Trying to Train and Retain the Millennial Attorney

The practice of law is changing, driven heavily by technology’s growing influence. Despite new demands, the legal business model largely remains the same. But incoming attorneys are getting younger, and often, their ideas around solving modern legal problems are more in tune with the modern legal climate.

Some companies and firms are taking steps to alter their own processes to appease first-year attorneys and, in turn, upgrading the way they deliver legal services.

In the International Legal Technology Association ILTACON 2017 session “New Training Models for Better Legal Ops Services,” Troutman Sanders partner Alison Grounds and Michael Lipps, CEO and managing director of legal software solutions at Lexis Nexis, shared their experiences trying to train, retain and prepare the next generation of attorneys.

At Troutman Sanders, Grounds oversees eMerge, a subsidiary that specializes in e-discovery and technology related legal work. But in addition to providing these services, the group also trains lawyers on the technologies they’ll need for these tasks. She explained her experience with eMerge as “kind of like having a little startup company from nothing,” noting that they “really had to scale up pretty quickly.”

Grounds currently oversees efforts to train both lawyers fresh out of law school as well as current law firm associates and attorneys in the ways of modern legal technology. One way eMerge does this is through its “eDiscovery Fellowship Program.”  eMerge also has an internship program for students coming out of law school, in which they look for attorneys to bring into the group.

The approach wasn’t always easy though—at times, she explained, lateral lawyers didn’t fit with the program, due to their own lack of interest in technology. At other times, it’s “difficult trying to find people as passionate and fit and had the aptitude to do what we need them to do.”

But there’s an ethical obligation for lawyers and the firms to understand technology and how it applies to their practice, Grounds said. “One of the first things I started doing at the firm (when hired) were these educational sessions, even as an associate.”

Lexis Nexis’ Lipps had his own experiences getting young attorneys to bring technology into the practice of law. He advised that “the simple exercise of wanting to put a group of first years in front of us from a variety of different problems … ultimately led us to Silicon Valley and the CodeX program.”

In Lipps’ view, training around legal technology doesn’t always have to be legal specific. He noted that there are law schools across the country that have programs around artificial intelligence and other technologies “that don’t necessarily have a legal angle with them.”

Lexis Nexis learned much from this approach. The company moved into a space at North Carolina State University next door to the school’s computer science department. “Right from day one [we] sort of threw our doors open to the computer science department” and found ways to engage students that didn’t want to go law school, and worked with them to apply technology to solving legal problems, Lipps explained.

Since then, the group has hosted hackathons, where Lexis Nexis clients will propose problems that teams of students and Lexis engineers “will spend hours, and sometimes days, [trying] to solve,” he said. Additionally, Lexis Nexis funds these efforts, and also has a board of students working in legal technology consult them.

Taking the Next Generation the Next Step

Training new lawyers in technology can be a costly and time consuming effort, and in the case of law firms, it isn’t guaranteed that they’ll stick around after their education.

Grounds noted that her group’s technology internship program was “more successful” with finding people that are “a good pairing” who stay with eMerge. However, the outcome wasn’t always the same.

“On the lawyer side, I’ve had good success with folks that are already in the temp doc review case,” Grounds said. “But my recent law school graduates are a bit of a hit or miss.”

She explained that success is contingent on the attorney’s desired career path. Grounds said that, while she’s “trying to convince them that this is a new era” they “don’t want to miss,” attorneys working in eMerge aren’t on the partnership track. “Because of that they get that training and they want to go be an associate somewhere, it makes complete sense.”

But while eMerge has lost attorneys they’ve invested technology training in, “I don’t think it’s any worse than the batting average of firms on the whole,” she added. “It just happens a little earlier.”

Nevertheless, technology’s role in law is only growing, meaning that attorneys will increasingly be expected to know how to apply it.

“Technology in law is here to stay,” Lipps said. “If you’re a partner on a big case, you have to think of technology as a part of your team and part of your strategy.”

Both speakers agreed that technology can be an entry point for bringing in new clients. However, Lipps stressed the importance of knowing just what the technology can do. He explained how a CIO told him that every morning, her managing partner goes to the rest room, reads something, then comes back and says, ‘I just learned about AI, and what is our AI strategy.’

“There’s so much volume of information around these emerging technologies,” Lipps added. “There’s this level of hysteria at law firms that are [saying], ‘OK, what do we do about this thing,’ when they don’t even understand what these technologies are.”