The Delta Model was a designed by a five-person team in 2018.Ìę , director of innovation design for the Program on Law and Innovation at Vanderbilt Law School; and , a clinical associate professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and co-director of the law school’s Center on Negotiation and Mediation were members of that team.

Most recently, Moon and Carrel have evolved the Delta Model to create the (DYD), a practical resource for current and future legal professionals to better understand the unique skillset associated with specific roles within the legal profession. The goal of this new iteration is to design a career development plan that builds on lawyers’ skills, according to a particular job. Because Moon and Carrel both work at law schools, they used the model to encourage law students to think intentionally and be forward-thinking about the curriculum choices they’re making, the professional employment they are exploring, and how potential clients and employers will perceive the students’ skills and competencies.

Applying DYD to law students & training

Too often, law students describe their potential career paths and the skills they’ll need to pursue their chosen path as a “black box,” Moon says, adding that the DYD addresses that knowledge gap in two ways. First, DYD analyzes different legal career paths and then works backwards to identify the array of competencies needed for success. Then, it enables the students to identify their strengths and interests to make sure those align with the skills and competencies of the potential career paths they are considering.

As part of this process, Moon embedded the DYD approach into her business of law class last fall, which had 120 students enrolled. Moon and Carrel recorded a video for students that introduced the model and showed how the Delta Model fits, holistically, into the legal profession. Through a series of guest speakers, Moon demonstrated how to apply the model by having each speaker “designing their own delta.”

DYD is also able to influence the legal training space, Carrel says, noting how the DYD framework is shaping legal professional development program initiatives. During the summer of 2020, for example, the virtual initiative (P2P) program used the Delta Model as a visible framework for designing the curriculum. From there, the creators also created a set of tools that analyzed each student’s current set of skills and areas of expertise, enabling each student to select their modules to achieve their desired future career path.

The Minnesota State Bar Association used the DYD as a framework to create three distinct paths or “tracks” within its annual conference. Attendees signed up for education options according to which side of the Delta Model — rebranded as people, process, and practice — they wanted to cultivate. By planning legal and training programs in this manner, legal professionals were able to “chose their educational options more intentionally because they understand what they are bringing to the table and where they need to go in order to select the coursework based on the skills they need to improve,” explains Carrel.

Design Your Delta evolves for the future

The goal of both Moon and Carrel for the future of DYD is simple: They want to embed the holistic model within the system of lawyer formation. While developing some tools and approaches specifically for law students is critical and definitely helpful, both are dreaming about DYD’s ultimate impact among all legal professionals. “I believe that the Delta Model can be a tool for organizations and institutions to use to analyze how they attract and retain employees and help their staff grow,” observes Moon.

But first, Moon and Carrel are starting where they are likely to have the most influence — in law schools. The pair want to use the Delta Model and DYD to expand the tools that law schools use, mostly through their Career Service offices, to further help students engage with a more intentional approach in their decisions about course choices while in law school and about post-law school employment.

The onset of the pandemic forced many law schools to pivot quickly to remote learning essentially overnight, with mixed results. Not surprisingly then, while many law school students, faculty, and administrators questioned value of online law school education based on their experience during the early days of the pandemic, almost all saw tremendous opportunity to enrich the learning experience through a mix of online and in-person legal education.

Carrel agrees with that sentiment and is confident that the Delta Model can aid in this endeavor. With the Model reflecting the holistic set of skills that legal professionals need for success, the legal community has the opportunity to reimagine itself and the delivery of legal education.

Certainly, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the increased need for empathy and emotional intelligence — two key concepts on the people side of the Delta Model — and the requirement for through experiential learning. Moreover, the pandemic has emphasized the link between holistic personal well-being — especially around mental, physical, and emotional health — and the impact on legal professionals’ productivity and morale.

“The Delta Model had already similarly spotlighted these skills on the left side of the Delta and allows us, as we move forward, to ensure that we’re paying attention to it — as opposed to ignoring it again — once we come out of this pandemic,” Carrel adds.

The Delta-Shaped law firm

Much has been written about how modern lawyers need to develop a multidisciplinary set of skills — beyond traditional legal skills — in order to practice law successfully in the 21st century. ¶¶ÒőłÉÄê helped develop one of the latest models for the successful modern lawyer, .ÌęBuilding on other examples that incorporate traditional legal skills and data and technology skills, the delta model also incorporates personal effectiveness skills such as communication skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.

These same concepts can be applied at the firm level. An increasing number of law firms are hiring multidisciplinary teams of nontraditional legal professionals like staff attorneys, project managers, pricing specialists, knowledge management professionals and data scientists to focus more on the emerging skill sets that differentiate how innovative law firms deliver services to their clients today.

Project managers

One of the fastest growing disciplines at law firms is project management. Already, 24% of law firms have adopted some form of legal project management, with another 27% planning to do so by the end of 2020, according to the ¶¶ÒőłÉÄê “2019 Law Firm Business Leaders Survey.” While the pandemic may have changed some of these plans, it is certain that the need for skilled matter management will not diminish.

