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9 SECRETS SUCCESSFUL SOLICITORS USE TO LAND £100K JOBS
WITH TOP LONDON LAW FIRMS
‘By being bloody good lawyers’
When I decided to write this book I mentioned the idea to the head of recruitment at a
top City firm and she immediately responded with the words: ‘By being bloody good
lawyers.’ I’m sorry to say that but I’m not sure it is quite that simple.
I can think of a lot of ‘bloody good lawyers’ who are on nothing like £100k and never
will be; and that got me thinking. This is actually a far more interesting question than
it may at first appear, with a vast range of factors at play and more than a few
assumptions some of which we believe could be challenged.
GO TO AN OXBRIDGE OR RUSSELL GROUP UNIVERSITY
In July 2014 Justin Cash wrote and interesting article for Legal Week: The Oxbridge
conveyor belt – a progress report on law firms' efforts to widen the graduate recruitment
pool
Legal Week research into the universities attended by the 2013 trainee intake at the
UK's top 30 law firms paints a gloomy picture of social mobility, given the dominance of
recruits who attended Oxford, Cambridge or another member of the Russell Group
network of 24 leading UK universities.
24 of the top 30 law firms provided details. They took on 1,049 trainees, of which 219
– one-fifth – were Oxbridge students. A further 613 contracts – 58% of the total intake
– were awarded to other Russell Group university graduates. That left the UK's other
universities supplying just 156 (15%) graduates to the top firms, with the remaining 61
(6%) coming from overseas universities.
Hogan Lovells was amongst the First that responded to the survey. They had the highest
proportion of Oxbridge trainees: 27 (44%) of the 61 trainees the firm took on in 2013
were Oxbridge-educated, with a further 31 (51%) coming from Russell Group
universities. The biggest employers of Oxbridge graduate trainees by number were
Linklaters with 40 such recruits (32% of the firm's total intake), Herbert Smith Freehills
(HSF) with 32 (39%) and Allen & Overy (A&O) with 30 (33%).
While Justin is trying to explain how things are improving, the facts and figures do not
substantiate that at all. He also tries to mitigate it:
"Law firms simply don't have hundreds of people in their graduate recruitment teams;
they can't go to every university in the UK, so one of the things we have to do is focus
on Russell and non-Russell Group universities alike."
A funny story that anecdotally illustrates how the current false beliefs may not be
working was when one of the largest law firms in London who recruit significant number
of their trainees from Oxbridge put a team of nearly 50 up against a litigation boutique
I know very well who put up a team of less than 10; I’ll leave it to you to work out which
firm’s client lost with multimillion pound costs.
What is even funnier is that the graduate recruitment partner at the same large City
firm has been quoted as saying ‘there is a real focus on social mobility… we recruit from
a variety of social backgrounds…’
The simple truth is that too many organisations are working with an assumption that
they should only recruit from ‘the top universities,’ which also brings about moral issues
raised both in the Shultz Sedeck report which we will look at next and the Department
of Education’s report Social Class and Higher Education, Issues Affecting Decisions on
Participation by Lower Social Lower Class Groups in March 2001.
That does not change the fact that if you want £100k you had better go to Oxbridge or
a Russell Group University.
MEASURING MERIT
When I started working as a legal recruiter, I remember being told how important the
university was, let alone the candidates’ grades. Over time those factors have become
contextualised by other equally important factors.
In 1998 Marjorie Shultz and Sheldon Zedeck at Berkley School of law decided to find
out if you could predict lawyering ability. Their paper in 2014 Measuring Merit is more
than a little thought provoking.
They defined 26 core skills that were required to be a good lawyer. The interesting
thing that they discovered was that overall there is a negative correlation between
academics and lawyering ability. Of the 26 skills required, they found that 8 correlated
negatively and only 4 were positive.
So do not worry if you did not go to an Oxbridge or Russell Group University if you want
to earn £100k.
GET INTO MORGAN LEWIS
One law firm known for paying well is Morgan Lewis who pays their New Qualified
lawyers £100k. So an obvious starting point would be go and work for them. In 2015
we analysed their associates and what was interesting was that only four went to
Oxbridge, 8 went to Russell Group, and 8 went to other universities. Considering the
talent pool they search in, the balance is interesting.
Are they on to something?
JORDAN FURLON 2008 – 6 NEW SKILLS NOW REQUIRED BY LAWYERS
While Shultz & Zedeck were working on their research Jordan Furlong was coming to
some very similar conclusions especially when it comes to interpersonal skills and
emotional intelligence. He found 6 new skills that lawyers need and published the
following article:
Up till now, the necessary and sufficient skill set for lawyers has looked something like
this (in alphabetical order):
 Analytical ability
 Attention to detail
 Logical reasoning
 Persuasiveness
 Sound judgment
 Writing ability (okay, that one’s apparently optional for some)
This list doesn’t include such characteristics as knowledge of the law, courtroom
presence, or integrity — these aren’t “skills,” per se, as much information as one
acquires or basic elements of one’s character. Even innovation, which I prize so highly,
is first and foremost an attitude and willingness to think and act differently.
I’m concerned here with actual skill: a ready proficiency or applied ability acquired and
developed through training and experience. Your degree of character, diligence and
intelligence are innate characteristics; skills are what you acquire through their
application. If you possessed these six skills in sufficient abundance, you were fully
qualified to practise law.
Well, not anymore, from this point onwards, while these skills remain necessary,
they’re no longer sufficient: they constitute only half of the set necessary to practise
law competently, effectively and competitively. Here’s the new six-pack, the other half
of tomorrow’s — no, today’s — minimum skills kit for lawyers (again in alphabetical
order).
1. Collaboration skills. This isn’t just about “working well in a team,” essential as that
is. This is about the ability to function in a multi-party work environment such that the
process and outcome transcend the collective contribution — the whole surpasses the
sum of the parts. Thanks to technological and social advances, this is how work is
going to be done from now on. Lawyers who collaborate well have the ability to
identify and bring out the best others have to offer, to submerge their own positions
and egos where necessary, in order to reach the optimal client outcome. Collaborative
lawyers trust the wisdom of the group; lone wolves and isolationists don’t do any good
anymore.
