Lawyers and Business Development Skills
As someone who works closely with our Sales and Business Development team to help them identify and research prospective clients, I was happy to come across the recent article “Courting clients: Are law school grads getting the business skills they need?” in The Lawyers Weekly. It discusses the need for law schools to incorporate client development training into the curriculum, and how various law schools are doing this. Currently, business development training has been a focus of the schools’ career services offices (the article highlights the career services programs offered at University of British Columbia and University of New Brunswick), but many law school deans are now recognizing the need for these skills to be formally taught in the classroom.
I don’t agree that “business development skills” should be taught as part of the formal law school curriculum – unless one starts from the premise that law schools are first and foremost trade schools.
In my view, putting the teach of those skills as part of the schools’ career services offices is exactly where they should be. If bodies within the profession, itself, want to give the law schools money to teach business development skills; then by all means. But it shouldn’t be at the expense of the subject matter of law.
To me, the premise that underlies Ms. Caruso’s suggestion is part of the reason why the legal profession has a bad reputation amongst so many people – that everything and anything that is taught in law school, and that we do in the profession, is focused towards increasing the likelihood of filling the profession’s pockets.
Let’s step back and look at other professions. I’ll apolgize in advance for the overkill.
Is there a push in the medical professional schools to include “how to find paying patients to work on” skills as part of the formal medical program? What would it be taught under?
Is there a push in the teaching professional schools to include “how to find paying students to teach” skills as part of …
Is there a push in the theological schools to include “how to find parishioners who will pay for the pleasure of attending the place of worship” as part of the …
Is there a push in the military colleges to include “how to find paying clients” as part of the …
Perhaps I shouldn’t ask whether there’s such a push in the MBA and accounting schools.
There’s good reading, in this recent paper, for all sides of the “what is a law school / what should a law school be” debate.
It touches on most of the issues we’ve canvased here and in related threads. The fact that it is written from the US perspective is irrelevant.
Balkin, Jack M. and Levinson, Sanford V., “Law and the Humanities: An Uneasy Relationship”. Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Vol. 18, p. 155, 2006
Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=939068
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=939068
The abstract is:
“In 1930 legal professionals like Judge Learned Hand assumed that law was either part of the humanities or deeply connected to them. By the early twenty-first century, this view no longer seems accurate, despite the fact that legal scholarship has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Instead law has moved closer to the social sciences. This essay discusses why this is so, and why the humanities exist in an uneasy relationship with law and contemporary legal scholarship.
No matter how often the legal academy embraces skills and knowledges external to law, law’s professional orientation – and the fact that law is taught in professional schools where most students will not become academics – continually pulls legal scholarship back toward an internal attitude toward law and recourse to traditional legal materials. As a result, law remains far more like a divinity school – devoted to the preservation of the faith – than a department of religion – which studies various religions from multiple perspectives. To the extent that the contemporary disciplines of the humanities view law externally or in ways inconsistent with its professional orientation, they are merely tolerated in law schools rather than central to legal study. More generally, because law is a professional field, it resists colonization by other disciplines that view law externally. Instead, law co-opts the insights of other disciplines and turns them to its own uses.
Ironically, law’s thoroughly rhetorical nature, which strongly connects it to the traditions of the humanities, places the contemporary disciplines of the humanities at a relative disadvantage. Law uses rhetoric to establish its authority and to legitimate particular acts of political and legal power. Law’s professional orientation pushes legal scholars toward prescriptivism – the demand that scholars cash out their arguments in terms of specific legal interpretations and policy proposals. These tasks push legal scholars toward technocratic forms of discourse that use the social and natural sciences more than the humanities. Whether justly or unjustly, the humanities tend to rise or fall in comparison to other disciplines to the extent that the humanities are able to help lawyers and legal scholars perform these familiar rhetorical tasks of legitimation and prescription.”
A young lawyer will eventually have to develop his or her own practice. One can catch the work when it drops into one’s lap, or one can take control of the reigns and drive practice growth through careful, methodical development of relationships that have the potential for business. A practice can develop itself, all willy nilly, or one can guide it.