Re-imagining your law firm is a challenging proposition - Rob Aberdein

All good law firms should be re-imagining themselves constantly. However, there are often real barriers to doing so. In hindsight, I was quite lucky at a young age to ‘get the keys’ to a small litigation department with no interdepartmental politics to deal with and a supportive wider partnership group.

The reality for many law firms is that the idea of drawing less profit to invest in technology and service delivery model evolution that ultimately reduces the need for lawyers, is like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas! So the status quo is preserved.

I also had a very clear vision of how I could evolve the delivery of legal services using technology, complemented nicely by my OCD, which meant that I desperately sought out form, structure and order. I’d never heard of target operating models, operational design, governance frameworks or lean processing but these were concepts that I later learned were well-documented and adopted methodologies (but had always been intuitive to me).

I was lucky that my circumstances, experience and mindset allowed me to do a lot of re-imagining but how might a firm begin such a process today? It starts with a clearly defined business strategy to allow the design of a linked target operating model. It’s not lost on me that many larger firms are already well down this road and at the other end of the spectrum, some branches of the law such as advocacy will always be more traditional in their methodology. Outside these areas, however, here are some areas firms should be thinking about:

Tech stack

Is your current ‘tech stack’ fit for purpose and is it actually fully understood and utilised properly by your team (you’d be amazed how often neither is the case!)? Is your tech integrated with non-legal systems across the wider firm? Have you adopted off-the-shelf solutions to automate common tasks in recurring transactional activity?

Performance insights

Do you have KPIs (key performance indicators) and SLAs (service level agreements) in place to help you understand your performance? Are these metrics supported by data collection and reporting? Do you make data-driven business decisions or is it about hunches or anecdotal feedback? What do your clients think and how do you find that out?

People

Is your firm diverse, engaged and innovative? Do your lawyers possess the right skills for the rapidly-evolving legal services marketplace? Are there clearly defined pathways for development and career progression?

Processes

Are there ‘playbooks’ for the work you undertake? Are precedents available and updated frequently? How do stay on top of developments in the law and ensure processes and precedents are updated promptly?

Service delivery model

Does your team know what needs to be done, by whom, and when? Have you thought about outsourcing or digitalising work? Do you have the appropriate lawyer/paralegal/non-lawyer ratios in your team for the work you do?

Making it happen

All this ‘re-imagining’ needs skills and capital and this, as ever, is the challenge most law firms face, along with the adoption of a mindset that most partnership groups will struggle with for a variety of reasons. The logical and perhaps only realistic solutions therefore are external investment and consolidation. Only then might re-imagining be possible….

Rob Aberdein is Chief Commercial Officer, Progeny