Oct 17, 2019

What are the skills that the legal industry needs to develop and integrate in an era of rapid technological and business model transformation?

In a new podcast, Mark Cohen, CEO of Legal Mosaic, a legal business consultancy; and Daniel Rodriguez, the Harold Washington Professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, discussed this issue at length.

With one representative from the academia and one more focused on the business side of law, Rodriguez and Cohen somehow manage to find common ground on the need to transform the legal workforce to accommodate the many new skill sets that are required today.

The pair agreed that legal education needs to move beyond just training in legal doctrine and needs to expand to include skills related to the business side of legal practice (including the application of technology) and personal effectiveness skills such as emotional intelligence, entrepreneurial mindset, and communication. While there was agreement that those skills represent the new, broader skill set that today’s industry requires, there’s still room for discussion about how those skills are delivered, including the role of law schools and the need for lifetime learning in a rapidly changing industry.

The approach of Rodriguez and Cohen has much in common with the new Delta Lawyer Competency Model, which was recently published by the Legal Executive Institute and authored by Natalie Runyon, Director of Enterprise Content Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute; and Alyson Carrel, Clinical Associate Professor of Law and Assistant Director for the Center on Negotiation and Mediation at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law (with input from many partners across the industry).