In the News

In this podcast episode of Zooming Through Law School, Alyson and Cat talk with Chris Meyers, Assistant Dean of Students at Vanderbilt Law School, about the importance of the Delta Model as a holistic framework for identifying and building competencies, and why it's so relevant in these pandemic times.

September 18, 2020

This article by Alyson Carrel explains how the Delta Model has the potential to help our profession recognize that legal professionals must broaden their skill set beyond “thinking like a lawyer,” as well as reimagine how students apply for law school, get hired, take the bar, and progress in their careers — without suffering from the structural racism currently baked into the system.

July 24, 2020

Natalie Runyon and Alyson Carrel, members of the Delta Model working group, authored a white paper detailing research undertaken by Thomson Reuters to validate the Delta Model.

2019

This brief video shows how someone in a law department managerial role can use the Delta Model to help employees plan and execute meaningful skills development and growth.

We are dealing with “big uncertain Asimov problems” in law, and these demand human thinking. And what is more human than thinking about the human competencies that we human lawyers and legal professionals need in order to face the vast known (and unknown) challenges of this Fourth Industrial Revolution?

The Delta Model working group posed some big questions: What are the various roles of a lawyer in the 21st century? What are the requisite skills and competencies that a legal professional needs in order to thrive personally and contribute professionally in this Fourth Industrial Revolution? How might we design a client-driven model for describing these competencies?

December 6, 2019

In this conversation with Geek in Review co-hosts Marlene Gabauer and Greg Lambert, Delta Model working group members Alyson Carrel and Cat Moon talk about the Model's holistic approach and how it can be leveraged in the law school experience and beyond.

November 12, 2019

In a world where lawyers are being displaced by technology, data scientists and policy experts, law schools are searching for ways to train lawyers to make them more relevant in today’s world. After all, law schools’ survival depends on placing students in jobs, so they need to teach them skills to make them marketable. Hence, the development of the Delta Model, a new competency model for the 21st-century lawyer. The brain child of five legal industry professionals with different backgrounds, the Delta Model incorporates three categories of skills critical for lawyers’ success in today’s world: substantive knowledge, business operations (which encompasses tech savvy, data analytics and project management) and Personal Effectiveness, which includes characteristics like entrepreneurial mindset, emotional intelligence and character.

November 12, 2019

The DR field should enter the conversation about technology & innovation and help shape the future of the legal profession by adopting a new competency model for 21st Century legal professionals [the Delta Model] that recognizes the interplay between technology problem-solving, data analytics, and emotional intelligence – and that provides law schools, law firms, and other organizations a model to visualize and understand the relationship between these skills. With the power on the ‘buy’ side, what skills and attributes must a lawyer have to keep clients happy? If clients are unhappy, it’s often not about price. Maslen cites a survey conducted by Thomson Reuters a few years ago, where close to half of 100 general counsel surveyed had changed their legal advisers in the previous year. The main reason? “They felt that the law firms did not understand their business,” she says.

November 12, 2019

The Delta Model working group contributed this post to Bill Henderson's Legal Evolution blog. The post offers an overview of the Model along with its applicability to various points along the legal profession spectrum, from law students to mid-career lawyers to legal employers.

November 10, 2019

What are the skills that the legal industry needs to develop and integrate in an era of rapid technological and business model transformation?

In a new podcast, Mark Cohen, CEO of Legal Mosaic, a legal business consultancy; and Daniel Rodriguez, the Harold Washington Professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, discussed this issue at length.

October 23, 2019

The last 10 years have seen a shift in how legal services are delivered as the market becomes more data-driven, transparent and fragmented, according to Kirsten Maslen, director of small law and academic at Thomson Reuters.

With the power on the ‘buy’ side, what skills and attributes must a lawyer have to keep clients happy? If clients are unhappy, it’s often not about price. Maslen cites a survey conducted by Thomson Reuters a few years ago, where close to half of 100 general counsel surveyed had changed their legal advisers in the previous year. The main reason? “They felt that the law firms did not understand their business,” she says.

October 2019