Legal Transformation
Therese Linton
Helping professionals build flourishing careers, optimise performance, get promoted, and live happier, more fulfilling lives! I transform mindsets and ways of working to take you from NOW to NEXT!
Legal Transformation – the pace of change is increasing
Let’s start by considering the recent upheavals that have created revolutionary changes in the legal profession, and then consider the concepts of innovation versus transformation. I’d go with transformation every time as it is a more holistic approach that also considers human factors.
“Legal services are in fact evolving through five different stages which I call bespoke, standardized, systematized, packaged, and commoditized.”??Richard Susskind
Richard Susskind, a renowned academic and thought leader in the area of changing legal practice is well known for his book – The End of Lawyers? This quote highlights one example of the changes that are currently being experienced by the legal profession. I observe the level of change over the last decade as revolutionary rather than evolutionary.
The impetus for change
The changes that we are seeing in the legal profession started with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/9 and it’s taken over 10 years for impacts to be felt in the form of changes to the way lawyers are expected to deliver services.
Client needs and expectations changed. There were limited budgets for legal work, so they started to demand more reliability, transparency, and predictability. There was also a trend towards increasing the size of in-house teams and spending less with external firms. We saw the concepts of the Legal Informed Purchaser and Legal Project Management emerge and gain traction.
Ways of Working changed. Firms were going out of business and other forward-thinking firms started to explore concepts like Lean Six Sigma and the application of project management skills.
Innovation was occurring at a rapid pace with trends such as – legal outsourcing, legal offshoring, workflow, and process improvement, as well as improved technology adoption.
New skills emerged in the areas of legal project management, legal process improvement and legal operations.
New roles become possible for non-lawyers and lawyers and the demand for Legal Project Managers and Legal Operations specialists have now gone through the roof!
This all resulted in –
What is Legal Innovation
Legal innovation is any change or improvement to deliver better outcomes. These changes can be small tweaks to existing approaches or major leaps forward with new services or new systems. Often the small opportunities are overlooked, and the large opportunities don’t eventuate due to the expected upheaval and a lack of willingness to change.
Legal Innovation is all of these things –
What is legal transformation?
Put simply, legal transformation is all about taking legal innovation to the next level through change management techniques to change the culture of legal teams and bring everyone along for the ride.
It includes ALL of the following –
领英推荐
“Legal transformation is critical to ensure the success of all legal team in an environment of changing expectations.”
Summary of the trends
Let’s look at the major trends that have emerged and become embedded into current legal practices. These are fast becoming non-negotiables and you won’t survive as a lawyer without these skills -
Client needs – clients are now demanding transparency around legal outcomes, costs and timeframes. They won’t tolerate cost overruns due to inefficiencies or unapproved variations. In large firms, clients are expective Partners to attend meetings with their Legal Project Managers in tow so they can feel confident that the legal work will be well run.
Ways of working – I first started delivering CPD training and pilot courses in Legal Project Management for one of the world’s largest law firms in 2010. I was astounded by the enthusiastic response from clients who were largely general counsel and also underwhelmed by the response from Partners and firm leadership. Clients now expect the concepts of Legal Project Management, Legal Process Improvement and Legal Portfolio Management to be well embedded into ways of working. Firms can no longer pay lip service or hide behind smoke and mirrors. Increasing the same expectations are being placed on large internal legal teams, with an emphasis on Legal Operations and Legal Process Improvement.
Innovation – legal innovation started spectacularly during the GPC when Seyfarth and Shaw announced their adoption of a Lean Six Sigma approach to their legal work – this was the forerunner of the Legal Process Improvement and Lean Legal Sigma frameworks. Other global firms started talking about Legal Project Management, although it has taken many years for these approaches to gain more widespread adoption. We’ve also seen Legal Operations that has emerged as an overarching concept for a set of frameworks encompassing Legal Project Management, Legal Process Improvement and Legal Pricing.
New skills – There is certainly an important place in the legal profession for those with deep technical skills and areas of practice specialisation and who are disinclined to interact with others – in external firms these people will be increasingly pushed into special counsel roles without client engagement or team leadership responsibilities. Career progression and practice growth will be directed towards those with higher emotional intelligence, good interpersonal skills, and team leadership skills, who are also willing to adopt the new disciplines of legal project and portfolio management. The legal expertise is merely the gate opener, it is no longer enough to satisfy client expectations.
New roles – All lawyers benefit from having the organisation skills that come from Legal Project Management and the continuous improvement mindset that comes from Legal Process Improvement, as well as the prioritisation and balancing skills that come from Legal Portfolio Management. There are also roles for specialists in these disciplines. Right now, demand far outstrips supply for experienced, competent Legal Project Managers. We have also seen the emergence of new roles in the field of Legal Operations, including Legal Chief of Staff and Head of Legal Operations. Roles for Legal Operations specialists are becoming more common.
“It still astounds me how few lawyers even know that alternate career paths exist. I’m always talking to recent graduates who have never heard of Legal Project Management or Legal Operations!”
Options for developing Legal Project Management Skills
Where do you get training if you’d like to move into a Legal Project Management role? Well, that is a hard question. Don’t be fooled by those who let you believe that you are a ‘certified’ legal project manager after you’ve done a two or three-day training course. You only have an understanding of the concepts and theories and no real competency.
I’ve been busy developing genuine competency-based online and virtual learning opportunities for those wishing to become Legal Project Managers, and for Heads of Legal Project Management that need to develop these skills internally. You can book me in to chat about these new LPM Practitioner? and LPM Advanced Practitioner? below.
In the meantime, I have three options for you –
Find out more…
Here are some useful links to articles that I have written on Legal Project Management –
And, next week I’ll cover the importance of change management to gain the benefits of all of this transformation.
If you’d like to find out more about the upcoming Legal Project Management Practitioner? and Advanced Legal Project Management Practitioner?, then book me in for a chat about tailored training solutions and ways to get started.
What are you waiting for - life is finite so it’s important to be happy and enjoy it.
My aim is to inspire you to transform your working life and achieve great things and I look forward to joining you on your journey!