If your answer is “no,” keep reading. Step 1 is to identify the type and quantity of the skills you need. Step 2 is to conduct a careful build-versus-buy analysis. Step 3 is … who are we kidding? Very few legal service organizations take the time to plan out a talent pipeline strategy and follow it with discipline.

One organization that has actually done this, however, is Cisco's legal department. According to Steve Harmon, deputy general counsel and head of legal operations at Cisco, the planning and construction of a talent pipeline is a “Quadrant II” activity.

What's a Quadrant II activity?

If we plot all organizational tasks onto a 2×2 matrix based on level of urgency and level of importance, we end with four quadrants. Harmon learned this technique while an information systems major at Brigham Young University. At the time, Stephen Covey was on the BYU faculty and taught a course based on his “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” research.

According to Harmon, most of the legal profession lives in Quadrant I. Although the long hours and tight deadlines make us feel productive, it is profoundly wasteful and non-strategic. This is because underinvestment in Quadrant II planning turns ordinary business activities into emergencies. Great organizations can't afford the loss of time and brain power.

At Cisco, a $48 billion technology company that is #62 on the Fortune 500, the talent pipeline is a planned activity with a multi-year time horizon. Because Harmon and Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler started this process several years ago, they have the talent they need when they need it. This keeps Quadrant I small and preserves whitespace for additional long-term thinking.

Yet, here is the good news—your organization can tap into the same pipeline opportunity as Cisco.

Steve Harmon sits on the board of the Institute for the Future of Law Practice (IFLP, or “I-flip”), something Chandler fully endorses because it's a Cisco Quadrant II activity.

IFLP is a nonprofit collaboration of legal departments, law firms, legal service companies and law schools. IFLP's core initiative is a three-week skills boot camp for law students followed by paid internships (10 weeks) and field placements (seven months). In 2018, 40+ students from five law schools participated in the program. In 2019, IFLP is planning to expand to 75-90 students from 15 law schools. The long-term goal is to make IFLP curriculum and internships available to students from all interested law schools.

With five interns, including three 3L students currently at Cisco's San Jose headquarters on 7-month field placements, Cisco is currently IFLP's lead employer. In 2019, Harmon wants sixinterns, all in the seven-month program. Why seven months? Because these students add the most value in months 4, 5, 6 and 7 when they finally have a deep grasp of Cisco's business. Harmon is hoping that IFLP can fill this order with capable students who can receive academic credit and thus graduate on time with a lower debt loads and dramatically better legal and professional skills.

Through Quadrant II planning, Harmon and Chandler believe Cisco can achieve its talent needs while elevating the profession and improving legal education. That's the power of Quadrant II.

If you're part of an ambitious legal department, law firm, legal service or legal ltech company that is seeking to improve its talent pipeline—perhaps on par with Cisco—your organization is invited to the Wave One Launch, IFLP's kickoff event in our drive to increase the number of employers for the 2019 boot camps. The Wave One Launch takes place in Chicago on Sept. 12 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. Featured speakers include Steve Harmon and several other senior in-house professionals who also serve as IFLP instructors. There is no cost to attend, but tickets are limited by the auditorium size. Program and Registration details here.

If you can't make the Wave One Launch, your organization can still become an IFLP employer. We know that lawyers are detail-oriented people. Here is the essential background information:

• Past the Pilot. IFLP's Boot Camp program is based on pilot project at Colorado Law called the Tech Lawyer Accelerator (TLA). The TLA began operations in 2014 thanks to a generous grant from the AccessLex Institute. The founder was Bill Mooz, a former partner at Holland & Hart who went on to senior in-house positions at Sun Microsystems and VMWare. The idea was simple – provide students with a strong foundation in data, process, tech, business, and professional skills and match them with employers (mostly in Boulder and Silicon Valley) who valued the TLA vetting and training. Between 2014 and 2017, the TLA placed more than 70 law students (most from Colorado Law, but some from Indiana Law) into high quality internships. Initially it was summer employment, but some IFLP employers (Cisco, Bryan Cave, and others) began experimenting with 7-month field placements.

• Change in Regulation. Steve Harmon badgered Mooz and Henderson to find ways to scale the program. Unfortunately, the ABA accreditation standards prohibited students from simultaneously earning pay and academic credit, thus requiring students to move heaven and earth to do a 7-month field placement and graduate at the end of their 3L year. Then, in late 2016, the ABA changed the accreditation rules to permit paid field placements that complied with structure and oversight requirements. This change opened the door for the creation of IFLP. In 2017, Mooz and Henderson tapped a group of 40 industry leaders to help conduct a needs analysis and to help formulate a viable nonprofit business model. Dan Linna was added as a co-founder to head up the Chicago-based curricular efforts. The result was the incorporation of IFLP in early 2018.

