How law firms can do more with less
Joel Barolsky
Professional services strategy adviser, facilitator and keynote speaker | Principal Edge International | AFR opinion writer | Senior Fellow University of Melbourne Law School
The full text of my opinion piece first published in the Australian Financial Review on 4 March 2021.
Commercial law firms face constant pressure from clients to do more for less.
They can respond in three ways: say it can’t be done and risk losing out to competitors, drop their prices, or make a step change to improve productivity.
Most are pursuing option 3 and are looking to legal operations to make it happen.
What are legal operations?
Legal operations usually include some or all of these disciplines:
- Business Management – commercial managers focused on improving profitability, increasing revenues and optimising efficiency.
- Service Design – workflow and client experience specialists that evaluate, accelerate and support legal process improvement projects. They also often assist with new product development and act as incubators for new business ideas.
- Legal Project Management – project professionals that make legal work tractable, trackable and transparent, for both lawyers and clients.
- Pricing – pricing experts that help partners to have better client conversations, align price with value, protect margins, and where appropriate, use alternative fee arrangements.
- Alternative Legal Services – a team of paralegals, legal technologist and lawyers focused on high-volume process work including e-discovery, transactional and dispute support, language editing, document review and IP management.
Australian experience
In Australia, some very large national firms have embraced a centralised approach to legal operations. Others have adopted a more decentralised model with each major practice group acquiring the resources specific to their needs.
Over time, I would expect most firms will move to a model of centralised governance to avoid duplication and facilitate the sharing of knowledge and applications. At the same time, operational specialists need to work right at the coalface to find smarter ways to deliver more for less.
Innovation roles will be also subsumed into legal operations. Legal secretaries and assistants will still work directly with local lawyers but will be more connected with and directed by legal operations.
In medium-sized and smaller law firms, a new business service function will likely emerge with the status of HR, marketing and finance. It will often start with outsourcing basic IT services - hardware, software and helpdesk – and the insourcing of specialist tech-savvy resources to help lift productivity and client connection in key practice areas. Once this is established, other roles involved in supporting legal service delivery will enter the legal operations orbit.
New career pathways
This emerging area of legal operations is also creating an alternative - and attractive - career path for lawyers.
They benefit from a deep knowledge of the intrinsic needs within a legal workflow, but also enjoy the respect of the various stakeholders involved in migrating to a new way of working.
MinterEllison offers new lawyers the option of entering its Legal Operations Graduate Program. The program gives candidates exposure to lean six sigma, design thinking, change management and agile methodologies. The firm recently graduated its first cohort and is reported to be delighted with the outcomes so far.
The growth of legal operations is not just confined to law firms.
Stuart Fuller, the global head of KPMG Legal Services, recently predicted that “half of the [in-house] legal team will not be lawyers by 2025”.
Fuller says the use of automated solutions, chatbots and other forms of productised legal services will rise, and these will need support from lawyers as well as a more multidisciplinary workforce with different skill sets. As a result, the proportion of legal work done by paralegals, data analysts, operational experts and other specialists might rise to the point where legal professionals become a minority.
The key message is that the path to improved productivity is not pressuring lawyers to bill more time, but rather working smarter with the evolving disciplines of legal operations.
BD consultant and coach ... helping professional services firms to grow key clients and win new business. EMCC accredited coach.
3 年Interesting piece Joel Barolsky especially when set against the backdrop of many law firms having made bumper profits during the pandemic by not having to outlay on overheads like traveling, client entertaining, certain forms of marketing events, away days, partner conferences, etc. I suspect many firms will continue to suppress such spending as they come out of lockdown as they believe (probably rightly) that most of it isn't really necessary. This will probably make them less inclined to look for ways to work smarter.