City firms' penchant for ever greater levels of specialisation should be cause for alarm, says former magic circle trainee Dominic Webb

Large commercial firms are rammed full of specialists. Ask them an intellectual property question and you will be introduced to lawyers who deal only with IP. Instruct them on a banking matter and they will not only use a team of banking lawyers, but probably a team of lawyers who deal solely in the very specific type of financial instrument that you wish to use.

The benefits to law firms and their clients are obvious. Teams of specialists can become very competent at doing what they do. They can churn documents out cheaply, and don't need to waste time getting to grips with new concepts. They have probably answered your questions a thousand times before.

But the trend does create a problem for the individual lawyers themselves, and indeed the industry as a whole: an extreme tendency towards over-specialisation.

The problem has been particularly highlighted – indeed exacerbated – by the recession, where certain types of deal have completely fallen away. For those 30 year old solicitors, newly redundant, who have spent the last five years of their qualified life doing nothing but one type of deal, there aren't too many options out there.

It cannot be good for the profession. It cannot be healthy that large numbers of some of the best young solicitors in the country are being made to choose, at the age of 25 or 26, to go into such narrow specialisations.

The problem is actually worse than most people outside of the big firms might realise. Tax departments, by way of example, do not stop the specialising simply at tax law. They go much further than that, with some people even being pigeon-holed into one particular type of tax.

Imagine calling yourself a solicitor but in reality spending every minute of your career dealing only with questions about VAT. Or questions about SDLT (stamp duty land tax). Seem ridiculous? It happens.

Specialisation is inevitable, and indeed desirable, particularly at partner level. It is quite right to expect that experienced people, 20 years and more into their careers, will conclude that their knowledge, or their skill set, or indeed their client base, would be best directed towards one particular area of law.

But big law firms are expecting, often demanding, that lawyers make this decision not after a 20 year career, but after a two year training contract – a training contract where they may have only seen four pretty niche areas of law anyway. Inevitably it leads to good people becoming disgruntled, stuck in a rut, wondering why they ever became lawyers in the first place. People were not attracted to law by the thought of spending year after year negotiating and re-drafting the same 200-page loan agreement.

The cause of all this is quite simple: the huge competition in the legal services market and the desire to increase profit per equity partner (PEP) above anything else. It is the same reason that law firms make people work silly hours and accept the most unreasonable demands from clients without protest. Everyone is scrapping with a large number of almost identical firms for the same work – so any way of doing that work quicker and cheaper is bound to appeal.

But surely an extreme level of specialisation is not a good thing for firms either, not in the long term. Having armies of people who are trained only to do one thing, and who are incapable of turning their hand to anything else, does not sound like a recipe for long-term success. The turnover of people in the big law firms, pre-recession at least, was enormous. When you're losing nearly a quarter of your workforce every year, you must realise that something is up. OK, over-specialisation is only one of several reasons for that, but it's a significant reason.

What can be done about it? Alas, I don't have the answers. Frankly I'm not sure who does. But variety, as they say, is the spice of life. Surely taking young lawyers out of their rut would lead to a happier, and better, profession.

Dominic Webb (name changed) is a solicitor at a private client firm

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