need consciously to learn to be techy, unlike young people who learn it naturally as they are learning to speak. Tech-savviness, business acumen, cultural sensitivity, solution- oriented design thinking . . . without these skills, and probably many others, a lawyer in private practice today will either flounder or end up before a discipline panel — or both. So, it's up to those of us who are training the next generation of the profession to make sure that we nurture these skills among our progeny. e truth, though, is that it's wrong to think of this as a debate about teaching skills. What the lawyer of tomorrow really needs is different attributes. "Culture eats strategy for lunch," Peter Drucker is famously Training lawyers for tomorrow Law schools must focus on attributes, not just skills, for a new generation to thrive in tumultuous times By Ian Holloway LEGAL INNOVATION NOW @LawDeanHolloway

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