FUTURE TENSE

The children of a nation are its future everyone says it and invokes this truth when it needs to be and so it is. Looking at the general crop of national leaders in Nigeria, they were largely children of the state in the sense that the state gave them an international education, development plan, feeding program. Adolf Hitler for all his choices made very sound choices as far as the children of Germany were concerned; preserving their cultural identity and contribution.

What does all this have to do with legal. Well, in my fourth year of legal studies (400 level in local lingo) it came to my attention that boys were doing global programmes like ICSAN (for company secretaries) and afterwards hopped on a plane to Heathrow, JFK and Jo'Burg for a foreign degree to JumpStart the illustrious legal career. So after a while they came back or finished the ICSAN or whatever and worked in a law firm for a few years. Then a while later, THEY LEFT THE LAW.
Simple reason really, the finances were off and they usually moved to finance houses like banks , asset managers e.t.c. I find their decision to be admirable and a true expression of capitalism and the mobility that owning your own means of production gives you. But from a legal ecosystem perspective we must stop the bleeding or else in the years to come we will have no blood left.

These transferees are sharp, ambitious and fortunate enough to be able to afford an expensive education and they should be a high return on investment to legal directly. The idea being that this gives law firms an advantage, an added cachet to your firm and your culture but if these people are leaving why go through the trouble? So this is really about the legal pipeline.

The football club FC Barcelona has its marbles straight on the pipeline issue. They have got this football academy that produces talent for the future needs of the team so fairly recently they've been killing all sorts of other teams and dealing best ayer awards and championships with the quality of their players.
The pillars of all these achievements came from the football academy who had been playing together for years.

The good news about this is that the system by itself will weed out the weak and the incompetent and unproductive. So forget any mollycoddling to cover your incompetence or lack of spine as a law firm. But whatever is left will be leaner, meaner and ready to achieve anything in sight.