"Is Law an Immature Profession?

A Ridiculous Question or is it?

The Context: Practice-based Leadership Development

Let us consider a table comparing Emotional Immaturity with Emotional Maturity. With a third column suggesting where Legal Working Culture (Hann, 2007) sits at present regarding Professional Development issues. What do you think?.

Emotional Immaturity	Emotional Maturity	The Legal Profession
Poor filters, say whatever comes to mind without regard for others feelings	Share feelings from their own experience in mutually respectful ways	Feelings are not important in the practice of the law. Don't take offence.
Defend what is familiar because complexity and change is overwhelming	Open to changing their minds when new information comes to light.	Defends the current professional development approach because work-based learning methods would be too complex. And require a capability uplift.
Do not trust or desire to learn or comprehend new complex concepts	Enjoy learning even if it contradicts what they already believe and know. Humble enough to go to "outside experts" and be accountable to them in designing and delivering a PhD academic study.	No desire to listen to and possibly learn from a 3 year PhD research study into how lawyers learn to manage and lead at work. Not relevant. Too theoretical. Not legal research.
Resist and deny reality especially when it does not fit with their opinions	Integrate new information and knowledge even if it is uncomfortable and requires rigorous analysis and synthesis across continuing legal education, workplace learning theory and professional learning theory.	Deny the reality that lawyers are really leading or managing. Even when they are doing all the necessary work their colleagues ask: "when are you getting back to the real stuff"?
Use superficial logic to shut down people's feelings: your concern for people working in the profession is not relevant to us. We will not grant you leave to complete the research. Too complicated, too theoretical. Not relevant to us.	Accept that you are the person best placed to do this research and to help others. You are prepared to leave a well paid job so as to provide better learning outcomes for lawyers, even if the legal profession doesn't seem to value what you do.	You are being too emotional in suggesting that lawyers are not receiving adequate support at work. Your desire to help lawyers has no value to them or to us the profession.We do not value your research work. We are not going to listen or learn. We will simply ignore you.
Denying Reality	Denying the reality of denial	Overcoming denial: A hopeful future

The Conundrum of a Lack of Educative Support for Learning at Work

Why is Management and Leadership Development for Lawyers Important?

The Need

In my new senior legal professional development role I wanted to provide support for lawyers learning to manage and lead at work. My personal experiences over my ten years legal career revealed some poor leadership and management skills, attitudes, and values. It was one of the reasons I decided to specialise in accredited work-based management and leadership development when I transitioned from law to adult education. I was passionate about hunting out cutting edge professional development strategies to make a positive difference to the lived work experiences of practising lawyers.

Surprisingly I found that lawyers were reluctant to come to any Workshop or Seminar that contained the work leadership or leader. And to a lesser extent "manager". They did not engage or feel entitled (or authorised) to participate in such a session. Once I commenced my research I realised that lawyers did not consider leadership work to be the "real stuff". And they understood that their legal colleagues did not usually value this work from them.

Pilot Program

Because of my previous experience, in managing a national work-based accredited management and leadership national business, I understood the benefits of offering leadership practice-based development across the Profession. There was however very little evidence about what would be the suitable delivery method and content for such programs.

However I did find an enlightened mid-tier law firm, with whom I worked for 2 years, conducting a practice-based leadership development program. We undertook what I now term Role Sculpting – a Development Program at a strategic level within the Firm with the intention of enhancing the individual professional's work skills, the workplace culture and the business performance of the firm.

Next Step: PhD Research

My research was supervised by a professional learning and work-based learning expert in the Education, not Law, Faculty. Then Associate Professor, Dr David George Beckett. The method required in-depth work analysis and dialogue with lawyers about their lived working experiences. Including observational research to understand how lawyers stepped up to learn to manage and lead throughout their legal careers.

One of the key reasons I was granted the opportunity to enrol as a PhD candidate, by The University of Melbourne, was because my role as Director of Legal Professional Development placed me in a unique position to understand the profession wide issues in the learning and development of lawyers’ post-admission. The irony does

not escape me.

False Hope is the Denial of Reality

“Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it."

"Are you saying we shouldn't hope?"

"I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open!”

Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, War of the Twins

I was the draft horse (work horse) plodding along aiming to eat the carrot dangling just out of reach. With false hope that, once I completed my research and was awarded a PhD by an international panel of interdisciplinary examiners in both Continuing Legal Education and Workplace and Professional Learning that there would be some interest, a shift even, in awareness of how lawyers best learn to do their other important work (not technical legal skills).

That CLE practitioners, HR learning and Development (Capability) specialists, even law academics would at least have a cursory interest.  That they would want to know how lawyers could be better supported to undertake their leadership and management work and learning. To enhance their career enjoyment and performance.

However I did not open my eyes sufficiently to the reality that the Legal Profession was locked into its legal education swimlane, and chose not to venture outside these parameters, so as to embrace what we can learn from workplace and professional learning theory and practice.

I failed. Or was I failed? Was it false hope?

The Invisible Work and Learning: Leaderwork

I employed a rigorous critical ethnographic research method approved by the Ethics Committee at The University of Melbourne. My research required conducting in-depth ethnographic study after undertaking a complex literature review that involved cross-disciplinary reading and synthesis.

