Camerons are in the press for outsourcing their support services to Integreon. The exact scope has yet to be finalised - or at least made public.
Various people on the Lawyers's blog have voiced their concerns, but for most partners there is some double-mindedness that needs to be worked through. All law firms claim to put their clients centre stage. All firms are grappling with how to manage costs without affecting the client experience. All firms see support functions as an overhead. Oh yes they do. Look at your balance sheet. So all firms are looking at ways of minimizing support costs.
If Camerons believe that the services that will be run form a third party supplier are sufficiently generic to not compromise their strategic advantage, they will make savings by outsourcing. Recent common examples are cloud computing and servers, secretarial services from abroad or group catering facilities.
If they think that they can outsource Marketing & HR, does it not say something about the way that these people are seen by their partner colleagues? It seems to say that partners believe that their added value is less than the cost. And who's to say that they're wrong? But perhaps they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Perhaps different people with a different structure could provide better value and at less cost than outsourcing?
Talk to every one your team, and ask what you could do to help them. This includes support staff. They will be astonished and rejuvenated. If you're too important or too busy to do this, you should step down from partnership. - Phone up a client and ask them how things are going. Not in legal matters, but generally. Then consider how your network of professionals could help that individual with his/her problems, and take action. Your client's loyalty will rocket.
- Find somebody to give honest praise to. Someone who who has done something you noticed that was good. It doesn't have to be earth-shatteringly important. But the person who receives the praise will remember it for months, and redouble their efforts in that area.
Demonstrate the behavioural change that you'd like to see throughout the firm. That's the core of leadership
There is a lag between what's happening in "the real world", and the effect it has on law firms.
So have a look at the short video on the landing page of Right Brain Media http://www.rightbrainmedia.com/, and ponder how long do we have to adapt, and what will adaption look like?
Jamie Pennington
Jamie@penningtonhennessy.com
10 years ago, bandwidth of internal servers was considered the biggest barrier to widespread use of e-learning. The era was characterised by bespoke Learning Management Systems, with the e-learning consultancy ranks bolstered in 2000 by legions of Year2000 consultants who needed to redeployed once the anticipated digital meltdown failed to arrive.
But when technology both increased available bandwidth and decreased the digital resources required, there was still not a huge take-up. With the exception of discrete mandatory topics such as money laundering, the suites of digital courses are left largely untapped. The more senior the audience, the less the appetite.
Why?
1. Online learning is often billed as the opportunity to learn in your own time. Since a lawyer's office time is fully committed, it is a product designed for a different clientèle.
2. Online learning has no commitment associated with it. Nobody knows that you were intending to complete the online module, so it's easy to put it off.
3. Online learning is rubbish for skills training. It can cover the associated processes (delegation for example), but without the associated skills it is akin to teaching cricket without a bat or ball.
4. Online learning does not allow peer learning. However bespoke a module is (and few are), lawyers gain as much from discussing issues with fellow students as they do from material presented.
So What?
There is still a clear business case for leveraging
face-to-face trainer time by front-loading knowledge acquisition. At the junior level, where knowledge-rich, frequently-run programmes (new-joiner for example) lend themselves to online-transfer it might be possible to dispense with face-to-face entirely.
In an ideal world, however, training would be blended; lawyers undertaking pre-session reading, online learning of processes and perhaps a pre-session quiz to confirm understanding. In the real world, some do, most don't, and the subsequent session has to cater for the resultant knowledge levels, frustrating all camps.
If we can find a way of increasing this compliance with pre-course work, the savings could be considerable. It is possible. One head of learning and development pointed out that she has no difficulty in getting partners to prepare for case studies when Ashish Nanda is coming.
Alan Hodgart recently spoke to a group of Law Firm Learning & Development Professionals about the challenges facing law firms - particularly leadership. His analysis was sound but he offered few practical ways for addressing them.
I can think of 7 reasons why developing leaders in law firms is more difficult than in many other fields.
- A typical partner’s psychometric profile is very different to that of a senior corporate executive.
- Lawyers are atypical leaders, for whom traditional models require adaption.
- Lawyers rarely want to lead. Most law firm leaders would be happy if they reverted to client-facing work.
