In the PHL, FEU and La Salle have long ago adopted a Law-Business program that earns for the law student a JD degree with an MBA component. In the US, there is a trend to revised law schools curricula along this line.
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A new law school curriculum: The hybrid lawyer/business developer
The legal profession today faces an existential crisis requiring informed action. The circumstances which many law school graduates find themselves in is a result of that crisis. How the legal profession got here – is less relevant to how it gets out of the crisis. And to get out of the crisis – law firms need to become more commercially astute not only about how they provide legal services, but also about how they generate new revenue. Indeed, without revenue – discussion of how to create efficiencies in the delivery of services are irrelevant. As well, law schools need to change with the times and offer a curriculum reflective of what the market needs while maintaining a commitment to academic rigor.
Law schools, therefore, should adopt a teaching programme aimed at creating a new generation of hybrid lawyers/business developers. The combination of these abilities would provide the legal profession with a highly sophisticated, institutional sales force capable of generating new revenue at the highest levels of corporations, governments and other prospective clients – throughout the world. In fact, this is a discipline sophisticated enough to warrant formal acknowledgement and study both within the legal academy and within the practicing profession.
Importantly, this discipline might generate support and assuage concerns among some law school academicians concerned about turning law schools into trade schools. As well, there is precedent for this sort of academic program in law schools. Harvard University, for example, offers a joint degree in both law and public policy (JD/MPP). Indeed, Harvard Law School recently outlined a “bridge seminar for the Harvard joint degree program in law and government—(which) aims to teach students to give advice on issues that have both legal and policy dimensions but also to understand the stakes for the institutions involved.” At Fordham Law School, Dr. Silvia Hodges already teaches a course on legal marketing. Therefore, why not take it much further and train new hybrid practitioners who work as specialists in the genuine fusion of a lawyer and business developer?
A law school curriculum proposing to train hybrid lawyers/business developers would include, but not be limited to, the following core skills:
The traditional curriculum:
- A comprehensive knowledge of law gained from studying the core curriculum currently offered in law schools.
Complimented by a legal business development curriculum, including:
- How to comprehensively understand the domestic and global commercial context in which law firms operate.
- How to identify saleable services from within often complex legal practice areas.
- How to carefully match and integrate closely – law firm services – with the commercial needs of prospective clients.
- How to identify where law firms will secure new revenue from advancing the commercial objectives of clients.
- How to perform sophisticated market research sufficient to generate a substantial pipeline of new clients in both domestic and international markets.
- How to most effectively initiate, manage and drive forward the entire business development process from the identification of ideal potential new clients to securing new client engagements.
- How to create legal transactions around those ideal commercial opportunities you’ve already identified while working in concert with subject matter practitioners and prospective clients.
- How to write semi-scholarly content on topics of highly specific relevance to ideal potential clients, for strategic dissemination on and off digital platforms.
- Comprehensive selling skills training, arming new graduates with an ability to successfully identify and persuasively communicate vital messages to audiences ranging from CEO’s of global corporations to the heads of foreign sovereign governments.
Why institutionalization of the Lawyer/Business Developer would help everyone
- Law schools would win by offering highly relevant training for a new generation of sophisticated hybrid lawyer/business developers within a new legal services landscape, while continuing to remain relevant and solvent.
- Law students would win as they would have greater career options relevant to the changing legal profession — as well as more return on investment for the substantial sums they pay to attend law school.
- Law firms would win as they would find themselves with the opportunity to employ those trained specifically in the most sophisticated methods of business development that would institutionalize practices devoted to generating revenue – the area where law firms most need reform.
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