2. Emotional intelligence. If you just rolled your eyes at this entry, you probably
subscribe to the belief, drilled into us in law school and in practice that lawyers have to
detach themselves emotionally from their cases and clients in order to offer the best
advice. That’s idiotic. Clients need our empathy, perspective and personal connection
to feel whole and satisfied; colleagues need our engagement, respect and
understanding to achieve their best and help us succeed; everyone needs us to listen
better than we do. Distant, detached lawyers are relics of the 20th century — the
market no longer wants a lawyer who is only half a person.
3. Financial literacy. This is a widespread issue, recently identified by The Economist
as a factor in the subprime meltdown and other economic woes. But there’s no excuse
for lawyers to remain so steadfastly clueless about money: running a business,
balancing a ledger, understanding tax principles, working with statistics, calculating
profit margins, even explaining the rationale behind their fees. Too many lawyers with
Arts degrees just shrug and say, “I was never good with numbers” or “They never
taught me that in law school.” Not good enough: every client and every case involves
money in some way, and every lawyer in private practice is running a business of one
size or another. Financial literacy is essential.
4. Project management. It’s a growing refrain among clients, a chorus of frustration
that most lawyers have zero skills in project management. Some lawyers wouldn’t
even be able to define it: planning, organizing, and managing resources to
successfully complete specific objectives while maintaining scope, quality, time and
budget restrictions. Lawyers seem pathologically unwilling to estimate time or budget
costs (invoking the almighty “it depends” clause) and are incapable of creating and
managing a plan of action, presumably for fear of failing or being caught shorthanded.
But today, everybody project-manages: it’s SOP in corporate life, and lawyers are the
only ones in the business chain who seem to have missed the memo.
5. Technological affinity. Gerry Riskin recently called out the legal profession in a
timely post on this subject: “too many lawyers pride themselves on their IT
incompetence, believing that it makes them somehow charming and brilliant.” Lawyers
have grown accustomed to going unchallenged on their technological backwardness,
and even tech-savvy new lawyers eventually succumb to firms’ glacial pace of tech
adaptation. Here is the fact: technological affinity is a core competence of lawyering. If
you can’t effectively and efficiently use e-mail, the Internet, and mobile telephone,
you might as well just stay at home. And if you don’t care to learn about RSS, instant
messaging, Adobe Acrobat and the like, clients and colleagues will pass you by.
6. Time management. Virtually every lawyer I meet says the same things: “I’m just so
busy. I have so much to do. I don’t have any time for myself.” And yes, law is
demanding, hard work. But a substantial part of lawyers’ difficulties in this regard lie
with their inability to prioritize their tasks and manage their time. Lawyers are terrible
at saying “no,” they’re awful at delegating work into more efficient channels, and
amazingly, many are still compensated not by the tasks they accomplish but by how
long they take to do them. Lawyers who won’t or can’t learn to manage their time will
continue to blame their Blackberry’s for their difficulties, if they don’t burn out or get
fired first.
So there you have it: six core skills that lawyers simply must possess if they want to
make a living in the 21st century. Law schools need to teach them; governing bodies
need to test for them; law firms need to make their lawyers expert in them. They’re
not optional, there are no excused absences, and the test is starting right about now.
CHOOSING YOUR LEGAL SPECIALISM
Not all legal specialisms pay as well as other so deciding what to specialise in is
important. There are some important factors that affect this and they include the value
of the matter, time pressure, risk, inability to commoditise the legal service, and how
close it is to the money creation in our modern economy.
Complex high value matters will pay higher salaries because the money is there and
clients are willing to pay.
Another thing that is not often considered is how near the role is to the source of
money in the modern economy. In 2014 Michael McLeay, Amar Radia and Ryland
Thomas of the Bank of England’s Monetary Analysis Directorate wrote a guide to
Money creation in the modern economy. It laid bare how money is created when
banks lend money, they simultaneously create a matching deposit in the borrower’s
bank account, thereby creating new money. This also explains why US firms pay more
because the influence of their central bank is greater internationally.
So the highest paying areas to specialise in are arguably going to be the following in a
US law firm:
 Business Finance & Restructuring
 Litigation
 Tax
The 7 year trap
The seventh thing highly successful lawyers will be aware of is that they need to plan
ahead, in the same way that a lot of successful CEOs are marathon runners, because it
requires setting an objective that demands long term planning and commitment.
Successful lawyers will do the same with their career. Deciding where they want to be
in 5 years, writing it down and reviewing it after five years. Asking the question ‘Am I
getting where I want in my career; and is my current role helping me to achieve what
I set out to do?’
Sadly,we occasionally come across lawyers who have been in the same firm for over
seven years, and while they are not happy and they know they need to move, they
never do so unless they are pushed, either due to their specialism becoming
unprofitable e.g. insolvency etc. It is also quite a traumatic experience for them
because they have already become institutionalised. It’s a bit like Stockholm syndrome
I guess.
Be flexible, tough and lucky
As the German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke put it "No plan of operations
extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength" (or
"no plan survives contact with the enemy") and "Strategy is a system of expedients".
However hard you plan, things will happen that you cannot control. There are
economic, legislative and technological changes that offer both problems and
unimaginable opportunities.
The economic cycle will determine how easily you get to £100k per annum. Whether it
was the .com crash or the Credit Crunch. Every decade there is usually a 1-2 years
blip as the wheel turns again.
A unique threat solicitors face is that of legislative change, but as we have said this is
not always a purely negative issue even when we might see our own specialism
disappear, or be devalued when Labour decided that gambling did not need as much
regulation. We saw a leader in this area losing his position with £600m turnover
gambling and leisure company. He is now a leading liquor licensing lawyer.
Technological change will also generate new areas of law with specialist lawyers that
have never existed before. In the last few decades there has been the growth of IT,
e-commerce, digital media, mobile technology, wind and solar power. Law firms will
have to service new industries that currently don’t even exist. Could you become a
leader in this area law?
Luck is also a fact of life, more often than not the role you apply for will not be the one
you end up getting, the number of times we have placed solicitors in firms they have
never even heard of, never ceases to amaze me. Then there is the recruitment
process itself that even with the most experience we never control 100%. We know
one solicitor who trained at a small provincial firm north of Oxford and went for couple
of interviews in the City. The first interviewing partner asked him a very complex and
topical legal question that the partner had only recently learned about himself. The
candidate had a good stab at answering, but he didn’t quite get there, so the partner
explained the answer. A few days later the same candidate was interviewed by one of
the most highly respected firms in London and the partner asked him questions about
a complex and topical… - He ended up working there for seven years.
