Alternative legal professions provide the modern and multidisciplinary complement to the traditional legal roles.
With technology on the rise, pressure on efficiency and budgets, and Gen Z changing the paradigm, many professionals are looking for new ways of work in the legal context.
In this guide to alternative legal professions, we will cover:
- What are the Alternative Legal Professions
- How to get such a role?
- What skills do you need?
- How to identify which is the one for you?
Want to find out which alternative legal profession is the one for you? Take the Quiz!
What are the Alternative Legal Professions
At law school, it was very easy to act under the impression that with your legal education, you would go on to become either an attorney or a judge.
But there are so many alternative legal professions, and the list is growing.
Some of the established titles are legal designer, legal engineer, innovation coordinator, legal project manager, and a wide array of legal operations roles. This is neither exhaustive, nor always fully reflective of the contents of such a role.
Explore the key alternative legal professions and their characteristics in the gallery below.
Some of these professions originate in other industries – something that works rather well outside law used in the legal context. That is how law got the legal project manager, legal operations, and legal designers.
The fun about it is that alternative legal professions don’t have to fit into these neat boxes either. Here is to the legal ops professional/design guru and the tech attorney/project manager, and all the other nuanced roles.
How to get such a role?
There are two ways: the organic a scaleable.
Option 1: Growing organically into your role
Growing organically into a new role is all about leveraging your unique skill set. Growing organically into the role means that you need to make your path, your business case, be your own cheerleader, and proactively work with your stakeholders to support your growth.
These responsibilities can kind of creep up on you gradually – suddenly you realise that 20/40/60/80% of the work is outside your traditional job description. And that the stuff that you were not specifically hired for is what you are looking forward to doing on Sunday night.
Organic roles can be fantastic because they are tailored to your unique strengths. On the other hand, just because these are so tied to specific humans, they are not very scaleable or approachable to outsiders. Organic roles are also incredibly difficult to benchmark. This is where Option 2 comes in.
Option 2: Applying for a role
This means that someone in the organization has created a plan for the role, got a headcount, and a (hopefully) very clear list of responsibilities.
It comes with less creative freedom, but it can have bigger existing senior buy-in, which can be otherwise difficult to come by. It is also a better path if you are early in your journey or just strongly prefer more structured environments.
In these cases, legaltechjobs or LinkedIn will be the places to look.
What skills do you need?
The essential skills will differ for each alternative legal profession. You can start by reading the introduction and the resources by the specific domain:
- Legal Design, Legal Design in law firms, Legal Service Design
- Legal Operations a Legal Design for Legal Operations
- Řízení právních projektů
As these roles are inherently multidisciplinary, do not hesitate to gather inspiration outside law, and learn how these roles look like for example in tech, hospitality, or healthcare.
What skills do all alternative legal professions have in common?
While each role comes with its own unique set of skills, some are essential for all alternative legal professions.
- Data Literacy – basic statistical thinking to see trends, leverage and visualise data, calculate ROI, and make informed decisions
- Change Management – tools and techniques for designing and facilitating change and innovation (read full introduction here)
- AI Literacy – technical skills and prompting, critical thinking, and ethical and legal considerations. (here are 10 Things lawyers should know about AI)
- Systems thinking – a solid understanding of how everything is interconnected, how incentives and feedback loops work, and how to work with systems (start by reading this by Donella Meadows)
- People, process, props – an understanding of the links between the different drivers of innovation (here is a full intro)
The Five Key Skills for Lawyers in the Age of AI and listed resources may also be useful in this exploration.
Do you need a legal background for all this? This is often unnecessary, but you need to be prepared to learn a lot about the domain, as it does come with some idiosyncrasies.
Do you need to code? I am probably hard-headed in this, but I do believe that even now that we can use natural language for prompting, the basics of algorithmic thinking can still be quite useful. Here is how you can learn to code.
How to find the one that is for you?
It is good to ask yourself some of the hard questions (a fabulous resource is Designing your life) and explore the topics that interest you, even if they fall outside what you normally do.
You can prototype the work – select the smallest possible way how you can experience the actual contents of the role and see if it fits you. Maybe redesign a form, apply project management techniques to your next legal project, or try one of the Three Creative Ideas.
On top of that, decide on the following (including but not limited to):
- Are you a builder or an organiser?
- Are you a generalist or a specialist?
- How much legal work do you want to be doing?
Take the quiz
You can use this fun quiz below, Which alternative legal profession is for you to give you some initial guidance.
Závěrečná ustanovení
Alternative legal professions can be a wonderful way how to carve out your path within the legal context.
With the quite complex and conservative domain specifics, these roles can be quite challenging. But they can also offer a way how to expand on your skills and leverage your strengths.
What alternative legal profession caught your eye?
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