Our Perceptions Hold Progress Hostage: Lessons Learned from Legal Innovator Luke Fletcher

When you think of a lawyer, what comes to mind? Is it an image of Harvey Spector or Perry Mason dominating the courtroom? Perhaps it's the unethical swindler whose fees are racking up by the minute? Or is it the altruistic law school student with their eyes set on British Parliament, Washington DC, or the respective equivalent?

People's understanding of lawyers and the legal profession as a whole, ranges across the spectrum. However there are some attributes rarely associated with the profession. For instance: Innovation.

Innovation seems reserved for entrepreneurs, business leaders, chefs, fashion designers, you name it, but not lawyers. Yet, innovative, is the picture of law that you come away with after a conversation with Bates Wells Braithwaite Partner & European Social Enterprise Law Association (ESELA) Founding Chair, Luke Fletcher.

As Luke describes his job: " I help clients who are aiming to play a positive role in the economy or in society. Typically those are clients who have a purpose that goes beyond profit. The other common thread is that a lot of it involves innovation. Often they want to change things: they want to change the system, do things differently, push boundaries."

From Luke's perspective the legal field is the very place to enact these systemic changes. As he states:

"Law is normative. It shapes behavior. It shapes the way we think. I think the impact of law is very often underestimated. We end up operating a certain way based on custom and practice, and it becomes our world. We find it hard to imagine something else." - Luke Fletcher

Few people would define the role of the lawyer or the field of law in those terms today. Luke continues: " If the client thinks of the lawyer as an agent for a very specific job, that’s all the lawyer can do because that’s all the client is asking for. But where the client has a more expansive view, you can form really powerful relationships and strategic collaborations. You can be a thought partner and you can be a coalition builder."

When most people are told to think of their lawyer in that capacity, they are likely to balk. That seems a far cry from the images we've conceptualized from the media and politics today. Luke acknowledges this challenge head-on:

"There are many misconceptions about law. Firstly it’s not like Suits, we don’t swan around from meeting to meeting... sadly. A lot more of it is reading documents, truthfully. There are plenty of those cultural misconceptions but the thing I’d identify more strongly is that people find it hard to trust their legal advisors"

There is a narrative here around the impact of the field of law, but a far more nuanced one in the power of perception to limit the evolution of an entire field of practice. Rather than the individuals within the field of law, it is at the times the beliefs held by others, that limit the potential for innovation and transformation of society. 

We see it time and time again. Whether it is in the field of social work, science, politics, or education, the narratives that define the past continue to define the future long after the narrative has changed. In the same vein, the role of a lawyer has been held stagnant despite the desire of those within the field to drive a greater purpose. As Luke states:

"I believe you can see an emerging cohort of lawyers across countries who think like this. Who don’t just want to be transactional but want to exercise leadership. Who want to be part of the solution, not a part of the problem. I think most lawyers inwardly yield for that purpose but are not in cultures that liberate that desire." - Luke Fletcher

The irony is that our fears and perceptions are what create the very systems we seek to avoid. Rather than allowing our thinking to evolve, the human need to label and categorize the world into categories we understand, locks us in a holding pattern. If we allow for the legal profession to evolve it can truly be applied to solving some our most pressing issues. Luke points this out with an example of an issue he sees coming into the mainstream of law:

"If we truly want to harness capitalism and its potential to the solve our most difficult problems, we need to re-imagine the purpose of the corporation." - Luke Fletcher

The picture Luke paints is clear: the legal profession presents a global opportunity to re-build systems, but only if we allow the profession to be released from the parameters we've set around the role of law and lawyers in society. To come full circle, it doesn't matter what imagery the field of law evokes, so long as you are able to look past it. Luke's vision of the future of the legal profession serves as a lesson applicable to all industries and professions. Progress comes with the space to evolve and grow whether applied to the individual, the firm, the industry, or beyond. The cost of holding onto the past is transforming the future.

A huge thank you to Luke Fletcher for taking the time to speak with me. I had the pleasure of seeing Luke live at ESELA's annual conference and was keen to connect with him. Fortunately through his team members we were able to connect for a call last month. See the full excerpt below where we discuss Luke's journey, the field of law, social innovation, followership, system reform, and personal transformation.

SG: Luke, let's get right into it. You're involved in a number of different things, how would you describe what you do?

LF: To be perfectly honest, I find it quite difficult. It’s taken me a long time to get to the answer and I’m not sure I’m entirely there. What I say now-a-days is that I help clients who are aiming to play a positive role in the economy or in society. Typically those are clients who have a purpose that goes beyond profit. The other common thread is that a lot of it involves innovation. Often they want to change things: they want to change the system, do things differently, push boundaries. Social innovation is a theme in what I do in large part because that’s a theme in the clients I take on. As a lawyer you inevitably dependent on your instructions and thus your clients shape your practice. That’s probably how I’d describe it overall.

