On supermarkets and junior lawyers

Many of you will have heard about the “just-in-time” procurement model adopted by many supermarkets and retailers, which involves i) having “lean and streamlined” supply chains under which food and other goods are only ordered, transported and placed on store shelves based on individual store demand, and ii) using as little warehousing and storage space as possible to store inventory (the "just-in-time approach").?

This contrasts with the bad old days when supermarkets ordered lots of everything and put it in warehouses and then the back room of stores and moved it into the front of stores to replenish stock (the “old-fashioned way”).

Then about 30 years ago some people in the industry realised that the old-fashioned way was costing supermarkets a lot of money and extra rent in back room and storage space needed to store unsold stock, and also for unsold stock that went off. This was inefficient for food wastage and also for profit purposes (“inefficiency”). Throw in the advent of improved technological innovations to enable faster transportation options and smarter logistics management??(“innovation/automation”) and the growing focus on sub-contracting out the increasingly specialised and global procurement process to 3rd parties (“outsourcing”) - and hey presto - the “just-in-time” model of supermarket procurement was born.

Things trundled along wonderfully until people started panic-buying when lockdown hit and the wheels fell off the bus slightly. The rest is history, although I think things have recovered somewhat now with supermarkets focusing on selling a reduced range of many products. It remains the "just-in-time approach", just with a bit more capacity and flexibility built in.

Anyway, I was thinking about this the other day when reading about the experiences of a retired lawyer on his blog. He commented that some senior lawyers he knew would typically hold off spending time training juniors until they absolutely had to - and even then, engaged in the bare minimum. Training was limited to just what was needed to “get the deal done”, for example. Others, however, would be more supportive and generous with their time and they would work hard to train, supervise and mentor juniors, often almost taking them under their wing. One might perhaps characterise these contrasting approaches as the “reactive” model versus the “proactive” model of legal training.

My first thought was that this broadly reflects what my experience of the legal profession has been like.?

My second thought was that this seemed strikingly similar to the "just-in-time" approach versus the "old-fashioned way" that supermarkets used to adopt. Except that I would call this the "reactive" versus "proactive" school of thought to lawyer training.

Rationally, a reactive, “needs-based” or “demand-led” approach to training juniors sort of makes sense for three reasons. The first (“inefficiency”) is that senior lawyers are very busy people and time spent training is time that cannot generally be billed to the client so one shouldn’t spend too much time on this. The second (“innovation/automation“) is that juniors are meant to be “self-starters” who are hired for their ability to “take initiative” and learn quickly on the job” - rather than to be hand-held through everything. The third (“outsourcing”) is that in big firms there are usually other lawyers whose it is to do the training - either PSLs or Knowledge Lawyers (who focus on training and development, or under-utilised associates. Or the people who provide external courses for lawyers, like MBL Training.

On the other side of the coin, I also know senior lawyers who proactively dedicate a great deal of their time to training juniors, billable hours be damned. I think for the most part this is down to a generosity of spirit and genuine desire to fulfil a sort of informal social contract within law firms, plus a concern to ensure that juniors are well-supported from a technical and practical skills standpoint. Such lawyers in my experience also tend to enjoy the teaching/mentoring (perhaps more so than the actual billable work itself but that is by the by).?

The main advantage of the proactive approach (and the disadvantage of the reactive approach), I feel, is that there is a tangible benefit of juniors actually knowing something about the practice of law and client relationship management before actually having to put this into practice, especially if clients start panic-buying legal services.?And also, in my experience as a junior, being guided and signposted as to where do start one's research, which precedents to start with, and useful resources tends to save a lot of time.

The main disadvantage of the proactive approach (and the advantage of the reactive approach), is perhaps best summed up by my observation that at a previous firm, a senior lawyer who probably spent the most time giving me training saw it as a means of procrastinating from actual client work. Certainly, he billed very little. He also happened to have joined from a firm with a great reputation for culture and technical excellence. To butcher the old saying, all training and no billable work makes Jack LLP a financial liability.

My feeling is that most law firms (sort of like supermarkets) have sort of settled into some sort of equilibrium on the proactive/reactive spectrum. Which, I suspect, is how we will all trundle on, until the next time something occurs that tests or breaks the model. What happens then is anyone's guess.