What can law firms learn from Leicester City?

Football is awash with money these days, and with metrics. If you want to rate a club you can look at its income, the amount it spends on player wages, its global support, all of which may be interesting.  Equally players can be measured on their wages, the transfer fee they command, their advertising potential, the yardage they cover in a match.  On the financials, at least, Leicester City and its players are also rans.

But that is all beside the point. Football clubs and football players exist to play and win at football.  On a domestic level that means the Premiership, which of course Leicester won.  In order to do the very thing they most strive for, success on the football pitch, they did not need their players and manager to be earning huge amounts – they needed to focus and engage them on playing football, and doing so better than everyone else.  Of course, they will have won a lot of money, some of which will no doubt be paid to the players, but that is result of their achievement, not the achievement itself.  They measured themselves on where they were in the league table, not on the size of their payslip.

Ask any of the Leicester players whether they would prefer to have won the league or earned more cash and we know what the answer would be.   Ask a young footballer what they dream of and its winning the league or lifting the FA cup, not ￡100k a week in wages.

No lawyer I know decided upon a career in law because of the money they could earn. The motivations vary, but helping people, justice, status and intellectual stimulus are all common.  The fact that you can earn a decent living in many areas of practice is a given, but a side effect.

Yet, when we rank law firms, or when law firms measure their success, so often the dominant metric is profit. Of course there is no equivalent, easily accessible, Premier League table for law firms based on how they performed in their various legal activities.  But law firms are crammed with clever people who are more than capable of developing ways to measure their success based on metrics that matter to them and matter to their people.  And the great thing for law firms is that you can choose your own purpose, your own measures of success, ones that matter to your firm, rather than adopting the one size fits all that the Premier League, or the PEP league table, implies. 

We don’t have to let ourselves be forced into a false and artificial measure of success that, at the end of the day, is not what we are about and will in fact distract us from what we actually want to achieve. Doing so will enable firms to distinguish themselves in different ways, and engage their people and will make for kinder, fairer, and more productive workplaces.  It might also produce a side effect of sustainable increases in PEP, but for most firms, at least, that is likely to be a side effect rather than the purpose.