THE GREAT DISRUPTION: HOW MACHINE INTELLIGENCE WILL TRANSFORM
THE ROLE OF LAWYERS IN THE DELIVERY OF LEGAL SERVICES
Another issue successful lawyers will be aware of is the impact machine intelligence
will have on their careers over the next couple of decades.
On 14 September 2015 BBC Panorama asked the question: Could A Robot Do My
Job? In which Rohan Silva reviewed the technological revolution that has begun in
Britain. The tone was remarkably positive.
Volvo, the Swedish motor company is talking to a number of university research
departments with a view to developing robotic bin men who can work at night with no
human involvement.
It would be easy to assume that the same could not possibly happen in law? How on
earth could a machine do a better job than a highly trained lawyer?
A fascinating and comprehensive report on the impact machine intelligence will have
on the legal profession was written by John O. McGinnis and Russell G. Pearce in the
Fordham Law Review May 2014 and I have tried to condense it here. It is not for the
faint-hearted:
Their introduction is interesting where they explain the impact Information technology
has already had on traditional journalism, causing revenues to fall by about a third
and employment to decrease by about 17,000 people in eight years.
Technological improvements in legal services and those driven by machine intelligence
are the most important phenomenon with which the legal profession will need to
grapple in the coming decades.
Those who will benefit first will be the superstars as the technology helps them stand
out. The second group of lawyers will be those who can take advantage of lower cost
inputs made available by machines to serve an expanding market of legal services for
middle-class individuals and small businesses.
Some legal jobs will be relatively immune to this change firstly, advocates, although
machines may reduce the number of disputes by creating a convergence of litigants on
the value of a case.
Secondly, those lawyers who are in highly specialized areas subject to rapid legal
change, will be relatively unaffected, because machines will work best in more
routinized and settled areas.
Thirdly, counsellors who must persuade unwilling clients to do what is in their self-
interest. It will also continue to have a role, since machines will be unable to create
the necessary emotional bonds with clients.
Lawyers who write routine wills, conveyancing, draft standard contracts, and review
documents—face a much bleaker future, because machines will do many such routine
legal tasks. Thus, while the arrival of the machines will be generally good for
consumers, the picture is much more mixed for lawyers.
THE RISE OF MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
Computers have been accelerating in power according to “Moore’s Law.” This law
reflects the regularity that the number of transistors that can be fitted onto a
computer chip doubles every eighteen months to two years. For over forty years,
computers have been growing at a similarly exponential rate.
Recently, researchers confirmed that Moore’s Law remains accurate.
I’m not going to bore you with the IT part if I can help it, such as algorithms, RFID
tags, temporal communication, broadband capacity or spatial capacity. Put simply the
power of IT is expanding in all ways. The result is the growth of IT infrastructure and
“big data”.
Assuming that computers continue to double in power, their hardware dimension alone
will be over two hundred times more powerful in 2030.
Looking at the exponential increase in hardware capability actually understates the
change in computational capacity in two ways.
The speed of performing a task has been improved by 1,000 times through increases
in hardware capacity. Improvements in software algorithms also increased computer
speed to an even greater extent.
Computers interconnect among themselves and with human intelligence. The most
salient and obvious mechanism is the internet. But this interconnection is a process,
not a single event.
The internet will not only connect more and more people, but also more and more
physical objects though the “internet of things.”
The greater power of computation, as represented in hardware, software, and
connectivity, was behind the creation of Watson, the IBM machine that beat the
best Jeopardy champions of all time in 2011. Jeopardy is a game of complexity and
breadth, requiring players to disentangle elements that seem unique to human
understanding, including jokes, rhymes, and language games. This combination of
natural language capability, together with the capacity to analyse issues containing
different kinds of information and ambiguity, make Watson’s application relevant to
the discussion of machines in the practice of law. “Watson” won by exploiting the
improvements in all three areas discussed above—hardware, software, and
connectivity—all capacities that can be expected to rapidly improve. As a result,
Watson is a harbinger of the growing scope of machine intelligence in daily life.
IBM considers Watson so important that it has created a division around the machine,
investing $1 billion in the machine’s development.19 IBM is using its program to aid in
medical diagnosis. At a recent competition on how to make use of Watson, the winning
entry centred on the legal field, using Watson to search for relevant evidence in data
and predict how helpful the evidence will be to winning the case.
Five Areas of Law on the Cusp of Machine Intelligence Invasion will
dramatically change in the near future: (1) discovery; (2) legal search; (3) document
generation; (4) brief and memoranda generation; and (5) prediction of case
outcomes.
Some tasks, like discovery, others, like brief writing, have not yet been fundamentally
altered. But there are already signs that such fields will be transformed, because
information technology is already being developed in allied fields, like journalism.
Machine intelligence is most advanced in discovery where predictive coding has
fundamentally transformed the prospects for e-discovery. Computer technicians help
construct algorithms that predict whether a document is relevant. Of course, predictive
coding is imperfect, because it can miss some documents. But, imperfection is the
norm even when lawyers perform document review.
Large law firms have set up e-discovery units within their firms and new service
providers independent of law firms are also springing up. Modus digitizes records and
helps with predictive algorithms. Lawyers will face competition from companies outside
the profession.
Searching for the law by combing through precedents has been an important part of
legal work for centuries. Machine intelligence will not only perform more of this work
than lawyers, but will also perform it more efficiently.
Lexis legal search was introduced to the public in 1974 and Westlaw soon after, both
had limited utility because they either did not allow researchers to search the full text
of legal opinions or they contained an incomplete database of case law. These
problems have largely been corrected, and both Westlaw and Lexis are now staples of
legal research.
Watson signals one improvement: the change from the use of keywords to semantics.
This limitation will disappear with the rise of semantic search. Semantic search will
allow lawyers to input natural language queries to computers, and the computers will
respond semantically to those queries with directly relevant information.
Brief Mine provides a database of legal briefs and opinions. The core idea is to use
search algorithms to relate the legal briefs to the relevant opinion. Through such
connections, Brief Mine hopes to help lawyers understand how the winning brief
contributed to victory in the subsequent opinion.
