The Case for the General Lawyer: Rethinking the Specialist Assumption in Law
"What do you specialise in?" The question follows lawyers everywhere, and the answer most clients expect is a neat label: corporate, tax, employment, litigation. The assumption behind that expectation is that legal problems arrive already sorted. They do not. In most jurisdictions, the word "specialist" carries no formal weight whatsoever. No examination, no accreditation, no regulatory distinction separates the lawyer who claims a specialty from the one who does not. What looks like a credential is, in the vast majority of cases, a commercial decision. The generalist who says so plainly is, at minimum, offering something the self-declared specialist is not: an honest account of how legal practice actually works.
