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Saturday, November 2, 2024

Do We Have Enough Great Trial Lawyers

Their View

Our collective perceptions of trial lawyers comes from the golden era  of television, where the practice of trial law was romanticized over  decades. Whether the public’s perception of the lives and careers of  trial lawyers were shaped by Mason, Matlock, Becker -  or even Goodman,  Chiles, and Hutz - these characters brought the lives of trial lawyers  into our living rooms.

More importantly, the best of these portrayals influenced many people  to go to law school and pursue litigation as a career path. As these  characters kept coming into our homes, our law schools benefited from  the influx of young people who wanted to be trial lawyers.

But in 2017, the American Bar Association warned of a shortage of trial lawyers.  Not only was there a shortage of litigators, it was becoming much more  difficult for young lawyers to get the practical experience in the  courtroom that is critical to growing and evolving as a practitioner.  One of the reasons this was happening is because fewer cases were going  to trial. Dating back to the 1980s, more cases were settled before  trial, to the point where in 2017 the ABA noted that only 2% of civil  cases were going to trial.

The notion of a shortage of lawyers runs counter to what we have  believed for a long time, about a saturated profession and far too many  law schools given job prospects over the past two decades. But lawyers  who are truly trial lawyers were a niche and remain a niche within the  profession and many would argue that their training and skill set has  not evolved much since that golden era of television. 

Keeping in mind that trial lawyers actually spend far less time in  trials than the public or even law students believe, and almost nothing  they do resembles what we see on television, how do we make sure that  tomorrow’s trial lawyers have a chance to be as great as the fictitious  and real trial lawyers of the past?

The answer may lie in a word that is like kryptonite to many in the legal profession.

Technology.

In early 2020, even before COVID-19 began to change the landscape of how law is practiced, a McKinsey study noted that 23% of lawyers’ work can be automated and that law schools  needed to be more responsive to meet that demand. If law schools must  respond to this need then training programs for new lawyers will have an  even greater burden in training these new lawyers. While powerful law  firms continue to pay top dollar to new associates, are they equipped to  teach and mentor the trial lawyer of the future? And if there’s even  any question as to the skill and interest set of the best-known firms to  do this, what of smaller firms outside of the larger cities? Will they  be as well-positioned and will the newest technologies be available to  these firms as quickly as to the others?

So where do we ultimately land today in an era that is making trial  law more complex and more intertwined with technology than it ever has  been?

In late 2020, this is a question that is not yet even close to  settled. What does seem clear is that the trial lawyer of the future  (and maybe the trial lawyer of future TV and Netflix series) will have  significantly deeper technology competencies than ever before. And as  McKinsey notes, it’s really going to be ride or die for law schools,  who, in the next five years, will need to transform legal technology  training from a niche thing often oriented towards students with already  deep technology backgrounds into required, necessary skills for anyone  training to be a trial lawyer. 

It’s not that trial lawyers themselves are going to need to write  computer code, but they’re definitely going to need to understand it.  Moreover, they’re going to need to have the technical and interpersonal  skills to word with people who are deep technologists, whether those  people work in their firm or in the modernized court system of the not  very distant future. While saying this in 2017 might have been seen as  aspirational, disregarding these guidelines today is simpl;y poor risk  management. 

About Aron Solomon

Aron Solomon is the Senior Digital Strategist for NextLevel.com and an Adjunct Professor at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University. 

Aron was the founder of LegalX at MaRS Discovery District in Toronto,  one of the world's first legal technology accelerators, and was elected  to Fastcase 50 in 2015, which recognizes the world's leading legal  innovators, Aron regularly consults for large global corporations, law,  and accounting firms.

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