Law Firms: Change or die

Too extreme? I don’t think so. If firms stay stuck then not only do they limit their growth and everyone within the firm but they leave the business exposed to a slow death.

Before considering what can be done to bring about seismic (profitable) change,  and garner an entrepreneurial perspective, it is helpful to consider some of the reasons that are still in play in limiting change.

The historical perspective weighs heavily on law firms. They expanded in an era where change wasn’t a necessary constituent to the running of a profitable firm.

The cycle of individual growth and development (articled clerk, solicitor and partner), more or less, made sure that the firm was sustainable. In the early years there was a need to introduce capital for growth and it was expected that everyone who qualified with the firm would go on to become a partner. There certainly wouldn’t have been committees set up to determine promotion or 360 degree appraisals as part of that process. Location wasn’t that key. Neither was branding or specialism.

As to competition, that existed but there were enough clients to go round so that it didn’t matter to the same degree as it does now. Of course many more firms had the benefit of legal aid and that no doubt kept quite a few of them from being exposed to the glaring light of competition.

In short, when it came to change there wasn’t a need to see it happen.

But of course the landscape now looks different, and there will be a paradigm shift later in the year when the full force of the Legal Services Act becomes a reality.

Firms will no doubt be watching and waiting but the smart ones will already have worked out how they need to develop, change and inculcate an entrepreneurial perspective.

They will have worked out that it is no longer good enough to work in the business – doing fee earner work – but they need to go to work on the business.

It will be key for them to have a clear vision of how the firm will look in the next 3-5 years and effect change within the firm to mirror what a firm of that type would be doing every day.

But what about the rest of the cohort – either the ones who are adopting the tactic of wait and see or those who know that they have to change but don’t know how (or perhaps the veil is so tightly drawn that they haven’t worked out a strategy to raise it).

Option 1

Dissolve the firm, sell it or break it up into its constituent parts.

ITT have recently gone down the break up route and it is a surprise that, with all the fundamental problems that exist in a law firm in trying to offer so many practice areas, that there has not been more splinter firms being thrown off.

Ask yourself this question: Is it possible for the existing brand to carry all of the practice areas going forward? If not how will you address it?

Option 2

Change the management structure.

Most firms have gone for a committee of some type distinct from the equity or fixed share partners. Is it working? No, then why are you continuing with it?Either it doesn’t fulfill its purpose or the wrong people are on the wrong seats on the bus.

Option 3

Ask for help.

Accept that you don’t have all the answers. You will find if you look expertise available where other, gifted people have witnessed seismic change.This doesn’t mean wheeling out consultant after consultant. No you have to identify the problem – lack of cash, lack of commercialism, HR issues, too high a dependency on legal aid or too few good quality clients – and then find the right person. Make sure you select wisely.

Option 4

Stop making excuses. And stop putting up reasons why things can’t be done.

Accept that lawyers like to pull everything to pieces and are sceptical – that is in large measure what you are paid to do; but you need to inculcate a completely different mindset.

Option 5

Stop worrying what the competition is doing.

The competitive landscape changes all the time. You competitor tomorrow may be completely different from your competitor of today. It’s out of your control.

Option 6

Make small decisions.

Agree that if it is wrong you can easily change things rather than those massive lofty aims you have like being a top 50 law firm or one of the best employers in the area. Sure they are important but if you don’t reach that level you just end up looking stupid and losing face internally.

Option 7

Urgently promote all your best people.

If you have to change the labels to accomadate this then do so.

Option 8

Stand for something and believe it.

I have mentioned on a number of occasions the way in which Zappos have made their values the raison detre of their business. Go back and re-examine that vision statement which usually starts off saying:

“We put our clients first and aim to deliver the very best service at an affordable price.”

Do you believe that your vision statement stands for something? No then change it but not before you have consulted with all your staff on what they think.

This point is key. One of the biggest gripes in law firms is the fact that staff are disengaged and not motivated. Of course, you cannot expect to bring everyone along.

Option 10

Out train your competition.

