The legal profession needs a specialization revolution

When I graduated from law school, I did what most new lawyers do. I traipsed around the office, asking everyone with an open door if they had work for me. People asked me what I was interested in, and I'd say, "securities and tax." One fateful day, I bumped into the late, great Joel Weinstein – head of the tax group – and lo and behold, he had work for me.

And that's how I became a tax lawyer.

Of course, it doesn't always work out that well. Some may have a passion, but the right work or job opportunities just aren't available, and they end up being pushed into another specialty.

We've built a profession where specialization happens by accident (i.e. through a random series of repeated exposure to an area), not by design. And in doing so, we've essentially normalized a culture where lawyers say yes to work simply because clients ask if they can do it.

You wouldn't see an optometrist for chest pain. You wouldn't hire a construction worker to engineer a bridge. You wouldn't expect your kids' hockey coach also to coach basketball, soccer, and swimming at a professional level. So why do we expect lawyers to master corporate law, family law, and criminal defence simultaneously?

In law, we've somehow convinced ourselves (and our clients) that expertise across multiple practice areas is not only possible, but desirable.

Many of my friends outside the realm of law were unaware (and shocked) that, unlike medicine or engineering, law school doesn't branch into specialties. While some Canadian law schools offer specialization electives in upper years, these are just course choices, not the formal specialty tracks you see in medical school.

Outside of CPDs, postgraduate programs, and professional association programming, our specialization and learning are literally rooted in "practice," through files, and through trial and error. Every lawyer will admit that their first-year files contained way more mistakes than their fourth-year ones, and so on.

We can't even call ourselves "experts" under Law Society rules, yet we're practicing in areas where deep expertise matters enormously to our clients.

As a profession, lawyers are well known to have major insecurities. If we didn’t invent “imposter syndrome”, we certainly perfected it. From our junior years, we are hesitant to tell clients “I don’t know” when they ask a question, for fear of being viewed as incompetent. That breeds a mentality of saying yes later in our careers when we should be turning down work we're not truly qualified to handle.

The best lawyers I know pick a lane, understand that lane, and limit their services to that lane. While I believe the problem is systemic, there are things we can do in our own practices to help fix it.

When I started Outsiders Law, I committed to training my lawyers intentionally through mentorship. We sit down and walk through “why” changes were made to their documents. Every time we do this, the junior lawyers say “oh, I didn’t think about that.” It simply isn’t enough to send a redline back to them and expect them to understand the rationale for the changes, or the thought processes they need to go through. Yes, it is time consuming. No, it isn’t billable… but it is definitely some of the best and most rewarding time you will spend as a mentor.

Lawyers should be learning through a loop of mentorship and feedback – not “practice.”

Mentorship isn’t just about taking someone to lunch. It's about consistently dedicating time you don't have to sit and talk about every single change you made to a document and why you made it. It's a commitment to collective learning, where an entire firm receives the same feedback, learns together, and advances as a unit.

So many other professions have embraced specialization. Isn’t it time the legal profession evolved and caught up? Our clients deserve it. The profession deserves it. And honestly, we owe it to ourselves to be the best at what we do, rather than merely adequate (or mediocre) at everything.