Professional Development Is Not Just for Junior Associates

Are lawyers suffering "arrested development," as the cheeky title of a dead-serious article has it at Legal Week?  Professional development is one of the pantheon of gods whose worship is most often honored in the breach, or else by procrustean insistence that junior associates hastily choose a "specialty" in order to maximize their billable value.

In that and an accompanying editorial, the following question is essentially posed.  Given that:

• Cash compensation alone is necessary but not sufficient for career satisfaction;
• So long as the billable-hour model reigns, time pressures will continue relentless; and
• Pressure to focus on a niche practice is unabated,

then what can firms realistically do to address the "growing disconnection between employer and employee across the legal sector?"  The traditional partnership pot-of-gold looks increasingly distant and improbable, and is no release from time and practice pressures in any event—"a pie-eating contest in which the award is more pie," as skeptics put it. 

Business as usual is not an option:  "The transition from gentlemen’s club to 21st century business will continue, at pace."  So the pertinent question becomes not "what needs to be changed?" but rather the far more interesting one, "what skills do we need to develop in successful 21st-century lawyers?"

Technical expertise will always continue to be a given, your admission ticket.  But as technology continues its innovative march, as outsourcing begins to loom up faster and faster on the horizon, and as regulatory reforms (notably, the Clementi Commission in the UK) open new frontiers in law firm structures, what remains the characteristic which cannot be readily cloned, imitated, or grasped by a "fast follower?"

Simply, what it's always been:  Deeply trusting human relationships premised on the lawyer's ability to communicate with both sagacity and commercial and economic insight into the client's issues.  This is all the best firms have ever had to sell, and it must remain emphatically more so as commoditising forces nip and cut from below.

And with this you get a "development" bonus:  What could be more professionally satisfying?