Indeed, hiring full-time project managers can improve cost-effective service delivery, and clients have also shown a willingness to pay law firms for project management services as a means of managing outside counsel costs. This suggests that paid-for project management services are a growing revenue opportunity for many law firms.

Project managers help plan and manage client engagements by bringing traditional project management techniques to legal matters. At its core, legal project management is about improving processes and facilitating better communication with the matter team internally and between lawyers and their clients. Legal project managers typically leverage technology to scope the work needed for a matter, develop budgets and project plans, and then manage to those plans.

At Shearman & Sterling, for example, the legal project management team is deployed with every case to support delivery teams, collect data and document processes to inform operational efficiency and data initiatives. Similarly, at Orrick, project managers are assigned to new matters and can leverage the firm’s matter management system to track all filings and data. The project managers also compile relevant litigation analytics on complaints, motions, judges, opposing counsel and more, loading that data into their matter management system and making it easier for attorneys to access information about the matter and develop effective case strategies.

Pricing

Law firms are also increasingly hiring pricing specialists to improve profitability and to deliver transparent and predictable pricing for clients. According to Altman Weil’s 2020 Law Firms in Transition Survey,Ìę70.4% of firms with 250 or more attorneys employ a pricing director or staff member. The survey respondents saw value in these roles, with 63% saying that employing a pricing director or staff member had resulted in a significant improvement to firm performance. Only 2% said it has not led to significant improvement.

An increasing number of law firms are hiring multidisciplinary teams of nontraditional legal professionals to focus more on the emerging skill sets that differentiate how innovative law firms deliver services to their clients today.

Pricing professionals at law firms help budget matters, monitor matter profitability, and analyze financial data to identify emerging trends around clients, industries, and practice areas. Pricing professionals are especially important for developing alternative fee arrangements (AFAs). And as more clients demand AFAs as a way of ensuring predictable pricing, law firms are struggling to determine accurate pricing and the work required to complete a project. While the use of AFAs in the US has plateaued in recent years, firms that have leveraged pricing and project management professionals to properly scope, staff, price, and track matters have seen improved profitability.

Knowledge management & client value

Knowledge management roles have been around for a while, and have traditionally focused on leveraging technology and processes to organize the firm’s prior work product and expertise so it could be easily used to solve legal and business problems. For example, Skadden Arps has more than 30 practice-related knowledge sites that contain curated precedent, reference topics, deal information, “what’s current” offerings and a broad variety of other information. The sites are curated by knowledge lawyers whose sole job is to work with the different practice areas to facilitate access to needed information.

While this kind of work continues to be a critical part of knowledge managers’ jobs, an increasing number of forward-thinking knowledge teams are focused on automating processes and leveraging data analytics to help practices and the firm make data-driven decisions.

Further, some knowledge teams are working with clients to develop differentiated services and solutions for them. As the COVID-19 crisis took hold earlier this year, for example, Shearman & Sterling’s knowledge and client value team created and sent daily client alerts that tracked COVID-19 legislation and related key information. The team delivered these alerts to more than 30,000 clients daily before launching a for their clients. Similarly, Fisher Phillips’ knowledge management team launched a for their clients.

An increasing number of knowledge teams also have developed and maintained client-facing portals and dashboards that give clients easy access to key information. In doing so, these knowledge teams aren’t just improving lawyer productivity, they are improving the client relationship by delivering these unique offerings.

Data science & analytics

Another growing discipline — and another increasingly important nonlawyer role — at law firms is data science and analytics. Law firms are increasingly relying on data analytics to improve both the business and practice of law. They’re leveraging third-party litigation analytics tools and hiring data scientists to analyze firm data. As early as 2018, many large law firms have viewed the hiring of data analytics professionals on the same level and pace as hiring for information security staff, according to International Legal Technology Association’s , which showed that firms were hiring 4.41 data analytics full-time equivalent (FTE) employees as compared to 4.32 information security FTE employees.

Data science and analytics professionals are responsible for mining, structuring, and interpreting firm data sets in order to drive better business results with data-driven decisions, price projects and unique client insights. They also help develop new products and services. “The applications of data, once you have it prepared to be analyzed, are infinite,” says Kate Orr, Innovation Partner at Orrick. “You just have to think of them!”

The fact that technology spend by law firms continues to be a primary area of investment underscores the fact that the pace of change is continuing to accelerate with the ongoing rise of big data and workflow technology that are greatly influencing how lawyering gets done. Moreover, combined with big unstructured data, artificial intelligence (AI) is creating opportunities to analyze siloed data sets to gain insights in numerous new ways.

The Rise of AI and EI

With the rise of AI, we are also seeing an increase in the demand for Emotional Intelligence (EI), which is the human side of lawyering. Our working definition of EI is:

• • • Self-awareness, self-regulation (organizing & managing self); and
    • Empathy — the ability to be aware of the emotions of the people they interact with for effective relationship-building and conflict resolution.