Of course each firm will have its own issues, some long-standing and others that have only recently come to light. But whatever the scenario you have to treat everything about the firm’s development as urgent. Don’t be forced to make changes only when something bad happens or when you lose a client.

If you are not inspired to change then how can you expect your people to grasp the situation?

10 Top Career Tips for Lawyers

In no particular order:

1. Read widely. As Jim Rohn said: “All leaders are readers.” You could do no worse than starting with Dale Carnegie’s seminal work How to Win Friends and Influence People. Don’t just read books that you think a lawyer should read. Read something that will make you more rounded.
2. Listen. This is skill number 1. Time yourself next time you are speaking to a client or a colleague as to how long you leave it before you interrupt. I bet you can’t stay quiet for more than a minute.
3. Put the other person’s interest first. Stop thinking incessantly what’s in it for you.
4. Say thank you. And get into the habit of sending thank you notes. You might just be the first lawyer to use them. In 14 years of practice I never heard a single partner talk about them let alone use them.
5. Extend trust. At some stage you are going to have to give someone a chance.
6. Volunteer but do it with a big fat smile. If you think you need to suck up all the time don’t bother.
7. Don’t forget why you went into law in the first place. When it gets really gnarly later on in your career and you feel weighed down by the expectation of billing (as if there was nothing else of importance) go find one of your essays or law papers and read it. You will appreciate just how far you have come and why law originally meant so much to you.
8. Never trash your competitors. You never know where you might find yourself in the next few years.
9. Show up. If someone asks you to do something, make sure you are present, motivated and energised. If you talk about under promising and over delivering with your clients well the same maxim applies to the internal market.
10. Have fun. I have always believed that if it is not fun it’s not worth doing. Now I am not suggesting you go around with rose-tinted spectacles, but for heaven’s sake given how much of your life is given over to work you need to enjoy and take pleasure from what you are doing. If you find yourself endlessly searching for the next big thing or complaining then may be you need to take a short break to recharge your batteries and consider whether you have chosen wisely in your career choice.

The legal landscape is changing faster than at any time previously and you simply can’t afford to adopt a wait and see policy. No: you need to work on things NOW.

Where life and work merge

It is perhaps overstating the position, but I firmly belief that our work is our life or, certainly, a very large part of it. And that is not just because it takes up such an inordinate amount of time but we get so much from it – or at least we should.

It should inspire us, fill us with joy and make us feel special. Too often I hear people moan about their job and they make it sound as if the world is about to end: “I can’t stand it any more.”

I know how hard it is to be inspired when you don’t feel appreciated and rewarded; but work is too important, in the scheme of things, to simply dismiss as something that you get done every day.

The thing is, as  a species, without work we would be lost in our own thoughts. Even if you were fortunate enough to enjoy the privilege of not having to work for money, you would still need a sense of purpose and that is unlikely to come from basking in free leisure time.

Your career, your life and your family should not be left to chance. If something is not working you need to change it. But more than that you need to go to work on your work, rather than working in it and being carried along on the tide – wherever that is headed.

Lots of material exists to create a whole new life – goal setting programmes, wellness and meditation – but the truth of it is that you must want to do it for yourself. You can have the most sophisticated and developed programme but if you are not willing to go through a period of change and likely discomfort then may be you should accept that you need to make the most of what you have and stop dreaming about the “What if …”.

I have been inspired by many things and many people in my life. I have been blessed over the past 20+ years to work with some outstanding leaders and one thing that that has shown me is no one got great if they didn’t have a clear idea of where they were going and how they were going to get there.

If you are stuck in a job that you hate you need to start planning not just for the Exit door when the market picks up but also looking at your profile, and marketability and ask yourself if you are the best of everything that you can be. If you think that there are areas that you need to work on, then start now. Don’t delay. Have a plan which includes your mission statement and start working and moving things toward closing the gap on where you need to be every single day.

Yes you will have ups and downs but if you know the direction you are headed it will be a heck of a lot easier to withstand the inevitable battering once you commit to your new direction.