Machine intelligence will go further being able to make judgments about the strength
of precedents. Network analysis can now evaluate the strength of a precedent by
considering how much other cases rely on it.
Machine intelligence will not only uncover precedent but will also guide lawyers’
judgments about the use of precedent, as most lawyers can neither comprehensively
evaluate the strength of precedent nor recall all possible precedents to mind.
Legal forms will also be revolutionised by Machine Intelligence. They will help tailor
these forms to meet individual situations. LegalZoom can already submit information
about his assets and his intentions for disposal of his estate to generate a draft of a
will.
In the future, documents will also improve as they become more closely connected to
results. With the growing interconnectedness of data, machines can relate specific
contracts to all court decisions related to creating a dynamic of practical critique for
continual improvement of legal forms.
At first, lawyers will still be very involved in marking up the first drafts that machines
create. But even at this stage, the savings can be very large. For instance, Fenwick &
West, a firm whose principal office is in Silicon Valley, developed a program that
automatically creates the documents for incorporating start-ups. Matt Kesner, their
technology officer, said: “‘It reduced the average time we were spending from about
20 to 40 hours down to a handful of hours . . . . In cases with even extensive
documents, we can cut the time of document creation from days and weeks to hours.’”
In the future, machine processing will be able to automate a form, tailor it according
to the specific facts and legal arguments, and track its effect in future litigation. As
hardware and software capacity improves, so will the generated documents. We
predict that within ten to fifteen years, computer-based services will routinely
generate the first draft of most transactional documents.
Predictive analytics is a new discipline that combines data with analysis to make
predictions. Computational power allows substantial data to be collected and
organized. Patterns can then be found among the data. Machine learning can help
analyze regularities within the patterns.
Using big data to guide decisions is one of the most important trends of the last
decade.
It has intensified so much that universities now offer courses, and indeed degrees, in
data analytics.
Predictive analytics is now coming to law. Indeed, law, with its massive amounts of
data from case law, briefs, and other documents, is conducive to machine data mining
that is the foundation of this new predictive science.
Of course, lawyers make implicit judgments about litigation prospects when advising
clients whether to bring a lawsuit, settle, or go to trial. But their advice is based on
their intuitions and limited to their direct or indirect experience of law. The advantage
of predictive analytics is that it provides a mechanism both to access a vast amount of
information and systematically mine that information to understand the likely outcome
of the case at hand.
The rise of legal analytics will also have an effect on the number of cases that go to
trial and the amount of discovery. Whenever the parties agree on the amount a case is
worth, the case is likely to settle.
The convergence does not need to be perfect for two reasons. Firstly, the expense of
legal fees on both sides creates a larger window in which settlement is sensible,
because both sides will be better off settling for an amount between their estimates of
the case’s value to save legal fees. Secondly, in many cases, at least one side is risk
averse and would prefer the certainty of settlement to the risks of litigation. As legal
analytics provide better estimates of a case’s value, parties will converge more rapidly
toward an agreement that falls within the settlement window created by legal fees and
risk aversion.
Even if average lawyers will be disadvantaged, some superstars may earn even
greater returns. Firstly, with great metrics of comparison, discerning who the
superstars are will be easier. Secondly, superstars can extend their research through
technology: they deliver their innovative solutions to problems faster and to a broader
range of clients. Partners may also be able to substitute machines for associates,
thereby gaining more leverage at lower cost. Thirdly, for a range of important
transactions and litigation, even small improvements in outcomes make it worthwhile
for clients to pay for non-commoditized legal services. Even if the machine intelligence
provides very good services, mixing in human intelligence may assure the best
possible result. Accordingly, we may see an even more bimodal distribution of legal
salaries, perhaps with a smaller group of even more highly compensated lawyers.
Machines may affect some other areas of law to a lesser extent, because machines
cannot easily add as much value to certain tasks lawyers perform. For instance,
machines will not argue in court and thus will not replace those who specialize in oral
advocacy. Nevertheless, machines will indirectly affect the practice of trial and
appellate lawyers. With more accurate predictions of case outcomes, fewer trials
should occur because more parties will settle.
Machines will generally be most effective at finding patterns in past data to predict the
future. Given the world’s ongoing technological acceleration, lawyers who specialize in
areas connected to that acceleration, like intellectual property, may also continue to
prosper.
The subject of Emotional Intelligence is raised by John O’McGinnis and Russell Pearce
when they talk about the bond between lawyer and client fuel, and client-centred
counselling — the careful, even elaborate, process in which lawyer and client work
together to identify the relevant considerations on which the decision should be based.
This process makes sense only if it is believed that people are prone to overlook or
misjudge important issues bearing on their decisions, and that correcting such errors
is an essential predicate to their making decisions that truly serve their own interests.”
Lawyers do more than undertake legal analysis. They bond with their clients, thereby
fostering relationships of trust, which allow the lawyer to facilitate clients to see their
long-term legal self-interest, even when clients’ passions and confusions cloud that
interest.
Machines are unlikely to perform this bonding function and, thus, will be unlikely to
substantially affect this important aspect of the lawyer-client relationship.
I’m now going to skip a large portion of the report and go to their conclusion. The last
sentence before which reads:
…the fear that machine intelligence will undermine the ideological foundations of
lawyers’ monopoly is a very real one.
CONCLUSION
The market for electronic legal services is at a relatively early, yet significant, stage in
terms of the disruptive effect of machine intelligence in undermining lawyers’
monopoly.
As machine intelligence in lawyering develops exponentially, it will take an increasingly
larger role in five areas of legal practice: discovery, legal search, generation of
documents, creation of briefs and memoranda, and predictive analytics.
Eventually, machine intelligence will prove faster and more efficient than many
lawyers in providing those services.
Lawyers will continue to provide services that cannot be commoditized if they are
superstars, practice in highly specialized areas of law subject to rapid change, appear
in court, or provide services where human relationships are central to their quality.
Otherwise, no effective barriers to the advance of machine lawyering in legal practices
exist—not even in the law and ethics of lawyering. Lawyers will continue to embrace
machine intelligence as an input and fail to prevent non-lawyers from using it to
deliver legal services.
