I'm not too sure if there is a typical millennial, but the corporate world seems pretty worried that they won't adapt to the traditional workplace.
And perhaps no more so than law. It's seen to be old fashioned, stuffy, hierarchical, with little scope for creativity or flare.
I'm not a lawyer nor am I a millennial, but I work alongside both - one for a little longer than the other.
It seems that law is still a hugely popular career choice for graduates - whether millennials or not.
Yes, the way they work will be different from their parents, but so too will the working environment.
The physical office environment is in many cases engaging and collaborative, with terrific facilities that rarely fail to impress. The behaviour of senior colleagues is far better than it was 20 years ago (who remembers the Legal Business Christmas Quiz?). And technology is changing the way law is being delivered.
For most law firms - the top 100 certainly - the challenge of millennials will be easily managed. Bright people will want to work for great law firms that offer interesting and challenging work.
Challenger law firms, gunnercooke being a great example, will accelerate that pace of change. But they too face the threat of reverting to type as they grow.
The firms that will struggle and perhaps disappear completely are the smaller regional and high street practices. It is perhaps here that millennials might make a truly dramatic impact.
Millennials prize autonomy: the space to think for themselves and act on their own solutions. In legal services, hierarchies continue to prevail. Junior lawyers start at the bottom, and work their way to the top by putting in long hours and billing huge fees. Strategic decisions are the sole preserve of those at the very top. But this model doesn’t work for the younger generations, who prize collaboration and openness, and have grown up in a world in which information has become increasingly democratised – meaning anyone has access to the resources that lead to a well-informed idea.
unknownx500