Social Media and the Art of Gobbledygook

I have been ruminating about this post for some time.

Social Media is my passion. In fact, I have gone so far to say that I am insanely passionate about it, which someone took to mean “… you have lost the plot”. Possibly.

But what I have observed over the last few months is the increasing divide between those people in the (social media) know and everyone else.

We talk about all things social media with such alacrity but the reality is that there are still a lot of people who have very little understanding of the lexicon let alone how any of this *stuff* works.

And, if anything, their understanding is imbued with all the wrong messages, largely as a result of the headline grabbing attention that Facebook or Twitter continually gets.

I have wondered whether it is comparable to other phenomenon  but it is hard to match one genre with another.

However, what it does resonate with is the oft repeated criticism of lawyers who talk in a language that their clients don’t understand.

I can still remember going into practice and looking at letters that were replete with legal phrases, latin and a lot of back-covering gobbledygook.

Now I will confess to having lost myself in the rather gladiatorial nature of dispute resolution and been prone to writing the odd prolix letter here and there (… you see, old habits die hard) but I did try to make a conscious effort to make sure that I wrote in a way that my client would understand the key issues and hopefully some of the subtleties  or nuances of the case. It was a constant challenge though and it was difficult at time to completely step back from the language and put yourself fully in your client’s shoes. Of course, there were occasions, where after a bit of egging on by the client, you felt comfortable in writing that letter for effect; but again I would always consider that at some stage the letter could be seen by a judge and if it was flippant, full of bellicose language or ego-centric comments, then I would have to answer for it and not the client.

If social media and the innumerable platforms are going to become an aid and not a distraction for law firms then whoever is controlling the messaging needs to consider the following:

1. The internal position.

2. The external external.

3. The approach which says: “There are no stupid questions”.

4. An explanation backed up with some live training.

5. A focus on how the social media universe is developing.

6. How there is increasing integration in social media land.

7. To focus on the people first and a heavy dose of listening before everyone gets carried away with jumping aboard.

8. To have a mechanism where the risk and reward is properly assessed.

9. To start with the premise that everyone knows nothing.

10. To stop talking about social media as if it is something other than … marketing, communication or business development. It is simply a different way of doing things and that needs to be explained.

Don’t assume that this is age related. There will be some younger people who are just as much in the dark.

If you find yourself getting frustrated in having to explain the same thing over and over then don’t think it’s their fault but rather look at your own messaging. I have spent many hours training lawyers on LinkedIn and I am still amazed with some of the questions I get but that doesn’t mean to say that the people are any less committed  to making it work.

I love the line “What do you think”. It is taken from a chapter of the Little Big Things from Tom Peters. In the final analysis if you find that you are getting a lot of blank faces staring back at your don’t be afraid to ask them what they think about social media and in particular the language you have chosen.

‘Try before you Buy’ legal services

How many law firms offer the ability to road test the legal service that their client is about to purchase? At its most basic this is about getting a taste of the experience, which is fundamentally what using a service is all about. You remember something for its WOW factor or very often its lack of it.

Normally what you are offered is a free half-hour or some such enticement and if you think there is a case or matter worth proceeding with then you accept the client. Yes you might provide advice that resolves the case but that is surely the rare occasion.

Rarely in my experience does the client, after the initial meeting, turn round and say I am just going to shop around. I accept that there may be some clients who don’t like the advice who don’t return but the reality is that you are baiting the line hoping to land the “Big One”. In a way it is a pre-qualification service but of course no firm is going to call it that!

If firms want to move the current debate on about how they will compete with more consumer focused brands then it is not a question of seeking out the novel or wacky for the sake of it (they can’t keep saying we are the best) but rather looking for methodologies that work in other business sectors that might not be available or as attractive to larger concerns. These will be focused on personal attention – think about the very best shop that you go into where they know your name and look after your every need with a big smile and enthusiastic manner.

The Try before you Buy approach will have the compliance ‘folk’ (and possibly the senior partner) going off into a tail-spin on the basis that a firm could be sued even though the client never paid a brass farthing for the advice, but that really is being very negative and overly cautious.