Ultimately, therefore, the disruptive effect of machine intelligence will trigger the end
of lawyers’ monopoly and provide a benefit to society and clients as legal services
become more transparent and affordable to consumers, and access to justice thereby
will become more widely available.
So if you want to earn £100k per annum you will have to keep your wits about you,
plan and review your career and above all, keep your chin up when the going gets
tough.
Wishes to you all
Nicholas Tyrrell
Mandaus Legal Search

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9 secrets successful solicitors use to land £100 k jobs with top london law firms

  • 1. 9 SECRETS SUCCESSFUL SOLICITORS USE TO LAND £100K JOBS WITH TOP LONDON LAW FIRMS ‘By being bloody good lawyers’ When I decided to write this book I mentioned the idea to the head of recruitment at a top City firm and she immediately responded with the words: ‘By being bloody good lawyers.’ I’m sorry to say that but I’m not sure it is quite that simple. I can think of a lot of ‘bloody good lawyers’ who are on nothing like £100k and never will be; and that got me thinking. This is actually a far more interesting question than it may at first appear, with a vast range of factors at play and more than a few assumptions some of which we believe could be challenged. GO TO AN OXBRIDGE OR RUSSELL GROUP UNIVERSITY In July 2014 Justin Cash wrote and interesting article for Legal Week: The Oxbridge conveyor belt – a progress report on law firms' efforts to widen the graduate recruitment pool Legal Week research into the universities attended by the 2013 trainee intake at the UK's top 30 law firms paints a gloomy picture of social mobility, given the dominance of recruits who attended Oxford, Cambridge or another member of the Russell Group network of 24 leading UK universities. 24 of the top 30 law firms provided details. They took on 1,049 trainees, of which 219 – one-fifth – were Oxbridge students. A further 613 contracts – 58% of the total intake – were awarded to other Russell Group university graduates. That left the UK's other universities supplying just 156 (15%) graduates to the top firms, with the remaining 61 (6%) coming from overseas universities. Hogan Lovells was amongst the First that responded to the survey. They had the highest proportion of Oxbridge trainees: 27 (44%) of the 61 trainees the firm took on in 2013 were Oxbridge-educated, with a further 31 (51%) coming from Russell Group universities. The biggest employers of Oxbridge graduate trainees by number were Linklaters with 40 such recruits (32% of the firm's total intake), Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) with 32 (39%) and Allen & Overy (A&O) with 30 (33%). While Justin is trying to explain how things are improving, the facts and figures do not substantiate that at all. He also tries to mitigate it: "Law firms simply don't have hundreds of people in their graduate recruitment teams; they can't go to every university in the UK, so one of the things we have to do is focus on Russell and non-Russell Group universities alike." A funny story that anecdotally illustrates how the current false beliefs may not be working was when one of the largest law firms in London who recruit significant number of their trainees from Oxbridge put a team of nearly 50 up against a litigation boutique I know very well who put up a team of less than 10; I’ll leave it to you to work out which firm’s client lost with multimillion pound costs.
  • 2. What is even funnier is that the graduate recruitment partner at the same large City firm has been quoted as saying ‘there is a real focus on social mobility… we recruit from a variety of social backgrounds…’ The simple truth is that too many organisations are working with an assumption that they should only recruit from ‘the top universities,’ which also brings about moral issues raised both in the Shultz Sedeck report which we will look at next and the Department of Education’s report Social Class and Higher Education, Issues Affecting Decisions on Participation by Lower Social Lower Class Groups in March 2001. That does not change the fact that if you want £100k you had better go to Oxbridge or a Russell Group University. MEASURING MERIT When I started working as a legal recruiter, I remember being told how important the university was, let alone the candidates’ grades. Over time those factors have become contextualised by other equally important factors. In 1998 Marjorie Shultz and Sheldon Zedeck at Berkley School of law decided to find out if you could predict lawyering ability. Their paper in 2014 Measuring Merit is more than a little thought provoking. They defined 26 core skills that were required to be a good lawyer. The interesting thing that they discovered was that overall there is a negative correlation between academics and lawyering ability. Of the 26 skills required, they found that 8 correlated negatively and only 4 were positive. So do not worry if you did not go to an Oxbridge or Russell Group University if you want to earn £100k. GET INTO MORGAN LEWIS One law firm known for paying well is Morgan Lewis who pays their New Qualified lawyers £100k. So an obvious starting point would be go and work for them. In 2015 we analysed their associates and what was interesting was that only four went to Oxbridge, 8 went to Russell Group, and 8 went to other universities. Considering the talent pool they search in, the balance is interesting. Are they on to something? JORDAN FURLON 2008 – 6 NEW SKILLS NOW REQUIRED BY LAWYERS While Shultz & Zedeck were working on their research Jordan Furlong was coming to some very similar conclusions especially when it comes to interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence. He found 6 new skills that lawyers need and published the following article: Up till now, the necessary and sufficient skill set for lawyers has looked something like this (in alphabetical order):  Analytical ability  Attention to detail  Logical reasoning  Persuasiveness
  • 3.  Sound judgment  Writing ability (okay, that one’s apparently optional for some) This list doesn’t include such characteristics as knowledge of the law, courtroom presence, or integrity — these aren’t “skills,” per se, as much information as one acquires or basic elements of one’s character. Even innovation, which I prize so highly, is first and foremost an attitude and willingness to think and act differently. I’m concerned here with actual skill: a ready proficiency or applied ability acquired and developed through training and experience. Your degree of character, diligence and intelligence are innate characteristics; skills are what you acquire through their application. If you possessed these six skills in sufficient abundance, you were fully qualified to practise law. Well, not anymore, from this point onwards, while these skills remain necessary, they’re no longer sufficient: they constitute only half of the set necessary to practise law competently, effectively and competitively. Here’s the new six-pack, the other half of tomorrow’s — no, today’s — minimum skills kit for lawyers (again in alphabetical order). 1. Collaboration skills. This isn’t just about “working well in a team,” essential as that is. This is about the ability to function in a multi-party work environment such that the process and outcome transcend the collective contribution — the whole surpasses the sum of the parts. Thanks to technological and social advances, this is how work is going to be done from now on. Lawyers who collaborate well have the ability to identify and bring out the best others have to offer, to submerge their own positions and egos where necessary, in order to reach the optimal client outcome. Collaborative lawyers trust the wisdom of the group; lone wolves and isolationists don’t do any good anymore. 2. Emotional intelligence. If you just rolled your eyes at this entry, you probably subscribe to the belief, drilled into us in law school and in practice that lawyers have to detach themselves emotionally from their cases and clients in order to offer the best advice. That’s idiotic. Clients need our empathy, perspective and personal connection to feel whole and satisfied; colleagues need our engagement, respect and understanding to achieve their best and help us succeed; everyone needs us to listen better than we do. Distant, detached lawyers are relics of the 20th century — the market no longer wants a lawyer who is only half a person. 3. Financial literacy. This is a widespread issue, recently identified by The Economist as a factor in the subprime meltdown and other economic woes. But there’s no excuse for lawyers to remain so steadfastly clueless about money: running a business, balancing a ledger, understanding tax principles, working with statistics, calculating profit margins, even explaining the rationale behind their fees. Too many lawyers with Arts degrees just shrug and say, “I was never good with numbers” or “They never taught me that in law school.” Not good enough: every client and every case involves money in some way, and every lawyer in private practice is running a business of one size or another. Financial literacy is essential.
