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Appeared in Mr. Magazine December 2017
By Mr. Hielke Bruin (Partner, Voxius)

With this issue of Mr. comes an end to the period, in which we have supported the magazine from its inception in terms of business and content. Much has changed in legal Holland since the first issue of Mr. in that distant past. Can you remember when lawyers used to work with a dictaphone and their own secretary? And that their services were billed on the basis of hours times fees? And that the interests of the client were really less relevant than the prosperity of the partnership? Or that a senior corporate lawyer made an NDA himself? Or that that legal counsel spent several days working on a new contract for a deal, which also occurred a week earlier in a slightly different but very similar context? And that Richard Susskind and Ben Heinemann were still hip and kept getting invited to client events?

Fortunately, everything is better now. We now have Legal Tech, work Lean, set up flex pools and henceforth perform our Legal consultancy within alternative pricing arrangements in order to make an efficiency move, in which service and product optimization and client focus are central. This requires T- or Pi-shaped lawyers, who preferably only become lawyers after their bachelor's degree and have previously been trained as aerospace technologists, historians or marketers. Clients think in commodities and unbundling and work closely with their lawyers and notaries on the basis of transparency and equality.

To quote the comment of a down-to-earth Rotterdam man at the BBC on the expectation of a soft Brexit, "you dream at night."

Most of the behaviors of that distant past are unfortunately still commonplace. The difference in thinking between advocacy and client/company still seems to be as deep-rooted as it was 20 years ago. Still you have to look closely before you encounter the word "client" within expressions of service providers. Most General Counsel still sigh that their outside counsel's advice is inappropriate for communication with management or SB.

Granted, it is primarily up to the client to point out to his counsel that the world has changed. That the Legal department within a multinational has different challenges than managing an M&A deal. However, the risk that many lawyers and notaries take is that their clients continue to evolve and at some point they find that they would be better off with a different kind of support. It is to be hoped that by that time the firm will be filled with rocket scientist lawyers, who in addition to their Bar Exam also have enough knowledge of business or technological processes to do speak the language of the business.