Collaboration with clients is the new imperative in law firm services

By Paul Lippe, CEO, Legal OnRamp

Speaking from a North American perspective, I think London law firms far undervalue the competitive advantage offered by their know-how operations, both in gaining additional business and delivering superior value to existing clients.

 First, a couple of definitions: knowledge-sharing is giving clients access to pre-existing knowledge (generally without a fee) that is not otherwise privileged to another client. Collaboration, on the other hand, is leveraging that pre-existing knowledge in the most efficient and effective way to address a new legal problem (certainly with a fee) by creating a new work product.

By and large, firms which have done a good job of organising existing knowledge are in the best position to both share it and to create superior-quality new work.

How is this playing out among firms and clients today?

• Large UK and US law firms are implementing expert location systems internally so that they can identify in-house experts and work more effectively. They are also looking for ways to share these results with clients, so that their experts will be selected for client panels of possible experts.

• To minimise the time spent reinventing the wheel, many sophisticated law firm clients have implemented collaboration systems and tied these into those of their panel firms to tap expertise and integrate knowledge.

• At present, a large US-based company is implementing a collaboration system with its panel of firms to share knowledge among and across the panel.

• A large US law firm is also developing a publishing system to share its knowledge with clients.

• Lateral hires are increasingly asking about their potential law firms’ know-how operations, because they realise how vital these are in integrating within the firms and delivering superior client value.

A question often asked is whether law firms should share their most valuable information with clients. However, what legal information, in an internet-fuelled world where most things begin and end in the public domain, is really so unique that only the firm has access to it?

Law firms may be better off reimagining valuable information not as something to be kept under lock and key, but something to display in their ‘front windows’ to attract clients.

Perhaps in the past, law firms could deliver services ‘over the wall’, leveraging information asymmetry between firms and clients to provide legal work without much interaction. But today, clients have in-house expertise and most work gets done by integrated teams from the firm and the client.

For various reasons, clients will never develop large internal know-how divisions, so smart law firms will find a way to use this to tie themselves more closely to clients.

Technological advances

Unless one is sleeping under a rock, one is increasingly aware of social networks, such as Facebook or LinkedIn. In many ways, lawyers misapprehend what these networks are about and confuse examples (often apocryphal) of silly behaviour on the networks with the nature of the networks.

But think about these networks in relation to email. Not so long ago, we didn’t use email. Today, many of us spend a huge portion of our day using email – it is our primary tool to share knowledge and collaborate with others. Our email inbox/outbox is the main vehicle (along with a browser) by which we navigate the digital world.

Perhaps we have reached the end state of humanity’s technological development and email will continue to be the dominant tool in this manner.

But it seems at least equally likely (and the evidence from innovative users like students and software developers certainly suggests this) that we are migrating from a strictly email construct to integrated web-based systems that connect people and information in various ways, centred on profiles.

Facebook and LinkedIn are examples of purely individualised profile-centred systems, while Quad, SharePoint and Jive are examples of profile-centred enterprise systems. The legal industry, because it integrates people and information around networks, individuals and enterprises, will probably come up with its own, slightly different model.

But regardless of how that model develops, it will require accessing pre-existing information, identifying expertise and collaborating in the creation of new work products.

London law firms have made large investments in those capabilities to facilitate collaboration across their firms; they would be wise to leverage those investments to enable collaboration with clients.