Change is inevitable in the legal sector as the profession tends to evolve in order to satisfy their clients needs and expectations. Even if it is impossible to not to happen, it is a difficult task that law firms need to cope with in order to continue with their business and the success that they have from ensuring their brand and good quality services from previous years. For dealing with this type of situation, firms can rely on the figure of the new legal professionals that are known as the O shaped lawyers.

During a lot of time, the study of the law and what was conceived as an acceptable job was to produce workers that only have a deep technological knowledge about a specific topic. In addition, some professionals such as the general counsel for the Routes team at Network Rail, Dan Kayne, has said that universities are failing at their goal of teaching law students to be great practitioners in the real world as they are creating machines that only know what the law is talking about that later will have to deal with the complexity of applying it.

This type of lawyers only develops technical competences but fail to have other valuable and important skills that will provide them great opportunities in their career. These types of skills are known as the five O’s or the O Shaped Lawyer and are:

Five O’s

Open, this refers to being capable to adapt to new situations and considering new perspectives and ideas that can be taken into account in order to make progress in the law firm and as a personal growth.

Originality, it is understood as the skill of the innovation, the creativity and the development of a forward-thinking methods in order to solve problems and cases in a better way.

Optimism, this type of lawyer needs to be, even in the most complex situations, optimistic and bring the best out of them in order to propose new ways of doing things, ideas, having a professional but good relationship with their colleagues and be open to new opportunities.

Ownership, the responsibility that a lawyer has over its work is extremely important so they have to train themselves into focusing on how their decisions are going to affect the law firm, if they are going to bring positive outcomes and, also, know when to ask for help.

Opportunities, this make reference to the new chances that the actual world that doesn’t stop evolving gives lawyers in their career. Don’t be afraid of change and embrace it with the new ways of working.