SG: Has this been your focus from day one or has this evolved over time?

LF: I started off my career at a big US Law Firm: White and Case. I was in international financial law at the time and I came across this little firm: Bates Wells Braithwaite (BWB), which was the leading charity law firm in the UK. I then realized you could earn a living doing the sort of things I’d would want to do pro bono. I was majorly attracted by the idea of actually doing this kind of work all the time. BWB has an amazing heritage as it was set up by Andrew Phillips who was a social entrepreneur himself. Today there’s an amazing client roster of people doing great things. I was attracted to that and I thought I’d do charity law. I thought that would be clear and distinctive, like becoming a specialist. What I soon learned was in this world of social innovation there are very few boundaries. I suppose I started off as a charity lawyer and then became a social enterprise lawyer and today I’m advising on responsible business and impact investing. 

SG: Delving more into your day-to-day now: what about this field has surprised you?

LF: What surprises me the most is how open the territory is. A lot is emerging and very little is settled. Often clients ask if we can reference them ‘the market’, in other words the 'industry best practices'. In most instances the reality is that there is no best practice or precedence. Very often there is no clear benchmark. It is often about thinking from first principles and extrapolating and saying this looks like a reasonable way to structure it. That structure is typically newly defined, which is enjoyable because it means you can be creative as you imagine the future and maybe even influence it. That comes as a surprise to most because the majority of the law is quite established.

SG: What have been some of the changes you've observed across the field? (Particularly in the field of Soc Ent.)

LF: There are the obvious things like the number of people, firms, and range of backgrounds in the field. We’re seeing a lot of diversity in background and general maturing as a field. What is less expected is that the conversation is merging. At one point it might have been easy to distinguish between charity, social enterprise, responsible business, and impact investing but now it's becoming much more difficult to do this. Increasingly we’re seeing this collision of different disciplines, markets and sectors. It’s exciting and slightly intimidating.

SG: Do you see that shift as a good thing? This collision of entities and changes defining the sector.

LF: I think that there are those people who like clarity and there are those people who appreciate complexity. For some they feel as if their world is under threat. By their world I mean their intellectual world. Historically it has always been clear what philanthropy is, and philanthropy is not business. Suddenly philanthropy feels threatened by this collision but equally business is threatened because philanthropy is saying business needs to happen differently which influences the sector. The models emerging in the intermediate space of business and philanthropy are asking poignant questions about business as usual in both sectors.

I think it’s inevitable. Is it good or bad? It’s probably good because we need to change how markets and public services work. We need experimentation, we need new ideas, and we need to challenge the orthodoxies we have. There are some pieces of markets which need to change in order to move forward as a society.

SG: How do you see the law facilitating this change?

LF: Law is normative. It shapes behavior. It shapes the way we think. I think the impact of law is very often underestimated. We end up operating a certain way based on custom and practice, and it becomes our world. We find it hard to imagine something else. So I think if we want to change the paradigm in which we think about philanthropy or business or systems we need to change the way we codify it to reflect our thinking. At the macro level I think the law is a critical piece of the puzzle and has a significant casual effect on behavior. If we get the law right, behavior will follow. On the micro level individual lawyers can be agents of change and catalysts themselves. Typically clients tend to think of lawyers in a very transactional manner and lawyers allow themselves to be thought of in this way. I think we need to escape that stranglehold because lawyers can have an important role in market-building, advocacy, and shaping our thinking. Law is a guardian of the orthodoxies we have, for better or for worse, so I believe law has a crucial role to play in social development.

SG: What is your vision or 'dream' for the organizations you work and yourself?

LF: Speaking to BWB first, law firms tend to think about success in terms of profits per equity partner. That’s an incredibly narrow paradigm through which to look at things. I would love to see us as a firm measuring success based on our contribution to society and the environment. What does that mean and how do we get there? I think we need a unique culture and practice. We need people who care deeply about the same issues as our clients, and people who come to work with a mindset beyond earning a living. I think that was the vision BWB was founded on by Andrew Phillips and that is embodied by senior leaders in the firm like Stephen Llyod. I’d like to play a key role in developing that vision and helping us get there. With the European Social Enterprise Law Association (ESELA), I’d like to see a network of international lawyers thinking outside the norm and collaborating to drive change. I think you can see an emerging cohort of lawyers across countries who think like this: Who don’t just want to be transactional but want to exercise leadership, who want to be part of the solution, not a part of the problem. I believe most lawyers inwardly yearn for that purpose but are not in cultures that liberate that desire. I think success for me with ESELA would mean handing it over to someone else, a future chair in another country, who shares the same vision and can bring it to a greater number of people

SG: What is the largest external misconception people have about your work? 

