Mitch Kowalski is the modern renaissance lawyer. He is, at times, all blue chip and corporate as a director for Infrastructure Ontario.
At other times, he’s academic and ethereal as a former instructor at Osgoode Hall Law School. He’s a regular blogger on legal affairs for the National Post and a fiction writer who’s also managing director of the Toronto Writers’ Centre. He does all of this while maintaining a bustling real estate practice in Toronto.
Kowalski can now add law firm management author to his eclectic list of accomplishments with the publication of his new book with the outrageously long title, Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Legal Services for the 21st Century.
The book is a quick read and provides a most entertaining view of what the law firm of the future — the very near future, according to Kowalski — is going to look like.
Although it’s been available in the United States through the American Bar Association since March, the book is only now hitting the shelves in Canada.
While I usually write about real estate law in this column, I’m taking the opportunity to write about the book this month as the issues raised affect all of us.
The book is unlike anything else on the market, perhaps not so much for Kowalski’s prognostications on the future of the practice of law but rather for its delightful narrative approach.
Kowalski has taken what’s essentially a manual on law firm management and written it in the form of a novella complete with a fictional firm and an imaginary client, partners, and associates.
The prose and approach make for an unusual read. I found myself quickly trying to race through the fiction to get to the heart of Kowalski’s messages but I’m an impatient reader and the joys of fiction have long since been lost on me.
Some will enjoy the narrative style Kowalski uses to deliver his otherwise hard-hitting message. Readers shouldn’t, however, confuse the entertainment value of Kowalski’s prose with any want of conviction in his message.
In many ways, much of what Kowalski proselytizes isn’t particularly new. For instance, even old-school lawyers with only a passing interest in progressive law firm management techniques are likely already familiar with some of Kowalski’s key principles: value billing instead of billable hours; greater emphasis on knowledge management and efficient technology; work-from-home flexibility and remote connectivity; and professional, corporate-style management rather than traditional management by committee.
These concepts are familiar to just about every managing partner in the country.
But Kowalski takes the paradigm further with some disconcertingly leading-edge concepts, some of which may raise an eyebrow or two even among junkies of law firm management reform.
For example, Kowalski advocates bullpen-style work environments with no private offices. Really? I’ve been witness to the ever-shrinking size of lawyers’ individual offices throughout my career but I really can’t see the disintegration of those walls altogether.
Some in-house legal departments have gone to the open bullpen model, and we all know that the accountants have embraced this approach, but I cling to the thought that lawyers need the privacy that drywall provides even if the opposing sheets of it get awfully close to each other.
In fact, many of Kowalski’s more creative ideas involve space. The office of Kowalski’s world looks more like the West Coast offices of Google Inc. today complete with lawyers and paralegals working on sophisticated legal issues when not at their on-site yoga classes or the group spinning sessions taking place on the stationary bikes placed in the hallways of their LEED-certified premises.
Consistent with this atmosphere, Kowalski paints the lawyer of the future as being dressed far more casually than even the most informal of today’s practitioners.
While dress codes have undeniably trended downward in the last couple of decades, I simply can’t see my partners or associates regularly walking into the office in spandex and Lululemon gear, especially when seeing clients.
Furthermore, I actually suspect that there may be a dress-code backlash already taking place with many lawyers returning to levels of sartorial formality not seen for a long time.
More radical still are some of Kowalski’s views on legal outsourcing. Let’s face it, some outsourcing is already taking place, but I see a disconnect between the occasional farming out of a big due-diligence project on the one hand and, on the other, a North American law firm maintaining entire branch offices in India and the Philippines with mandatory rotations through them to ensure an operative integration of these support functions.
Not only would there be a sea of professionalism issues in managing paralegals on the other side of the world, but the recent backlash by North American consumers against Asian-outsourced customer support and call-answering functions in other industries militates against Mumbai or Manila showing up on North American law firm letterheads.
For the record, I’m not drinking all of Kowalski’s Kool-Aid but I very much appreciated the book as it succinctly underscored and brought home to me the problems associated with the undeniable commoditization of the practice of law over the last couple of decades, a trend exacerbated by the recent recession and one that will continue to plague our industry long after the economy improves.
As Kowalski has explained to me, while his book canvasses all of the current leading law firm management techniques, “there is no one silver bullet and it is up to the progressive law firms of the future to put all the pieces together in a matrix that works for them.”
Whether you’re a young lawyer looking to see what a day in your life might look like in the not-too-distant future or a law firm manager looking to come to grips with the apparent sea change that is engulfing our industry, Kowalski’s book will prove invaluable.
The book launch is at Ben McNally Books in Toronto on May 9. Is it an alarmist parable or an epiphany for law firm management? You be the judge.
Jeffrey W. Lem is a partner in the real estate group at Miller Thomson LLP. His e-mail address is [email protected].