  • 4. 4. Project management. It’s a growing refrain among clients, a chorus of frustration that most lawyers have zero skills in project management. Some lawyers wouldn’t even be able to define it: planning, organizing, and managing resources to successfully complete specific objectives while maintaining scope, quality, time and budget restrictions. Lawyers seem pathologically unwilling to estimate time or budget costs (invoking the almighty “it depends” clause) and are incapable of creating and managing a plan of action, presumably for fear of failing or being caught shorthanded. But today, everybody project-manages: it’s SOP in corporate life, and lawyers are the only ones in the business chain who seem to have missed the memo. 5. Technological affinity. Gerry Riskin recently called out the legal profession in a timely post on this subject: “too many lawyers pride themselves on their IT incompetence, believing that it makes them somehow charming and brilliant.” Lawyers have grown accustomed to going unchallenged on their technological backwardness, and even tech-savvy new lawyers eventually succumb to firms’ glacial pace of tech adaptation. Here is the fact: technological affinity is a core competence of lawyering. If you can’t effectively and efficiently use e-mail, the Internet, and mobile telephone, you might as well just stay at home. And if you don’t care to learn about RSS, instant messaging, Adobe Acrobat and the like, clients and colleagues will pass you by. 6. Time management. Virtually every lawyer I meet says the same things: “I’m just so busy. I have so much to do. I don’t have any time for myself.” And yes, law is demanding, hard work. But a substantial part of lawyers’ difficulties in this regard lie with their inability to prioritize their tasks and manage their time. Lawyers are terrible at saying “no,” they’re awful at delegating work into more efficient channels, and amazingly, many are still compensated not by the tasks they accomplish but by how long they take to do them. Lawyers who won’t or can’t learn to manage their time will continue to blame their Blackberry’s for their difficulties, if they don’t burn out or get fired first. So there you have it: six core skills that lawyers simply must possess if they want to make a living in the 21st century. Law schools need to teach them; governing bodies need to test for them; law firms need to make their lawyers expert in them. They’re not optional, there are no excused absences, and the test is starting right about now. CHOOSING YOUR LEGAL SPECIALISM Not all legal specialisms pay as well as other so deciding what to specialise in is important. There are some important factors that affect this and they include the value of the matter, time pressure, risk, inability to commoditise the legal service, and how close it is to the money creation in our modern economy. Complex high value matters will pay higher salaries because the money is there and clients are willing to pay. Another thing that is not often considered is how near the role is to the source of money in the modern economy. In 2014 Michael McLeay, Amar Radia and Ryland Thomas of the Bank of England’s Monetary Analysis Directorate wrote a guide to Money creation in the modern economy. It laid bare how money is created when banks lend money, they simultaneously create a matching deposit in the borrower’s
  • 5. bank account, thereby creating new money. This also explains why US firms pay more because the influence of their central bank is greater internationally. So the highest paying areas to specialise in are arguably going to be the following in a US law firm:  Business Finance & Restructuring  Litigation  Tax The 7 year trap The seventh thing highly successful lawyers will be aware of is that they need to plan ahead, in the same way that a lot of successful CEOs are marathon runners, because it requires setting an objective that demands long term planning and commitment. Successful lawyers will do the same with their career. Deciding where they want to be in 5 years, writing it down and reviewing it after five years. Asking the question ‘Am I getting where I want in my career; and is my current role helping me to achieve what I set out to do?’ Sadly,we occasionally come across lawyers who have been in the same firm for over seven years, and while they are not happy and they know they need to move, they never do so unless they are pushed, either due to their specialism becoming unprofitable e.g. insolvency etc. It is also quite a traumatic experience for them because they have already become institutionalised. It’s a bit like Stockholm syndrome I guess. Be flexible, tough and lucky As the German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke put it "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength" (or "no plan survives contact with the enemy") and "Strategy is a system of expedients". However hard you plan, things will happen that you cannot control. There are economic, legislative and technological changes that offer both problems and unimaginable opportunities. The economic cycle will determine how easily you get to £100k per annum. Whether it was the .com crash or the Credit Crunch. Every decade there is usually a 1-2 years blip as the wheel turns again. A unique threat solicitors face is that of legislative change, but as we have said this is not always a purely negative issue even when we might see our own specialism disappear, or be devalued when Labour decided that gambling did not need as much regulation. We saw a leader in this area losing his position with £600m turnover gambling and leisure company. He is now a leading liquor licensing lawyer. Technological change will also generate new areas of law with specialist lawyers that have never existed before. In the last few decades there has been the growth of IT, e-commerce, digital media, mobile technology, wind and solar power. Law firms will have to service new industries that currently don’t even exist. Could you become a leader in this area law?