LF: There’s are many misconceptions about law. Firstly it’s not like Suits, we don’t swan around from meeting to meeting, sadly. A lot more of it is reading documents, truthfully. There are plenty of those cultural misconceptions but the thing I’d identify more strongly is that people find it hard to trust their legal advisors. Trust is something that needs to be earned, it needs to be won, and it needs to be sustained. If the trust isn’t there, the client can try to control the relationship, and narrow the parameters of the relationship. If the client thinks of the lawyer as an agent for a very specific job, that’s all the lawyer can do because that’s all the client is asking for. But where the client has a more expansive view, you can form really powerful relationships and strategic collaborations. You can be a thought partner and you can be a coalition builder. I think this is the key misconception: the lawyer is seen as a very transactional agent but when taking a more full perspective the lawyer or firm can be a key part of the leadership needed to get from point A to B.

SG: Collaboration seems to be a key theme here, how do you approach partnership development?

LF: As an advisor I’m conscious that I do not want to get in the way of my client. I want the client to be in the driving seat. When you have legal advisors representing different parties they will be looking out for the interests of the client but often in a way that is self-defeating. When you have lawyer-to-lawyer conversations, it is simply not the source of creative thinking. I like to avoid legal capture and to have the clients talk to enter in principle agreements ahead of time. I see my role as a strategic advisor to help my clients ask good questions of my counter parties. Often this is a lot of clarification: expectations and outcomes. Often in cross-functional partnerships there are big things that go un-discussed because the expectations of each party are misaligned and unlikely to occur. Often it’s pushing my clients to have those more difficult conversations early on.

SG: Is there an area of law or society where you find partnerships to be underutilized or ineffective?

LF: One area that is quite dysfunctional is public procurement because it encourages this transactional behavior. It encourages the state to buy something and analyze what is being sold at a transaction-by-transaction basis. This makes it very difficult to build relationships. One model that has a lot of potential is what we call the innovation partnership model in which the state can say to a private sector partner: We have a problem we want to solve. We don’t know how to solve it. We don’t even know what to buy. We want someone to help us figure out what to buy. Can you help us? The state doesn’t often use this model. This means the state ends up telling the market what it wants, before it knows what it needs. That means the market doesn’t have an opportunity to contribute to the states thinking in how to best solve this social or economic problem. This even creates a disincentive to support the state because at some point they will procure something, likely from someone else, so why put in the resources into helping.

If we could see large scale funds from central government given to local governments with the condition that those must be used on innovation partnerships with charitable organizations, social enterprises, or social business providers that could be a very powerful thing.

SG: What is the number one trend you believe we should be paying more attention too?

LF: One thing that has not yet fully reached the mainstream but that I think should and will be shortly is the purpose and nature of the corporation. This interaction between law and culture will yield in the definition of the purpose of the corporation. If we truly want to harness capitalism and its potential to solve our most difficult problems, we need to re-imagine the purpose of the corporation. This purpose then drives the way boards think and that then drives strategy. The purpose of the corporation is at the very heart of capitalism. Because of this corporations are surrounded by orthodoxies that people are reluctant to change in order to protect their legacies but this does not make it any less necessary. We’ve already begun to think deeply about this and I would like to think we’ll see a lot of innovation in this area across the globe.

SG: Building on that... Do you think that this change in purpose will be driven by the formation of new entities (e.g. B-Corp) or the re-purposing of what is currently out there?

LF: I think it will primarily be re-purposing. Most of the machinery surrounding the corporation works well. It’s our core conception that doesn’t work. The primacy is shareholder value in the model and our thinking. This makes it incredibly difficult for corporations to contribute to society in the way that many of those within the corporation would like. Going to the purpose of the corporation is the key. I do think we will see increasing innovation in tax policy and corporate governance in the near term to try and reduce inequalities. When thinking about how to drive this change internationally it is quite fascinating. If you think about developing economies there’s a question of whether they can leapfrog some of the systems we’ve created today and implement better law and governance models for the ground level.

SG: The last question I wanted to ask you was what is the number one skill you are looking to build?

LF: The truth is there are so many skills I’d like to have and that I’m working on that it’s almost impossible to say. The thing that sticks with me is that I’d like to be inspired, genuinely deeply inspired. Not a skill really but rather an attribute. I think if you are genuinely inspired you have something to give, something to share. Where does that inspiration come from? It comes from followership. People talk about leadership but I think followership is very important. Who do you look to follow and what do you hope to emulate from them? I would like to identify those people who are going to be those agents of change and who are going to bring about the world that we need. 

A big thank you to Luke Fletcher for making the time to speak and Sam Hunter for facilitating our conversation. For more of Luke check out his bio here, the BWB page on social enterprise, or the ESELA website.