No instead look to see how the client might try out your service or see examples of your work or get an idea of how you live up to your promises. In that way they get to understand just what it feels like to be an XYZ firm client. Show them how much they mean to you.

This approach or something allied to it might just help in assuaging a client’s concern that they will have to pay for every bit of advice even though they can’t even see the meter running.

Does your law firm have an Entrepreneurial perspective?

I hope you will bear with me for the next few days whilst my blog at www.juliansummerhayes.com is migrated to a new website. It is some time since I posted here but am glad to see that it still retains that comfortable WordPress feel. [Thanks to Ian Brodie as well for the top tip on saving the content].

I wasn’t going to post but, having posted every day, save for Christmas and New Year, I didn’t want the resistance to get the better of me (see The War of Art by Steven Pressfield).

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Without question the idea of a law firm being entrepreneurial is a challenge to any partner. Not least the fact that they are hidebound by so much bureaucracy, officialdom, the weight of (historical) partner perspective and a focus on the commodity of law.

Moving forward it will be essential for firms to strip themselves bare of the shackles of yesteryear and start to envision a whole new business model. Indeed, every person in a position to make and bring about change will need to stop thinking like a legal technician and more like an entrepreneur.

Tom Watson the founder of IBM is reputed to have started out with a crystal clear vision of what IBM would look like as a mature business, how that business would function in that guise and looked at the current situation and matched what the business was doing on a daily basis to what it should be doing. This is mentioned in Michael Gerber’s book the E-Myth Revisited.

If firms adopted this approach then I believe it would force them to cut out the hyperbole that goes with verbose and meaningless value statements and instead look at what a firm of the future would resemble and if their (current) values measured up to that. And even more important is to envision the sort of clients that a firm of the future would act for and if they are equipped to deliver the service that said clients would demand.

Most firms will struggle at this for the simple reason that in trying to see the future they will take as their reference the past. As I have said before that is like trying to drive a car whilst looking in the rear view mirror. And there is also the perennial problem of trying to see who is leading the pack and then copy the best bits and mould the rest to the practice. Again that won’t work. The leaders are the leaders because they do something different from the rest and once you have caught up with them they will have moved on to the next phase. There is a touch of Kysen in this but again how many firms have a system in place which iterates at the stupendous rate that is needed to build a new-model law firm every few years?

One further point: Given how law firms have flocked to the middle ground it will be important to Think Big. Whatever your firm of the future resembles and how the service is delivered you have got to consider the number of providers in the market and it is unlikely that your ideas will be that novel. If that is right then it will come down to doing the basics extraordinarily better than the next firm. It won’t be enough to meet the regulatory or compliance hurdles. In any event clients will expect that as a given and those clients, particularly the ones that are relatively well-informed, will look for the double-WOW factor. They will want their cake and to eat it in abundance.

Partners need to start working on the business of law and to not constantly see their role as an essential part of the delivery of legal services. Yes a person’s expertise and Brand is important but the firm shouldn’t exist separate from the partners but as one indivisible whole. Not all clients require partner attention and as long as they receive Amazon style consistency, particularly around the commoditised end of the market, they are not going to be that discerning of using one person over another. In fact they may never meet a real person either because the service is delivered over the internet or it may be that a virtual law firm is the firm of choice.

Entrepreneurship, flair, innovation and passion are not something that most HR departments are briefed to look for. Instead they look for the safe option. The classically trained and super-bright lawyers. All the weirdos or those people who might have started their own business don’t normally get a look in. May be this is a step too far given that it may upset the law firm culture that firms have been so precious to build but unless your existing cohort have all the answers you may find that you unnatural lawyer is just what the business needs right now.

The Strategic objectives for the next 5 years should be priority number 1. Make sure you put your very best people to work on this. Give it an end date for implementation and make sure the message goes out loud and clear that if the market is left to dictate the pace and shape of change that the firm may disappear as slicker and bigger brands enter the market.