Legal Research

"How Much Should You Specialize?"

Posted by Carolyn Elefant: "There's an interesting opinion piece at Legal Week on the growing importance of specialization, by former law firm trainee Dominic Webb. Although the piece discusses lawyers in U.K. firms, it is equally relevant to American firms as well.

Webb says that today's large commercial law firms are "rammed full of specialists." The benefits of specialists are obvious -- they are highly competent at what they do, and thus can service clients more cost effectively. But there's also a cost to specialization, and that is the impact that it has on individual lawyers themselves. The problem is that young lawyers are asked to pigeonhole themselves into narrow specializations, often without any opportunity to even experience different practice areas. Webb writes:

Specialisation is inevitable, and indeed desirable, particularly at partner level. It is quite right to expect that experienced people, 20 years and more into their careers, will conclude that their knowledge, or their skill set, or indeed their client base, would be best directed towards one particular area of law.

But big law firms are expecting, often demanding, that lawyers make this decision not after a 20 year career, but after a two year training contract - a training contract where they may have only seen four pretty niche areas of law anyway. Inevitably it leads to good people becoming disgruntled, stuck in a rut, wondering why they ever became lawyers in the first place. People were not attracted to law by the thought of spending year after year negotiating and re-drafting the same 200-page loan agreement.

Still, the emphasis on specialization won't change unless it's in a law firm's best interest. Webb makes the argument that perhaps we over-emphasize specialization:

But surely an extreme level of specialisation is not a good thing for firms either, not in the long term. Having armies of people who are trained only to do one thing, and who are incapable of turning their hand to anything else, does not sound like a recipe for long-term success. The turnover of people in the big law firms, pre-recession at least, was enormous. When you're losing nearly a quarter of your workforce every year, you must realise that something is up. OK, over-specialisation is only one of several reasons for that, but it's a significant reason.

In the recession, specialization has been a lottery of a sort. Lawyers who specialize in bankruptcy remain busy, while those with financial industry or merger backgrounds are out of work. Yet a few years ago, the reverse was true, with financial and corporate work booming and bankruptcy floundering. Specialization can make lawyers more valuable, but at the same time, the old adage applies: Don't put all your eggs in one basket."

The active link is available at the source site listed below.

Source: Legal Blog Watch, 12 August 2009

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on August 13, 2009 (boomark / email).