InView Magazine: Issue 8 out now!
Blurb: Learn how Peter Connor, pioneer of the T-Shaped Lawyer concept, is rewriting the rulebook on what it means to be an in-house counsel by advocating for lawyers to contribute more to the business by doing more business work.
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You may have heard of the term ‘T-Shaped Lawyer’ – a concept widely accepted as the baseline to be successful in today’s legal landscape. Yet it is widely misunderstood and challenges the traditional perception of what a lawyer is and does.
“Most professionals are I-shaped, deep in one area, like the law, but limited expertise in other areas. To thrive today, especially in-house, you need to be T-shaped, deep in law, broad in business. The key point, that many misunderstand, is that this applies not just to knowledge and skills, but also to the work you do” says Connor.
Connor is the founder of T-Shaped Legal and the author of The T-Shaped Lawyer: A New Vision for You and Your Work, as well as his most recent book, The T-Shaped Lawyer Guidebook: A Framework for Your Professional Development. His 40-plus year legal career has spanned both private practice and in-house roles and taken him around the world.
In 1982, Connor joined Baker McKenzie in Sydney as an associate before moving to the firm’s Hong Kong office as part of an associate training program, where he immersed himself in commercial law, working with the early computer clients.
As the tech sector ramped up, by the late 1980s, “the first wave of wave of in-house lawyers were joining tech companies like Microsoft and Intel,” says Connor. “I joined Sun Microsystems; that was my entrée into the in-house legal world.”
He soon realized that working within a business required lawyers to think differently – no longer as pure risk mitigators, but as business enablers. He found a freedom to work differently than within the hierarchical private practice structure, noting that business colleagues valued “your ability to ask good questions, make them aware of things they hadn’t seen, and suggest solutions,” not just legal advice.
“At some point, you stop thinking of yourself as a lawyer who understands the business and start seeing yourself as a businessperson who happens to be a lawyer,” says Connor. This mindset shift, which he refers to as the businessperson mindset, was a defining principle of his T-Shaped Lawyer philosophy.
Connor climbed the ladder of the in-house function at Sun Microsystems to become the European General Counsel (GC) and in the mid-2000s, took on a Europe, Middle East, and Africa GC role at Citrix Systems. Through decades of leading and coaching legal teams, he observed that less than 25 percent of most in-house counsel’s daily work constitutes ‘legal work’.
The other 75 percent is either ‘Internal Business Work’ for the legal department or ‘Client Business Work’ for the wider company according to Connor. The question, Connor poses is “are you doing the right sort of business work, and how can you do more Client Business Work, and do it more effectively”.
Rather than focusing only on efficiency or automation, Connor argues that legal teams should focus on people and on human transformation. First, “stop trying to do more with less. Instead, adopt my mantra of ‘Do Less to Do More’. Do less low-value legal and business work, and more client business work that truly drive business outcomes.” He calls that Work Rationalisation. Second, develop, and start using, a range of non-legal skills, competencies, mindsets, qualities and knowledge that he outlines in his T-Shaped Lawyer Framework™.
Despite the increasing use of AI and other technologies in legal departments, Connor believes most teams are missing a huge opportunity. “AI isn’t just a productivity tool for individual lawyers. It’s an opportunity for leaders to reimagine their legal departments, to empower the business and to free up time to do different, more impactful, work,” he says.
He argues that teams need a human transformation strategy to go hand in hand with a digital transformation strategy. Very few legal departments have a Future of Work strategy. Connor’s T-Shaped Lawyer philosophy, frameworks and in-person and online programs provide just that.
A decade ago, Connor left the corporate world and founded T-Shaped Legal to be a legal team coach to help legal professionals transform themselves, their work, and their capabilities to do more impactful work. “Either you believe in my philosophy that lawyers can, and should, be more than just lawyers, and do more than just ‘legal work’ or you don’t,” says Connor.
“Every in-house counsel and every leader need to make that choice right now and it will inform everything else. To me, with AI increasingly encroaching on legal tasks, the choice should be an easy one.”
In episode 44 of the Legal Leaders podcast, host David Lancelot spoke to Peter Connor about how in-house lawyers can transform from “just lawyers” into true business partners. To watch the podcast, click here.