In talking with and observing lawyers doing the work of leading it became clear that an important issue was that lawyers are not necessarily working in roles with positional authority. Instead as they get on with their legal work they also get on with the work of leading (and on occasions managing).

I defined this unique aspect of lawyers work as leaderwork (Leaderwork).

An immature profession might chose to ignore this fact.

Reframing Failure

"I couldn't wait for success so I went ahead without it".

Having removed the carrot (hope) my eyes opened to the fact that improving the experiences of lawyers undertaking work beyond technical legal skills was challenging. Their lived work experiences, as articulated to me in my critical ethnographic research, did not fit neatly into the silos of legal theory and education.

It was easier for the profession, and formal education bodies, to simply deny my participants eloquently articulated reality and the existence of my PhD. And this is exactly what happened.

I left the profession again to work in more fertile pastures.

Challenge to the Profession; A Mindset Change

Upon successful completion of my PhD the lack of official, or any interest, in my findings was deafening. But were my findings really that irrelevant? Or were they in fact too confronting?

After a decade of developing my education consulting business I am now convinced that the findings are as pertinent as ever.

And that one explanation for the lack of interest is because, far from being a mature profession as is often claimed, at least in the professional development of its people, the Legal Profession is actually an immature profession.

Another explanation is that the leap from the existing legal professional development framework to Legal Working Culture was too wide for the profession to traverse. Here the usefulness of the Job Crafting conceptual model and its more sophisticated sibling, which I propose, Role Sculpting, becomes apparent.

We Choose Not to See (Value) the Other Work

The second phase of my research explored in greater depth the work and learning experiences (professional development, lifelong learning) of legal practitioners leading in 4 key branches of the profession; academic, senior counsel, judge and managing partner.

And importantly my participants raised the specific pain points they faced as they developed their other work skills besides their specific legal professional skills.

For instance A1 who had experience as a government official, as well as senior counsel, recognised a need for the legal profession to change its thinking, from what he suggested was the prevalent viewpoint regarding professional status.

He described this as follows: "a reluctance of lawyers to embrace notions that might challenge their professional status: "We need a degree of openness and willingness to acknowledge. You don’t just make legal decisions. There is a whole lot more to it that getting out the legal text books and law to say, but I think the view is legal decisions. That might sound like an extraordinary thing. There is nothing demeaning in not making legal decisions. There is the view that these are the sorts of things managers make. We are not managers we are professionals. I think there is a bit of that around". 

(A1-8).

No Authority: A Dual Role with No Status

L3 explains cogently why the authority to manage and have the formal title of manager is often not available to lawyers who manage and lead. This is caught up in the issue of a dual role and the fact that lawyers are knowledge workers, as explained by L3: We are the wheels as well, so we have got to play this dual role so it’s far more blurred - so while we are expected to have management skills and we do undertake management it’s not like OK you’re a manager or anything like that. (L3-1).

A lawyer working as Managing Partner explained this same dilemma cogently:

"A difficulty is that I find that managers don’t really see themselves as managers. They see themselves first as technicians and lawyers. They are task focussed, generally, not people focussed. Most of them have never heard of what a KRA is or a KPI. They don’t have the business plan or the action plan in mind. They don’t seem to have the big picture in minds in terms of staff development. … and in fairness to them they are the most committed bunch of people you would ever get in the workplace and that’s their problem in a lot of respects because they are committed to the actual minutiae of work that they see anything that is not work related as not having much status. Even the present role I am doing now. Everybody keeps on saying ‘when are you getting back to the real stuff?’ (L 11-7).

Legal Working Culture

One of the key findings of my research was the concept of Legal Working Culture. I defined it as follows:

"‘LWC’, incorporates the beliefs, behaviours and values shared by lawyers about how best to lead legal work and legal organisations and to give service. Lawyers appreciate tactful personalised guidance, through the exercise of personal and intellectual leadership skills by other lawyers in the course of their day-to-day work.

This leadership extends to role modelling values awareness. It reaches beyond the individual legal organisation or institution. Capturing ‘LWC’ is at the heart of a model for advancing better learning at work for lawyers. It therefore values reflective learning and practice by lawyers at work".

Hann, D (2007) PhD ‘Lawyers Practising Learning: Reshaping Continuing Legal Education, xxi.

Towards a Mature Profession

Are we any closer to the delivery of a mature professional development experience for lawyers where the legal profession acknowledges the validity and importance of all the work that lawyers do?

Today I choose to return, to plod on without false hope but with renewed vigour. Maybe now there is a more mature appreciation of how best to support lawyers' overall professional development. Hope is eternal.

That someone else will care.

The Equine (EQ) Link

Equine Experiential Education programs can significantly assist people to draw on their unique strengths and attributes. Equine assisted Team building exercises can enhance Role Sculpting and leaderwork capabilities.

Equine facilitation exercises can help us tune into our inner purpose and mission in life and overcome disappointment and difficulties in our daily lives.

Deborah Hann

23 December 2023