Speaking on an episode of The Lawyers Weekly Show, produced in partnership with Leo Cussen, the pair outlined key skills junior lawyers and grads need to have in their toolkit to thrive in an ever-evolving legal profession.

This notion is particularly important when thinking about the role of legal education, which Leiman said should be done via a “long-term view”.

“The students who might start with me this year probably aren’t going to get fully qualified for perhaps four or five years. And if we look back at the changes that have happened in the last four to five years, they have been momentous. And my sense is that the pace of change is not slowing down anytime soon, but likely instead to get faster and faster,” she explained.

“It’s really important that we equip anyone who goes into legal study with the sorts of skills that they’re going to need, not just to travel along a fairly narrow or defined path, as we might define it now, but give them the skills to take the critical thinking and legal knowledge that we can give them and help them be able to adapt to rapid change, to thrive in a context of uncertainty and a context that’s going to get more and more uncertain, and also to give them the skills to take on the sorts of leadership roles that we are seeing.

“As everywhere, people are saying we’re encountering new things, we need the law to help us navigate through that. And so, I think we need to equip people with a wider range of skills so that they can be those people who really step up and say, well, no one really knows what to do here with this new challenge that we’re facing. But we do have a skill set that can help us navigate through when nobody else knows what to do.”

Because of this rapid change within the profession – and the world – entering the law can be overwhelming for younger lawyers, Paterson added.

“It’s overwhelming for a lot of people, not just lawyers, but I think there’s going to be so much change where no one knows how to navigate it and they’re going to be looking to people who have the skills to do that,” she said.

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“And I think if we as legal educators can produce students, graduates and junior lawyers that have those skills, and then not only are we going to be able to navigate as a society these challenges, but also we are going to equip those grads so that they don’t feel so overwhelmed and burdened by these things. And so, I think as legal educators, we have a responsibility to make legal education change with the changing times as quickly as we can.”

In terms of what junior lawyers and law students need to be abreast of in 2024 and moving forward, legal tech and innovation, Paterson said, is “massive” and constantly evolving, although transferable skills are still extremely important to develop, too.

“Grads need the skills to be able to navigate that. And there are lots of challenges with legal tech and AI and those types of things. So, I think that’s one of the biggest ones. Social justice is another area where I think grads need to be thinking about and educating themselves on. And legal education has a responsibility, I think, in that vein,” she added.

“But I think what’s more important is that we provide grads with transferable skills that are not necessarily legal skills per se, but things like adaptability and creative thinking and critical thinking. And those types of skills are transferable across many different areas, and teaching them those types of skills and being able to work in a team and that type of thing is almost more important.”

Leiman echoed a similar sentiment and added that many who study law don’t strictly end up in the legal profession, meaning that homing in on a broad range of skills can assist in all walks of life.

“I am absolutely convinced that we need more people in our community with legal knowledge than less, because as we think about how we’re going to move forward as a civil society, legal knowledge is the bedrock for that. So, we need as many people as we can to have legal training and legal understanding and legal knowledge. But we acknowledge that many of those people never go into practice, so there’s a huge range of career pathways,” she outlined.

“But even for those who do go into legal practice, even within what we might call traditional, regulated legal practice, there’s a huge range of roles there. Someone who’s working in family law might be very different to a criminal lawyer, very different to someone who’s working in high-end commercial, very different to someone who’s working in a rural practice. And the task for legal education to equip all of those people is huge.”

Managing to prepare grads and help them develop their skills is no easy feat – but it is improving day-by-day, Paterson posited.

“We’ve been a little bit behind, I think, in creating the legal education and the skills that we want for these graduates and early lawyers. Certainly, when I did my PLT, I mean, it’s called practical legal training, but I didn’t feel that I had the practical skills I needed when I left that course. And I was just very lucky that I happened to be working in a law firm at the time. But I think we can do much better, and we are starting to do much better in terms of equipping grads,” she added.

“It’s been about teaching them how to be lawyers, but I think we can do better than that. And I think that teaching them how to be people who can navigate the world first and then people who can help others navigate the world. And I think as legal educators, we can and are at the moment really changing the legal education landscape to teach those exceptional skills that we think they will need to navigate the world. We’re doing a pretty good job of it at the moment. We’re getting there.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Tania Leiman and Bianca Paterson, click below: