US law schools pushed to improve leadership training

Too many US law schools are not teaching leadership skills, a failing increasingly exposed by technological and generational shifts, academic and corporate experts have warned.

The deficit has become more glaring as legal professionals grapple with changes such as the rise of artificial intelligence, which reduces skill-sharpening person-to-person interactions, and the increased demand for work-life balance among younger workers. Its effects are being seen in law firms’ struggles with succession plans, and perhaps even in the worsening of the nation’s political dysfunction.

“They are not trained to be leaders at all, and law school doesn’t do anything to help them do that,” Sharon Meit Abrahams, the president of the professional services company Legal Talent Advisors, said of US law school graduates.

According to another expert, Richard Jolly, a clinical associate professor of management and organisations at Northwestern University: “There is, in many ways, a crisis of leadership in the legal world, because the skills you need in order to be an effective leader are not the skills that you’re trained to do at law school – and not the skills that are rewarded to help you get promoted up to associate and then up to partner.”

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The paucity of leadership-related education – and the teaching of interpersonal relations more broadly – is not necessarily unique to law schools, the experts said, especially as rising tuition fees mean greater emphasis is put on helping students get their first job after graduation.

But the deficit is looking especially troublesome for the legal field, where accumulations of technical expertise are heavily rewarded and firms tend to be small, leaving relatively limited pools from which leaders can identify their successors, Dr Jolly said. In past eras, “you could be a very brilliant attorney and be absolutely useless at relationships,” he said. “And increasingly, that’s not the case.”

The shortcoming could even be hurting the nation more generally, given the dominance of lawyers among the ranks of national and local elected officials, Dr Abrahams acknowledged. “They have charisma, they have charisma – not always leadership skills,” she said of US lawmakers.

Law firms have recognised the problem and have been trying to address it, hiring experts such as Dr Abrahams to teach leadership to their young hires. Some US universities also are embracing the challenge. They include the University of Houston, which just hired an alumnus, Andrew Gratz, who spent his career training young lawyers in the private sector, to bring that content to its law school.

Dr Jolly, a long-time professor of organisational behaviour at the London Business School, came to Northwestern on a similar mission. Four years in, he describes making progress, but also encountering what he sees as a significant amount of ingrained resistance from many of his law school colleagues.

“When you’re dealing with lawyers, and especially law academics, they are highly sceptical. It takes a long time,” he said.

The idea is being embraced more quickly by Northwestern students, in the law school and elsewhere, including undergraduates across various majors, Dr Jolly said. “It’s something that is proving very popular”, as measured by class enrolments, he said.

The uptake should only accelerate, Dr Abrahams said, because lawyers who have have additional business-related training are more highly valued. “I do a lot of career counselling, and I tell anybody who has a JD-MBA, ‘You’re going to get hired in friggin’ heartbeat, because the law firms know that you have an understanding of how businesses work,’” she said. “And a lot of lawyers don’t even understand how the law business works.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com