  • 6. Luck is also a fact of life, more often than not the role you apply for will not be the one you end up getting, the number of times we have placed solicitors in firms they have never even heard of, never ceases to amaze me. Then there is the recruitment process itself that even with the most experience we never control 100%. We know one solicitor who trained at a small provincial firm north of Oxford and went for couple of interviews in the City. The first interviewing partner asked him a very complex and topical legal question that the partner had only recently learned about himself. The candidate had a good stab at answering, but he didn’t quite get there, so the partner explained the answer. A few days later the same candidate was interviewed by one of the most highly respected firms in London and the partner asked him questions about a complex and topical… - He ended up working there for seven years. THE GREAT DISRUPTION: HOW MACHINE INTELLIGENCE WILL TRANSFORM THE ROLE OF LAWYERS IN THE DELIVERY OF LEGAL SERVICES Another issue successful lawyers will be aware of is the impact machine intelligence will have on their careers over the next couple of decades. On 14 September 2015 BBC Panorama asked the question: Could A Robot Do My Job? In which Rohan Silva reviewed the technological revolution that has begun in Britain. The tone was remarkably positive. Volvo, the Swedish motor company is talking to a number of university research departments with a view to developing robotic bin men who can work at night with no human involvement. It would be easy to assume that the same could not possibly happen in law? How on earth could a machine do a better job than a highly trained lawyer? A fascinating and comprehensive report on the impact machine intelligence will have on the legal profession was written by John O. McGinnis and Russell G. Pearce in the Fordham Law Review May 2014 and I have tried to condense it here. It is not for the faint-hearted: Their introduction is interesting where they explain the impact Information technology has already had on traditional journalism, causing revenues to fall by about a third and employment to decrease by about 17,000 people in eight years. Technological improvements in legal services and those driven by machine intelligence are the most important phenomenon with which the legal profession will need to grapple in the coming decades. Those who will benefit first will be the superstars as the technology helps them stand out. The second group of lawyers will be those who can take advantage of lower cost inputs made available by machines to serve an expanding market of legal services for
  • 7. middle-class individuals and small businesses. Some legal jobs will be relatively immune to this change firstly, advocates, although machines may reduce the number of disputes by creating a convergence of litigants on the value of a case. Secondly, those lawyers who are in highly specialized areas subject to rapid legal change, will be relatively unaffected, because machines will work best in more routinized and settled areas. Thirdly, counsellors who must persuade unwilling clients to do what is in their self- interest. It will also continue to have a role, since machines will be unable to create the necessary emotional bonds with clients. Lawyers who write routine wills, conveyancing, draft standard contracts, and review documents—face a much bleaker future, because machines will do many such routine legal tasks. Thus, while the arrival of the machines will be generally good for consumers, the picture is much more mixed for lawyers. THE RISE OF MACHINE INTELLIGENCE Computers have been accelerating in power according to “Moore’s Law.” This law reflects the regularity that the number of transistors that can be fitted onto a computer chip doubles every eighteen months to two years. For over forty years, computers have been growing at a similarly exponential rate. Recently, researchers confirmed that Moore’s Law remains accurate. I’m not going to bore you with the IT part if I can help it, such as algorithms, RFID tags, temporal communication, broadband capacity or spatial capacity. Put simply the power of IT is expanding in all ways. The result is the growth of IT infrastructure and “big data”. Assuming that computers continue to double in power, their hardware dimension alone will be over two hundred times more powerful in 2030. Looking at the exponential increase in hardware capability actually understates the change in computational capacity in two ways.
  • 8. The speed of performing a task has been improved by 1,000 times through increases in hardware capacity. Improvements in software algorithms also increased computer speed to an even greater extent. Computers interconnect among themselves and with human intelligence. The most salient and obvious mechanism is the internet. But this interconnection is a process, not a single event. The internet will not only connect more and more people, but also more and more physical objects though the “internet of things.” The greater power of computation, as represented in hardware, software, and connectivity, was behind the creation of Watson, the IBM machine that beat the best Jeopardy champions of all time in 2011. Jeopardy is a game of complexity and breadth, requiring players to disentangle elements that seem unique to human understanding, including jokes, rhymes, and language games. This combination of natural language capability, together with the capacity to analyse issues containing different kinds of information and ambiguity, make Watson’s application relevant to the discussion of machines in the practice of law. “Watson” won by exploiting the improvements in all three areas discussed above—hardware, software, and connectivity—all capacities that can be expected to rapidly improve. As a result, Watson is a harbinger of the growing scope of machine intelligence in daily life. IBM considers Watson so important that it has created a division around the machine, investing $1 billion in the machine’s development.19 IBM is using its program to aid in medical diagnosis. At a recent competition on how to make use of Watson, the winning entry centred on the legal field, using Watson to search for relevant evidence in data and predict how helpful the evidence will be to winning the case. Five Areas of Law on the Cusp of Machine Intelligence Invasion will dramatically change in the near future: (1) discovery; (2) legal search; (3) document generation; (4) brief and memoranda generation; and (5) prediction of case outcomes. Some tasks, like discovery, others, like brief writing, have not yet been fundamentally altered. But there are already signs that such fields will be transformed, because information technology is already being developed in allied fields, like journalism. Machine intelligence is most advanced in discovery where predictive coding has
  • 9. fundamentally transformed the prospects for e-discovery. Computer technicians help construct algorithms that predict whether a document is relevant. Of course, predictive coding is imperfect, because it can miss some documents. But, imperfection is the norm even when lawyers perform document review. Large law firms have set up e-discovery units within their firms and new service providers independent of law firms are also springing up. Modus digitizes records and helps with predictive algorithms. Lawyers will face competition from companies outside the profession. Searching for the law by combing through precedents has been an important part of legal work for centuries. Machine intelligence will not only perform more of this work than lawyers, but will also perform it more efficiently. Lexis legal search was introduced to the public in 1974 and Westlaw soon after, both had limited utility because they either did not allow researchers to search the full text of legal opinions or they contained an incomplete database of case law. These problems have largely been corrected, and both Westlaw and Lexis are now staples of legal research. Watson signals one improvement: the change from the use of keywords to semantics. This limitation will disappear with the rise of semantic search. Semantic search will allow lawyers to input natural language queries to computers, and the computers will respond semantically to those queries with directly relevant information. Brief Mine provides a database of legal briefs and opinions. The core idea is to use search algorithms to relate the legal briefs to the relevant opinion. Through such connections, Brief Mine hopes to help lawyers understand how the winning brief contributed to victory in the subsequent opinion. Machine intelligence will go further being able to make judgments about the strength of precedents. Network analysis can now evaluate the strength of a precedent by considering how much other cases rely on it. Machine intelligence will not only uncover precedent but will also guide lawyers’ judgments about the use of precedent, as most lawyers can neither comprehensively evaluate the strength of precedent nor recall all possible precedents to mind. Legal forms will also be revolutionised by Machine Intelligence. They will help tailor these forms to meet individual situations. LegalZoom can already submit information
