The New Practicality

Since this blog's overarching interest is in the trends that are surfacing and shaping the business of law, on occasion it's helpful to step back and see how some of the individual topics we've been tracking are coalescing as a whole.

Law.com ran a piece the other day by Ari Kaplan which hits on two of the trends we've been watching, and the article not only confirms our observations, but it inspires a new term: The New Practicality.

The two tenets of the New Practicality are:

• The present state of staffing/hiring dynamics are impacting the majority of those entering the profession.

"There is a real awareness that the hiring landscape is forever altered, but it is too soon to determine what the contours of that new normal will be," says James Leipold, NALP's executive director. "Law schools face real challenges because the demand for new graduates is going to be compromised for a while," he adds.

"One sobering statistic about associate employment: In its annual study of associate attrition the NALP Foundation found that 32 percent of associate departures in 2009 were the result of firm downsizing -- compared with 0 percent in 2006."

No matter how you look at it, that is a significant number.

• There is an emerging demand for practical skills.

"The interest in practical skills, such as firm citizenship, professionalism, project management and client development, is being driven by a new culture of efficiency and higher expectations."

"... Chris Simmons, managing partner for the Washington Metro Region of PricewaterhouseCoopers aptly characterized those new duties: "What you think is the hard stuff (technical proficiency) is really the easy stuff, and what you think is the easy stuff (soft skills) is the hard stuff," he said. "Financial pressures in law firms are requiring individuals to prove their relevance," he added."

What is interesting is that the driving force behind the New Practicality is not just the economy; it's really the vertical access to information provided by the internet.

To the layperson, even twenty years ago, the practice of law was something that took place behind closed mahogany doors and drawn velvet curtains. Most people didn't have access to or the understanding of what lawyers were actually doing. Most clients only saw the final product.

The internet changed that by providing access to information that, to some degree, opened a window of transparency into the inner workings of law firms and legal departments.

While the economic turmoil of '08 caused clients to tighten financial demands on their attorneys, clients wouldn't have known to turn the screws if they hadn't become more savvy consumers via the changes brought on by the digital world of the internet.

Previous economic pinches didn't result in a New Practicality, because clients didn't realize there could be any other options.