Flexible service: Launching the Lawyers on Demand service model

Partner Simon Harper reflects on the lessons learnt from launching a new service model at Berwin Leighton Paisner

Key takeaway points:

1. Don’t over-engineer the concept
2. Experiment and then replicate the successes
3. Remember that law is all about relationships 
4. Make the most of any constraints 
5. Don’t try to be too innovative
6. Decisions are easy when they can be temporary
7. Laugh when you can
8. Work under the radar
9. Improve your world
10. Quality is paramount

 

Faced with price pressures, regulatory changes and economic uncertainty, the legal market looks set to further segment and stratify. This rightly leads firms to ask themselves questions about the core of their business. Is all of their work really bespoke and mission-critical for clients, or is some of the work more business-as-usual or even commoditised?

Each of these segments form the basis of a legitimate model for a legal services business. However, is it possible for a law firm to work with more than one service model and even to build a new one to complement its current offering?

As a commercial partner at Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) looking at how best to retain and grow our clients, I had this question in mind back in 2007. After a little inspiration while lying on the beach, some ad-hoc market research back in London and getting together with a colleague, Jonathan Brenner, we suggested piloting a new model alongside the firm’s core business.

Over the subsequent four years, the resulting service, Lawyers on Demand (LOD), has grown well beyond our original expectations. In 2010, it turned over more than £5m, attracting much attention in the meantime.

Though we were ambitious from the start, LOD wasn’t meticulously planned with endless foresight, tempting as it is to claim visionary status. Like all good start-up businesses, it changed and adapted as it grew. This article looks at what it took to develop a new service model within an existing firm and how that model works.

 

Designing the model

The traditional legal model works well for resourcing many client needs, but can be ill-suited to those under increasing cost and resourcing pressures for business-as-usual work.

There are often reasons why extra resources are required on a part-time or full-time basis where the traditional model does not provide a workable answer, either because of the expense involved or the need for the lawyer to be within the business. Clients may look to firms for secondments but these can be scarce and are too often a compromise, with neither client nor firm getting quite what they want from the arrangement.

The increased prominence of resourcing and budgetary pressures on the client agenda coincided with a growing number of high-quality lawyers who had started to question their career options.

While clients were struggling to resource their legal needs, some great lawyers were toiling with the challenges of balancing an ambitious career with the other things that mattered to them most – like their families, creative ventures and prized hobbies – knowing that existing models for legal work left little room for other priorities.

So, LOD was created to enable clients to flex their teams without the usual overheads and to give talented lawyers a way to pursue other interests or otherwise work in a way that suits their own priorities.

LOD comprises a flexible pool of high-quality freelance lawyers who are trained, vetted and supported by BLP. They work directly with a client, either at the client’s offices or from the lawyer’s home office, but with web-based access to firm know-how and PSL support.

It is a service which combines the commercial approach and flexibility of an in-house resource with the support and quality assurance of a major law firm. Reduced overheads and minimal supervision allow us to provide this using a pricing structure based on fixed daily and weekly rates.

LOD began as a pilot in 2007 with eight lawyers. Since then, our team has increased ten-fold in size and gained a fantastic list of clients. In 2009, we pushed the boundaries further and developed an additional model providing internal LOD assignments to BLP itself – around 25 in the past year.

 

Launching in a law firm

Unfortunately, the very traits which traditionally make for a good lawyer can sometimes conflict with those needed to quickly adapt to meet a changing market and launch a service like LOD. So, how did we manage to launch LOD within BLP?

First, the firm’s culture of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit meant that LOD was given the support and room to grow that it needed in the early days. It could have been perceived as a direct threat to BLP’s traditional legal services model – many of our competitors still view it this way. However, the firm’s board saw that the legal landscape was changing and embraced the concept quickly.

Notwithstanding questioning from some of the more traditional partners, the firm saw that LOD could enhance not only client relationships but also BLP’s reputation as a forward thinking, innovative law firm.

Second, we had a unique combination of expertise. My own experience included ten years as a lawyer advising companies on how to adapt quickly to the disruptive changes brought on by the internet, with clients ranging from start-ups to blue chips. My co-founder Jonathan’s background had been in starting and running one of the City’s largest legal recruiters.

This combination has enabled us to look after both the clients and the talent in the way that LOD requires, as well as to adopt an entrepreneurial approach that would not come naturally to many firms.

 

The challenges

Throughout the growth of LOD, I remained a partner at BLP with a day job and a large client base happily utilising the core model on matters that could never be replaced by LOD.

While LOD offered something new, it was important to all of us not to cast aside the traditional model as in any way outmoded. Indeed, much of LOD’s benefit to BLP was predicated on LOD resources allowing BLP to innovate through improvements and efficiencies in resourcing and service provision.

To make LOD work, the first thing we needed to do was to put to one side the structure, mindsets and assumptions that make the regular BLP model successful and allow LOD to answer some basic questions quite differently. How will we engage with lawyers? How will we charge clients? How will we sell this service?

It’s very easy to subconsciously accept structures and actions that have been successful for the core firm model. However, we needed to get beyond that. The market we were looking at demanded a different value proposition and client relationship management process than regular lawyering. In short, we needed to move from exploitation of an existing business model to exploration of a new one.

While on the one hand we endeavoured to forget assumptions, we also saw that there was the potential to borrow resources from our firm’s existing infrastructure. Client relationships, support services and brand credibility are usually unavailable to start-up ventures. However, because we were launching the new model within an established firm, we were able to pick and mix the elements that we needed.