• Industry-Level Solution. The employers and law schools who support IFLP all believe that the legal industry is heading into a period where we need new methodologies to keep pace with the staggering complexities (social, economic, legal) of a highly regulated, globalized, and interconnected world. The state-of-the-art is necessarily being developed in the field by skilled resourceful lawyers and allied professionals. With rare exceptions (like Dan Katz at Chicago-Kent and Dan Linna at Northwestern, Henderson would say), full-time law faculty lack the technical skills and know-how to meet this need. For reasons of cost, quality, and speed, the profession needs an industry-level solution.

• Body of Knowledge. IFLP is seeking to organize these new legal methodologies into a tractable “body of knowledge” that can be efficiently learned and communicated to law students, practicing lawyers, and allied professionals. In many respects, this is the 21-century equivalent of Restatement of Laws movement. Imagine the extraordinary inefficiencies and negative impact if the legal profession had not, through the American Law Institute, imposed order on the sprawling landscape of state common law. It's time to do the same for data, process, technology, design thinking, and foundational business concepts, at least as they apply to the legal field.

• T-Shaped Legal Professionals. With the benefit of the traditional 1L curriculum and some upper-level doctrinal course, law grads can teach themselves new areas of law. Yet, no amount of doctrinal knowledge prepares a student for artificial intelligence, process mapping, design thinking, and multidisciplinary collaboration. Unfortunately, once into practice, lawyers quickly become too expensive to immerse in weeks of foundational training – they just can't spare the time away from the office. Yet, three to six credit hours of IFLP boot camp training plus quality internships can produce law graduates with unique skills and highly relevant work experience. This is how IFLP ended up in Cisco's Quadrant II.

• No Supervision Required.It takes effort to supervise people, including interns.This past summer, Univar (#349 on the Fortune 500) was undergoing a major restructuring that consumed all its internal bandwidth. Univar's general counsel, Jeff Carr, needed the extra hands and the intern price point but lack the time for daily supervision. Thus, he hired an IFLP intern supervised by Elevate Services, a law company with expertise in data, process, and technology, and ElevateNext, a law firm affiliated with Elevate. Carr recently told a group of fellow Fortune 500 general counsel, “I just can't say enough about the importance of this initiative as well as the quality of the program and the interns. Our experience was incredibly positive.” If you don't have the capacity to supervise an intern, an IFLP Managed Intern would help. No supervision required, but you do get the results.

• The Law Firms Get it. By a long measure, IFLP has enjoyed its greatest uptake with enlightened law firms. In the US, this includes Bryan Cave, Chapman and Cutler, Dennemeyer, Fenwick & West, Hermes Law, Honigman, Orrick, Seyfarth Shaw, and Thompson Hine. In Canada, we were pleased to include Bennett Jones, Blakes, Oslers and McCarthy Tetrault. In each case, the firms became IFLP employers because they were looking for a pipeline of law grads with a working knowledge of the P3 disciplines (pricing, project management, process improvement). P3 is the law firm equivalent of legal operations in a legal department. When lawyers on both the client and service provider side have the same level of advanced knowledge and skills, innovation accelerates from theory to practice. This is the power of Quadrant II.

In 2018, IFLP was fortunate to host students from Colorado, Northwestern, Indiana, Michigan State, and Osgoode Hall (Toronto). In 2019, IFLP is pleased to include students from Brigham Young, University of Calgary, Chicago-Kent, Miami, Richmond, Southern University, Suffolk, Syracuse, and Vanderbilt. A handful of Wave One invitees are still pending. IFLP looks forward to including more law schools in Wave Two.

A group of farsighted legal employers and legal educators are seeking to build a new, better, and more robust talent pipeline. Through this process, the negative narrative on the legal profession and legal education is going to get re-written. Legal employers are the rocket fuel for this initiative. Become a Wave One IFLP employer (www.futurelawpractice.org).

William Henderson is a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, where he holds the Stephen F. Burns Chair on the Legal Profession. Daniel W. Linna Jr. is a visiting professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. Prior to teaching, Linna was a litigation partner at Honigman in Detroit. Both Henderson and Linna are co-founders of IFLP.