Legal News

Teaching Lawyers to be Business People. Discuss.

By Ashby Jones

B5.

If you’re a young lawyer sitting at your desk this morning, delaying the moment the billable-hour clock starts running for the day, we encourage you to delay it a few minutes more and turn to page B5 of the WSJ. On that page alone, along with two lovely ads, you’ll find a triad of articles, all devoted to lawyers and the topic of business. (Those more digitally inclined can find the articles here, here and here.)

All of the pieces discuss ways lawyers are getting smarter on business. The first, called “Law Firms Embrace Business School 101,” looks at the trend of law firms sending their younger attorneys out to get even more education, often in the form of seminars, both to train associates for management positions and to teach them about their clients.

A related piece, called “Lawyers Often Lack the Skills Needed to Draw, Keep Clients,” focuses on how firms are training lawyers ways to drum up more business. The third — “Creating a Shorter Path to a J.D./M.B.A.” — talks about those schools that have started offering that joint degree in three years rather than the traditional four.

It’s hard to draw a neat takeaway from the three pieces, but for the sake of economy and discussion, we’ll try. When viewed collectively, the three articles could provide a critique of the traditional three-year law-school model. Some quotes:

• “We realized our associates don’t have an inside view of how our clients work,” said Jane Eiselein, WilmerHale’s director of professional development.
• Lawyers are business solutions and to be able to be that, you must have an understanding of business dynamics,” says Jim Hever, the head of the client development centre at Addleshaw Goddard in London.
• Business development is not something taught in law school, said Larry Bodine, an Illinois-based business development consultant. “Basically you spend three years reading appellate court opinions and you don’t learn anything about building a clientele.”

LB Readers, what do you think? We realize that not everyone who graduates from law school heads off to a big firm that caters to companies, but should law schools be focusing less on “appellate court opinions” and more on the workings of the corporate marketplace?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 20, 2009 (boomark / email).