Outliers or Outlawyers?
Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 8:33PM I'm sure that hundreds (if not thousands) of blog posts have been inspired by Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.
It has been on my reading list for a while, but I have only just got around to picking it up (downloading it on my iPad Kindle app to be more accurate).
I am guessing most of you have already read the book (or heard about it), but if not then the link above is worth a look - I'm not intending to add yet another review here.
Outliers actually touches on lawyers with a chapter about Joe Flom of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom... and how years toiling away working on the litigation and hostile takeover work which the White Shoe firms shunned left his firm perfectly positioned to dominate when blue chip clients started to demand those services.
This thread of being in the right place at the right time runs through the book. Whether it is Joe Flom and his contemporaries or Bill Gates getting to put in his 10,000 hours on the mainframe at the University of Washington these "outliers" are hugely successful (at least in part) because of this accident of demographics and timing.
So, the important part of this post is a question. Where do you think the UK legal market sits on this "Outliers scale"? Are the senior equity partners at the top tier firms right now the ones who started out at just the right time (with those who are training now having missed the boat)? Or are there opportunities right now for new lawyers to take advantage of technology, Web 2.0 and deregulation of the market to rise to stratospheric heights? Maybe you just think the whole premise is wrong and hard work and dedication will take you to the top whatever.
I know what I think, but I really want to hear what your views are....
Reader Comments (3)
Awful book I thought. I think Gladwell's formulaic "Quirky story" style got shown for the one trick pony it is... but this is not a book review.
I think that there are always opportunities for real talent to shine through. I am mindful for example of Bristol firm TLT's growth regionally and locally and they are probably 10 years old.
I would certainly not deign to suggest that existing senior partners are lucky or fortunate.
What lies ahead? Increased opportunity for those who are bold enough to break with convention and get creative - I'm thinking Susskind's maverick lawyers. This could be their day.
The problem is that times of opportunity normally mean times of change, and with those changes come downsides. I suspect the profession will shrink dramatically over the next 5-10 years and it may well be that the opportunities lie outside of conventional law provision.
Thanks Neil - interesting comments.
I agree with you that nobody gets to top equity through luck and without a great deal of hard work and intelligence, but it does seem to me that the level of qualification where it becomes likely has risen over the decades (from a position where partnership was offered on qualification in some firms) so I guess in that sense an equal amount of hard work and aptitude will probably bring less reward to someone training now than if they had qualified 20 years ago?
I thought the book was ok - but it suffered from the fact that I have seen it reviewed and quoted so often that I barely needed to read it! I also wonder if it misses one essential possibility - maybe Bill Gates wouldn't have founded Microsoft if he was born 10 years earlier, but maybe he would just have done something equally impressive?
Sadly I think the days when all a solicitor needed for a cozy retirement was to put up a nice shiny brass plaque have long gone. So from that point of view, the lucky ones were probably those who qualified before, say, 1970. However with the legal market worth £22bn, there is still money to be made. Salaries for the big-city firms will remain high, even if they do have to take on fewer partners and rely on an increasing number of less well paid staff. Equally there are unquestionably opportunities for entrepreneurial solicitors. But the days of solicitors making easy money are long gone.