- There are few role models, and leadership is “caught” as much as “taught”.
- Leadership development is left late (30 years +) compared to the corporate model.
- The rewards for leadership in a law firm are not always obvious.
- Few lawyers have corporate experience outside the legal function, so they haven't experienced people who just want to lead.
The solutions are harder to find, but possible. Key aspects are:
- Developing leaders, not training them.
- Leaders are grown, not made, so it requires a joined-up, firm-wide effort to develop leaders.
- Ne
w leaders learn by leading.
As John Wimber used to say "Leading is a doing word."
P.S. If you want some very practical summer reading on the subject, you can try these 2 excellent books. I've got about 70 books on leadership, and these are the best on leadership development. They're not aimed at lawyers, so you'll have to translate into a law firm environment.
Developing the leaders around you - John Maxwell
How to Grow Leaders - John Adair
It is a common mantra within law firms that lawyers need to be "more commercial". Many programs have been established to address this issue, including:
*MBA-style programmes,
*client focus groups,
*industry lectures,
*case studies and
*specific training modules
Training departments also offer training to in-house legal teams on both legal and managerial issues to enable a stronger bond to be fostered.
But I've yet to find a firm who sends chosen associates on a specific client's own middle-management leadership development programme.
So, for example, you would send an Associate on IBM's 5-day "The Leadership Challenge" programme (assuming IBM was a client), where s/he would mix with the future senior line managers within IBM.
In this way:
The lawyer would meet people who will REALLY matter within the client in 10 years time, and get a true understanding of the client's business outside the legal function.
- Associates would understand that the legal function within most client companies is not the well-regarded powerhouse that the in-house team would have you believe.
- Associates would see that, conversely, the legal function is often seen as the "business prevention unit" within a company, and is avoided in the usual run of events.
Contacts within the client's line management would be established, so that they can help the client's own in-house lawyers be more effective.
You could also impress the client with the quality of your associates, since you would choose your delegate carefully. In this way you would build a long term client relationship based on what we preach; really understanding the client.
A great deal has been written about the Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y.
The FT entered the fray on Thursday with a well-crafted piece looking at ways some companies are linking the retiring generation (Boomers) with Generation Y to give the feedback and meaning that characterises the Generation Y.
I don't know of any law firm that is this pro-active. Advantages could include:
- Linking the "grey hairs" heading for retirement with NQ's might well bridge the feedback gap that hard-worked partners are often accused of neglecting.
- Linking could also give those retiring a sense of legacy, and a chance to share the accumulated wisdom which is rarely captured on a formalised basis.
- Linking could be a natural part of the wind-down process, formalising the latter stages of a highly successful career. Note the Cisco example given by the FT.
In my experience mentoring programmes usually stumble because of the mentors preoccupation with his/her career&clients, or the unwillingness to give frank feedback.
Perhaps Boomers heading for retirement would be the answer.
If you want some solid research to challenge partners who think that people buy for rational reasons (let's send them the brochure with our Legal 500 profile...), Predictaby Irrational by Dan Ariely is the book to read.
In the book he narrates a whole series of scenarios which he set up to test various theories. Two examples:
- Why removing an alternative purchase that nobody chose could change the one they DID choose, and
- How to price a $5.00 product to sell - he tried 3 ways: $5.00 with free p&p; $2.50 + $2.50 p&p; or Free + $5.00 p&p. You can see the answer to this particular test in a short video clip he created here.
We know that clients buy the individual lawyer, supported by the firm's brand. This book unpacks some of the science behind how they choose.
There's a great deal written about leadership. You've probably read lots of it.
This article by Professor Nigel Nicholson of London Business School illustrates the challenge that we face within a law firm. It's not that the article is wrong, it's just that most of it is entirely unapplicable to a typical law firm. Can you imagine a typical partner's response to being told:
"Leaders should be unafraid to tell people how they forge meaning, hope and belief out of such times. You have to do so with authenticity - speaking about your own feelings, learning, foibles, biases and so on, in a way that reveals enough of your own fallibility to bring you close to them but not so much as to shake their confidence."
You can read the whole article here