  • 10. about his assets and his intentions for disposal of his estate to generate a draft of a will. In the future, documents will also improve as they become more closely connected to results. With the growing interconnectedness of data, machines can relate specific contracts to all court decisions related to creating a dynamic of practical critique for continual improvement of legal forms. At first, lawyers will still be very involved in marking up the first drafts that machines create. But even at this stage, the savings can be very large. For instance, Fenwick & West, a firm whose principal office is in Silicon Valley, developed a program that automatically creates the documents for incorporating start-ups. Matt Kesner, their technology officer, said: “‘It reduced the average time we were spending from about 20 to 40 hours down to a handful of hours . . . . In cases with even extensive documents, we can cut the time of document creation from days and weeks to hours.’” In the future, machine processing will be able to automate a form, tailor it according to the specific facts and legal arguments, and track its effect in future litigation. As hardware and software capacity improves, so will the generated documents. We predict that within ten to fifteen years, computer-based services will routinely generate the first draft of most transactional documents. Predictive analytics is a new discipline that combines data with analysis to make predictions. Computational power allows substantial data to be collected and organized. Patterns can then be found among the data. Machine learning can help analyze regularities within the patterns. Using big data to guide decisions is one of the most important trends of the last decade. It has intensified so much that universities now offer courses, and indeed degrees, in data analytics. Predictive analytics is now coming to law. Indeed, law, with its massive amounts of data from case law, briefs, and other documents, is conducive to machine data mining that is the foundation of this new predictive science. Of course, lawyers make implicit judgments about litigation prospects when advising clients whether to bring a lawsuit, settle, or go to trial. But their advice is based on their intuitions and limited to their direct or indirect experience of law. The advantage of predictive analytics is that it provides a mechanism both to access a vast amount of
  • 11. information and systematically mine that information to understand the likely outcome of the case at hand. The rise of legal analytics will also have an effect on the number of cases that go to trial and the amount of discovery. Whenever the parties agree on the amount a case is worth, the case is likely to settle. The convergence does not need to be perfect for two reasons. Firstly, the expense of legal fees on both sides creates a larger window in which settlement is sensible, because both sides will be better off settling for an amount between their estimates of the case’s value to save legal fees. Secondly, in many cases, at least one side is risk averse and would prefer the certainty of settlement to the risks of litigation. As legal analytics provide better estimates of a case’s value, parties will converge more rapidly toward an agreement that falls within the settlement window created by legal fees and risk aversion. Even if average lawyers will be disadvantaged, some superstars may earn even greater returns. Firstly, with great metrics of comparison, discerning who the superstars are will be easier. Secondly, superstars can extend their research through technology: they deliver their innovative solutions to problems faster and to a broader range of clients. Partners may also be able to substitute machines for associates, thereby gaining more leverage at lower cost. Thirdly, for a range of important transactions and litigation, even small improvements in outcomes make it worthwhile for clients to pay for non-commoditized legal services. Even if the machine intelligence provides very good services, mixing in human intelligence may assure the best possible result. Accordingly, we may see an even more bimodal distribution of legal salaries, perhaps with a smaller group of even more highly compensated lawyers. Machines may affect some other areas of law to a lesser extent, because machines cannot easily add as much value to certain tasks lawyers perform. For instance, machines will not argue in court and thus will not replace those who specialize in oral advocacy. Nevertheless, machines will indirectly affect the practice of trial and appellate lawyers. With more accurate predictions of case outcomes, fewer trials should occur because more parties will settle. Machines will generally be most effective at finding patterns in past data to predict the future. Given the world’s ongoing technological acceleration, lawyers who specialize in areas connected to that acceleration, like intellectual property, may also continue to prosper.
  • 12. The subject of Emotional Intelligence is raised by John O’McGinnis and Russell Pearce when they talk about the bond between lawyer and client fuel, and client-centred counselling — the careful, even elaborate, process in which lawyer and client work together to identify the relevant considerations on which the decision should be based. This process makes sense only if it is believed that people are prone to overlook or misjudge important issues bearing on their decisions, and that correcting such errors is an essential predicate to their making decisions that truly serve their own interests.” Lawyers do more than undertake legal analysis. They bond with their clients, thereby fostering relationships of trust, which allow the lawyer to facilitate clients to see their long-term legal self-interest, even when clients’ passions and confusions cloud that interest. Machines are unlikely to perform this bonding function and, thus, will be unlikely to substantially affect this important aspect of the lawyer-client relationship. I’m now going to skip a large portion of the report and go to their conclusion. The last sentence before which reads: …the fear that machine intelligence will undermine the ideological foundations of lawyers’ monopoly is a very real one. CONCLUSION The market for electronic legal services is at a relatively early, yet significant, stage in terms of the disruptive effect of machine intelligence in undermining lawyers’ monopoly. As machine intelligence in lawyering develops exponentially, it will take an increasingly larger role in five areas of legal practice: discovery, legal search, generation of documents, creation of briefs and memoranda, and predictive analytics. Eventually, machine intelligence will prove faster and more efficient than many lawyers in providing those services. Lawyers will continue to provide services that cannot be commoditized if they are superstars, practice in highly specialized areas of law subject to rapid change, appear
  • 13. in court, or provide services where human relationships are central to their quality. Otherwise, no effective barriers to the advance of machine lawyering in legal practices exist—not even in the law and ethics of lawyering. Lawyers will continue to embrace machine intelligence as an input and fail to prevent non-lawyers from using it to deliver legal services. Ultimately, therefore, the disruptive effect of machine intelligence will trigger the end of lawyers’ monopoly and provide a benefit to society and clients as legal services become more transparent and affordable to consumers, and access to justice thereby will become more widely available. So if you want to earn £100k per annum you will have to keep your wits about you, plan and review your career and above all, keep your chin up when the going gets tough. Wishes to you all Nicholas Tyrrell Mandaus Legal Search