Our partners were flexible, open-minded and happy to do things in alternative ways. This has meant the LOD lawyers received an excellent induction and training programme, with easy access to our systems and knowledge from wherever they are working. This was all essential to ensuring clients continue to receive high-quality services and LOD lawyers feel part of the BLP team.

 

Lessons learnt

In a way, the LOD concept wasn’t especially magical. As I’ve already noted, it scratched an increasing itch that we knew was bothering both clients and lawyers.

However, the next challenge was to get beyond the idea. It is very easy for a promising idea to become nothing more than that. With the benefit of hindsight, I’ve tried to highlight ten guidelines which I think have been crucial in making LOD work.

 

1. Don’t over-engineer the concept

Jonathan and I both had day jobs (as head of recruitment and TMT partner respectively). The firm’s early support in letting LOD happen as a pilot meant that, in only a few extra hours a week, we could get something launched.

It initially took a year for us to pull together what we needed to make it happen, but if we had waited until we had enough time, then we’d still be waiting. The time scarcity made us progress while plans were still fuzzy.

Though in the end it’s the details that make the difference, paralysis through analysis is easy at the early stages. Starting to build something a bit out of focus gave us room to adapt the details along the way.

 

2. Experiment and then replicate successes

We did some short, sharp experiments and then incrementally built upon what worked (and binned what didn’t).

For example, we tried some pricing models alongside each other and observed which ones worked for clients and which ones worked for our own profitability. We experimented with the areas of law to grow into – we tried adding our first corporate finance lawyer to the team a week before the Lehman crisis, a perfect example of learning quickly (and it’s no surprise that corporate is an area of growth that we didn’t pursue again for a couple of years).

 

3. Remember that law is all about relationships

As a business grows, it’s easy to focus on the numbers, the processes and the next innovation. However, part of starting LOD was a rose-tinted wish to add another option that might be better for some lawyers and clients.

Whenever we have had a decision to make between short-term gain and long-term relationships, we’ve tried to do what we believe is best for our lawyers and clients (and so ultimately for LOD) by choosing long-term relationships over quick wins.

 

4. Make the most of any constraints

The wider firm gave us support, but there was no budget provided for the LOD experiment. So, the pilot had to beg and borrow resources and be profitable from the start.

These constraints were an advantage in disguise, because they forced us to invent each part of LOD so that it could stand alone. We had to avoid building in any fat. We made do with what we had and we both got involved in any matter we needed to in order to make LOD work, regardless of our roles within the wider firm.

 

5. Don’t try to be too innovative

I spent hours drawing complex models and creative approaches. However, it was almost always the most simple ones that worked best.

Our clients told us that they wanted innovation, but they are also lawyers – too much innovation can be off-putting. Our first step for LOD needed to be recognisable and relatively simple.

 

6. Decisions are easy when they can be temporary

We built LOD so that we rarely have to make a big decision: we just make lots of small ones. That way, we largely avoid endless meetings and big calls and instead have attainable goals (one more assignment, one more lawyer in the team) that we can accomplish and build upon.

This doesn’t mean we don’t have a big picture, big plans or big ambitions – of course we do – but quick and small decisions are so much easier to get things going.

 

7. Laugh when you can

Though this article may make it appear otherwise, things will inevitably go wrong. When we made mistakes, we admitted them and apologised – genuinely. Then we got on with the business (rather than writing a policy to ensure that this unique event never happened again).

Jonathan and I share a love of finding humour within everyday events of the business world. When bad things happened with LOD, as long as the only things that were hurt were our egos, we tried our best to find the funny side.

 

8. Work under the radar

LOD’s obscurity for the first couple of years was important while we got the model right. It allowed us both to prove ourselves to the more sceptical members of the BLP partnership and to test ideas with clients.

I can already feel that, as we get bigger, we will naturally take fewer risks with the models for the LOD business. This is something for us to keep an eye on as we grow up.

 

9. Improve your world

We want our lawyers and clients to say “this makes my life better”. The concept of an interim lawyer too often had a rather sad image attached of a wandering locum dreaming of a permanent home. This couldn’t be further from the truth for LOD lawyers.

We worked hard to help the image match the reality – of energised, talented and ambitious lawyers with a wish to work in a different, more self-directed, way. Many other industries benefit hugely from a high quality and happy freelance workforce – why not law?

 

10. Never forget that quality is paramount

Quality control was the primary concern of the firm’s board when I first proposed LOD – and their emphasis on this was spot-on.

We have developed a rigorous selection process for lawyers, which includes multiple interviews and technical tests. We look for the most ambitious and talented lawyers who have trained at top law firms and/or had blue chip in-house experience.

LOD prides itself on being innovative and we look for that same spark of creativity within the lawyers we recruit. To build our current LOD team of 80, we have looked at around 8,000 applications.

 

Business prospects

Today, LOD continues to grow and develop, serving clients across a broad spectrum of sectors in the UK and beyond. Clients include Cisco, Financial Times, Orange, Sky and a number of the big high street banks, all of which are multiple users of the LOD service.

We had an encouraging start to the financial year, which reflects strong continued demand in the market for flexible resourcing models.

Following approaches from other law firms and requests from our lawyers, we are considering offering LODs to third-party firms, broadening the range of potential assignments considerably and giving us important questions to deal with around conflicts and confidentiality.

The demand from clients seems set to increase and the advantages of being the only law firm that has developed this approach means that LOD looks well placed to continue to grow.

To meet these demands, we are recruiting further, giving more lawyers the ability to balance their legal careers with other interests and giving more clients a way to reduce their resourcing and budgetary burdens.

simon.harper@blplaw.com

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