In recent years, the legal sector has undergone a lot of welcomed change. However, certain aspects in the sector are still quite traditional and can be perceived as dividing. Your colleagues are most often divided into lawyers, or business support. As a lawyer, you are either on a partnership track, or on the in-house one. The prevalent legal career in a law firm is still dominated by that of the junior associate – associate – senior associate – partner or special counsel, although we now also see an influx of new roles in the law firm, not least in the Legal Tech sphere. Thankfully, the division of roles in the legal industry is starting to get fuzzy around the edges. The legal sector today offers a variety of alternative roles as career paths, such as legal technologists, legal tech managers, legal designers, knowledge management lawyers, the list goes on. However, it is still very much a choice to be a lawyer or business support (i.e. what some would call non-lawyers). Although these exciting roles provide new frontiers for a legal career, it usually means leaving a lot of the legal work aside. For me, I wanted both.
For the past two years I have worked at DLA Piper in Sweden as a Legal Technologist, project managing our digitalisation initiatives, implemented new software and held countless of onboarding and introduction sessions. Working with Legal Tech in practice has been incredibly rewarding and exciting, and these two years have taught me a lot. In parallel, I have also completed law school. In June 2022, I graduated with a Master of Laws with a focus on IT and media law. I realised that I was now at an important fork in the road, one road leading me the Associate way and the other down the road of Business Support. One new challenge and one where I already have a lot of experience and expertise. It seemed like a waste of a good education to not at least try out the shoes of an Associate. At the same time, by now I almost have a self-proclaimed bachelors in Legal Tech, and I wasn’t ready to step away from my passion and expertise.
Instead of making me choose, my employer and I found a new way forward. I sat down together with the head of Knowledge Management and Legal Tech, Partners from the firm and the Head of Human Resources to discuss a hybrid role; a role combining both the traditional associate work and the Legal Technologist work. The result was a new role, the Legal Tech Associate.
A lot of experienced people will tell you that hybrid roles are tremendously difficult to do and get right. The risk is primarily that you end up working 200%, or that you end up dropping one or more balls because one part of the job (spoilers: usually the Associate side) simply takes up too much space on the agenda. Other risks to account for is lack of support for these roles, or lack of understanding of the value that a hybrid role can bring, not just for the individual, but for the firm as a whole. To mitigate these risks, we agreed on a few initial points for the hybrid role:
- The split is 40/60 – 40% Legal Tech work, 60% Associate work. This meant that all the lower level tasks previously part of the Legal Tech work, such as onboarding, offboarding and putting out the daily fires were removed from the job description and we also brought on the role of the Legal Tech Trainee.
- The billable target is 50% less than for full-time Associates. The percentage was decided to account for transition time, among other reasonings.
- This is a pilot, meaning we all agree to add a certain amount of flexibility, full transparency and short feedback loops to the equation.
As with any innovating pilot, Partner sponsors and team support is absolutely vital for success. I am fortunate enough to have two Partner sponsors, in addition to the support from Head of Knowledge and Legal Tech, as well as the full support of the Intellectual Property and Technology practice group in which I will be working.
So with these agreed terms, I face the Autumn in a new role. One part senior, one part junior. One part which I have walked for two years already, another completely uncharted territory for me. It will be an exciting pilot – and I look forward to giving you updates along the way, anything from lessons learned to full transparency on how much work I actually do within each role. You’re welcome to climb the new the dual ladders of law firm careers with me!
Malin Männikkö
Legal Tech Associate
DLA Piper (Sweden)
