As technology and the fast-changing pace of business continue to transform the legal landscape, one lawyer is urging practitioners to move beyond their traditional roles as service providers and embrace their place as strategic decision-makers.
Speaking on a recent episode of The Lawyers Weekly Show, Melissa Care, partner at Coutts Lawyers & Conveyancers, stressed the need for lawyers to move beyond reactive service delivery and embrace the role of proactive strategic decision-makers amid a period of rapid change in the profession.
While lawyers have traditionally been viewed as service providers who react to problems as they arise, Melissa Care said this mindset must evolve, with lawyers instead being seen as those who can help businesses anticipate challenges and plan for long-term success.
“I think it’s about not only just dealing with things when they come to a head, unfortunately. There’s always a perception with law, you only go to a lawyer when something’s wrong,” she said.
“We’re trying to have that mind shift where people start to realise that if we’re part of their business, we can hopefully try and start these things before they get to that point.
“We can be more commercial about it, but we can also strategise for their business with them, be a part of their team, as opposed to just somebody you go to when things go wrong.”
However, driving this mindset shift won’t happen overnight. Care emphasised that “building that trust with businesses” is a crucial first step in redefining what it means to be a lawyer in today’s landscape.
Care spoke firsthand about the importance of fostering open discussions with businesses, explaining that these conversations not only help shift perceptions but also enable lawyers to gain a deeper understanding of how to best support their clients.
“There are a lot of businesses, and I find this with our own commercial clients, they don’t realise they actually need a lawyer till you’re in there and starting to look at things,” she said.
“It’s really important to get to know their business, know what they need and be able to assist them in that process, not just at a point in time where things have gone wrong.”
While the benefits of acting as a strategic adviser are clear, Care acknowledged the challenge of adopting this approach, citing how deeply ingrained the traditional lawyer-as-problem-solver mindset remains.
“It is a challenge. It’s breaking a mould that we’ve been so used to. Lawyers are so structured in the way we operate, billable hours, dealing with things as and when they happen. So it has to be a mind shift,” she said.
“Once you’re in it, you can understand the advantages of doing that.”
Care highlighted the successes she has witnessed among clients who initially didn’t recognise the value of lawyers who provided proactive legal guidance.
“We’ve had really good success with the clients that we’re already doing this for, to the point where they really didn’t realise that they needed [it]. They didn’t realise that having a trusted adviser who could deal with these things was going to be so helpful,” she said.
Acknowledging the hurdles of initiating this mindset shift, Care stressed that the transition allows lawyers to play a broader role in client success, advising on areas businesses might overlook.
“It is hard at the start. At the start, it’s breaking your way in, getting them to trust you, even getting them to hand over what they’ve got so you can analyse it. But it goes beyond that as well. It gives us as lawyers an opportunity to advise on things that businesses might not always think about,” she said.
“Often, businesses are growing quicker than they realise, and they forget things like corporate governance and the requirements that they’re supposed to do, their due diligence and things like that. So it’s an exciting opportunity for lawyers to expand, but it is a mind shift, and it’s a new way of thinking.”
