Imagine the scene. A partner calls in his firm's HR manager to discuss the continuing underperformance of a legal secretary - and tells her the secretary has to go because she has consistently failed to pull her weight throughout her three years' service. The HR manager checks back, only to find that the secretary has had just one performance appraisal since joining the firm, and was given the top score of “exceeding standards." When the HR manager challenges the partner on this, he says: “Oh, you know, we didn’t want to upset her by being completely frank”.
Or picture this. Another law firm has arranged a training session for fee-earners on a new on-line information source. The associates find themselves surrounded by empty chairs where the partners were supposed to be. They conclude that if the partners can't be bothered to turn up, then next time they won't do so either.
Many fee-earners in private practice will immediately recognise events such as these, because they have happened in the past, and continue to do so. Such dislocations are symptomatic of a malaise that still afflicts the way 'support' functions are commonly regarded within law firms. But the fact is that support functions and non-legal activities are increasingly critical to law firms' future - and the failure to recognise and reflect this shift is not only outdated, but increasingly dangerous.
When times are hard, as they are now for many firms, the leaders of the firm can be tempted to focus even more on client work, relegating their involvement in support services even further. A better approach, however, is to focus more effort on ensuring that the whole firm is equipped to profit more rapidly, as business conditions improve.
While law firms are changing, their clients are changing faster and more radically. The current tight market for corporate legal work - with sharp declines in workload in some areas - is serving to highlight the long-standing shortcomings in the way support services are perceived, organised and managed.
Such deficiencies are especially worrying in an industry that has a track record of resistance to organisational innovation, and where many fundamental attitudes and hierarchies remain entrenched despite two decades of rapid technological change and internationalisation. Add the growing competitive pressures and ever-rising expectations of clients, and the need to re-examine law firms' traditional business models and ways of working - including the reliance on billable hours - is irresistible. A recent survey by Legal IT and PA highlights a number of areas where the strategic involvement of support services could add considerable value by:
- clearly and consistently communicating the business vision
- fully aligning staff rewards and recognition schemes with business objectives
- defining firm wide processes and technology to support business objectives
- measuring and monitoring commercial value, and other key indicators of business performance.
However, the barriers to achieving real and lasting change in support functions remain high. While law firms have been intent on crossing geographical boundaries, all too often they have remained internally fractured by organisational habits that have not moved in line with the outside world. The pressure has now reached a level where change is not an option, but an absolute necessity.
A closer look at three activities traditionally labelled as 'support' functions - HR, non-legal training and marketing - underlines both the scale of the task, and the possible ways forward.
A well-understood and articulated HR agenda can bring significant strategic value to any law firm, by ensuring that the objectives of HR and the firm as a whole are closely aligned. However all too often this value is lost through confusion at senior levels over what value HR can deliver. With HR excluded from the business planning process, and 'people issues' either treated as an afterthought or avoided altogether by senior fee-earners, the HR professionals in law firms frequently find themselves in an overburdened firefighting role, at the beck and call of whichever partner shouts the loudest, and frustrated by their inability to devote any time to strategy and organisational development.
To deliver its full value, HR needs to acquire a new position and degree of influence within the firm – one that allows them to ensure that all staff are motivated and rewarded for delivering what the firm needs them to deliver. For this to happen, partners must allow HR to participate in the strategic planning process, empower it to make real decisions, and allocate it enough resources to recruit and incentivise HR professionals with the capabilities and vision to fulfil this higher-level role. More radical solutions could extend to outsourcing HR. In any case, firms need a fundamental rethink about the design of the organisation, with partners and fee-earners becoming more engaged in HR strategies and issues.
Non-legal training is a further area where traditional law firm structures can result in missed opportunities and inefficiencies. Current business pressures mean that fee earners' ability to manage people and develop their firm's business have never been more important. At the same time, knowledge management and capabilities such as document profiling, searching and assembly have become central, placing ever greater emphasis on lawyers' ability to use technology. Yet the commitment to non-legal training at the topmost levels of the firm is frequently half-hearted.
This has several results: junior fee-earners get the impression that their non-legal capabilities are peripheral; measurement of the effectiveness of the training becomes very difficult; training is delivered piecemeal. Training departments often decide that offering one-to-one training is the only way to reach the partners - an approach that is very expensive compared to classroom, distributed or on-line training, and provides no visible leadership or example for the rest of the firm. What is needed is a vigorous and imaginative approach to training, with stronger leadership, committed buy-in from partners, and a clear focus on the business results.
Marketing and branding are equally decisive elements in firms' survival, but are all too often relegated down lawyers' list of priorities. While the view of marketing as 'unsavoury and unnecessary' may be a caricature, industry figures still indicate that most equity partners spend less than 5 per cent of their time on marketing. Law firm partners' attitude to their marketing personnel has given the legal sector a poor reputation among marketing professionals - creating a vicious circle of 'me-too' marketing by people without the ability or drive to challenge the status quo.
In an environment where firms are facing rising competition and growing cynicism about their role, with clients often feeling they have little control over the relationship, firms must send out a clear and consistent message about what they are good at, what benefits they offer - and how they differ from the competition. Again, partners need to commit themselves and be seen to lead the firm. Like HR and training, marketing can only realise its full value by becoming part of the strategic mix, and gaining real decision-making clout in the organisation.
The problems across all the support areas have much in common. By their nature, law firms are precedent-driven, and partners often like to see an idea happening elsewhere - especially within other law firms - before they will take it on board. This hampers innovation in the support functions. The problem is heightened by the fact that many lawyers still regard non fee-earners as an unavoidable cost rather than a source of real value to the business.
The Legal IT/PA survey has shown that senior partners need to take a much stronger role in leading and unifying the firm behind a consistently applied strategy. The most successful firms going forward will be those that can manage their people and their clients brilliantly – and excellent support services will be essential to making this happen.
Partners need to recognise the true value of these non-legal activities. A manufacturing company that relegated marketing, HR and training to peripheral status would not last long. Law firms have to come to terms with the fact that however good their legal product is, the tasks of selling and sustaining it require a whole range of different skills - and that understanding the law is just one of them.