With the pace of change and the center of power shifting to the buyers of legal services, the demand for improvements in how lawyers relate to clients has increased. And increased EI makes for better lawyers to act as trusted advisers for clients.

The “I” to the “T” to the Delta-Shaped Lawyer Competency Model

For a long time, good lawyering could be adequately done using an “I-shaped” competency model, which shows the legal knowledge and skills that are learned in law school. Before the 2000s, this was the primary skills that were in demand.

Then, following the financial crisis and with the influence of new legal technology, things started to change. Enter the “T-shaped lawyer competency model in 2014,Ìęcreated by .

The base of the “T” were the legal skills and knowledge learned in law school and the horizontal part of the “T” were the areas of technology and workflow changes that were mainstreamed in how legal work is completed. These competencies included such key factors as design thinking, data analytics, technology, project management, and the use of business tools.

However, there was not a model that met two ongoing challenges: i) clients’ demand for better relationship management, underscored by the need for emotional intelligence; and ii) how to empirically measure these qualities.

Enter the Delta Model

The Delta-shaped lawyer was conceived to address these gaps that are now seen as personal effectiveness skills in the model below. We included EI and other professionalism topics, such as character and other competencies that clients were saying they wanted anecdotally. Then, we sought to run it through an intense validation process.

Phase 1 of our modeling experiment included conversations with researchers and academics who had done previous lawyer competency research — Bill Henderson, Professor and Stephen F. Burns Chair on the Legal Profession at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law; Alli Gerkman, Senior Director of the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver; and Jae Um, Director of Pricing Strategy at Baker McKenzie.

At the end of 2018, we embarked on Phase 2 of our research, conducting interviews with practitioners on the client-side as buyers of legal services and leaders from law firm talent functions to validate the model and prioritize competencies.

Based on Phase 2, this is what the model looks like now:

ÌęWhat We Learned

Our insights gained from the interviews were surprising in some ways and not so surprising in others. Our hypothesis that personal effectiveness skills were equally important for a successful 21^stcentury lawyer as were the skills obtained in law school was not only true, but as some practitioners stated, it was even more important. Indeed, 50% of the top 10 competencies named by our interviewees were classified in the area of personal effectiveness skills. Based on the interviews:

• • • 92% named “Relationship Management” as a top 10 competency. To underscore the point of relationship management, an in-house lawyer to whom we spoke stated: “Even when you are an in-house lawyer, you are still in client service, which I don’t think people realize. I still have clients and they get paid by the same company — they don’t pay you.”
    • 83% named “Communication” as a top 10 competency, particularly knowing your audience. In fact, the Chief Human Resources Officer of an AmLaw 200 law firm indicated that it’s a top development area for the firm, framing communication as “understanding your audience and what is right for a particular client or a particular partner that a lawyer works with.”
    • Ìę75% named “EI” as a top 10 competency. A professional development director in an AmLaw 200 law firm said that the self-management part of EI is really critical. “Self-management is key, and the ability [for any lawyer] to take responsibility for their own behaviors and for their own wellbeing” at any level is a top 10 competency.
    • 66% named “entrepreneurial mindset” as a top 10 competency. An in-house lawyer we spoke with provided her view of what this looks like by the willingness of a person to put “their hand up and say, ‘I see a problem and I have an idea of how to solve it’ or ‘I heard of this really great tool.’”

Our findings in the area of data and technology were more surprising. More specifically, the discussion around technology was not so much about having expertise in technology but rather “understanding technology tools and knowing when to use them,” which is why we renamed the right-hand side of the triangle “Business & Operations”, changing it from “Process, Data, & Technology”. Further, 83% of our interviewees named “project management” as a top 10 competency, and 67% of them named “business fundamentals” as a top 10 competency. Only 50% of our interviewees named “data analytics” a top 10 competency.

Finally, it was no surprise that the skills learned in law school made it into the top 10 as well. Based on our interviews, we separated legal subject matter expertise because there was a view held by many of those we interviewed that staying current on the law and practice areas of expertise were critical for a successful lawyer in the 21^st century. At least 25% of our interviewees stated that skills listed under “The Law” — the bottom part of the Delta — are top 10 competencies.

To sum up the value of the Delta Model, one law firm professional development leader indicated that “it took [us] three years to development our lawyer competency model. Having something to either adopt or start from and deviate from is very valuable.”

Our Delta Model team is comprised of Alyson Carrell, Assistant Dean of Law & Technology Initiatives at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law; Shellie Reid, Access to Justice Fellow at the Legal Services of Northern Virginia; Caitlin “Cat” Moon, Director of Innovation Design in the Program in Law and Innovation at Vanderbilt Law School; and Gabriel Teninbaum, Director of the Institute on Law Practice Technology & Innovation at Suffolk University Law School.