Legal revolution: The 'future normal' for law firms

Considerations about the changing nature of work have resulted in a wide range of predictions over the years, many of which have come true. Charles Handy's radical predictions 20 years ago¹ about portfolio careers, the rise of home-working and the spread of outsourcing are now commonplace features of working life. On the other hand, the 'paperless office' which was widely predicted 30 years ago is still a distant dream for most of us, despite huge advances in technology. As Bill Gates once said, "we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years, and underestimate the change that will happen over the next ten".

Despite the risks of getting it wrong or misjudging the pace of change, opening our minds to future possibilities is a legitimate way of driving strategy and taking more control of organisational destiny. We need to dare to be bold in our thinking, using the trends that are already emerging, to envisage the world of work over the next 10 years, and to prepare our organisations to compete in new and different ways for top talent.

A quiet revolution

If we look closely enough, the clues to
what the future of work might hold are all around us.

Many of lawyers' working practices have changed significantly over the past 20 years. Technology has streamlined the processes of due diligence, discovery and contract drafting, and the pace of communications has increased out of all recognition by the use of email, conference calls and mobile phones. We now live in an on-demand economy, where the lines between work and other aspects of our lives are increasingly blurred. There is an 'anytime, anywhere' mentality amongst new entrants to the workplace, and a trend towards boundaryless lifestyles.

A quiet revolution is also taking place in the manner and environments in which people work individually and together, with profound implications for law firms. Yet, some things - such as traditional hierarchies, levels of individual autonomy, linear career pathways and a reliance on single-cell offices - have changed very little. It's in these areas in which significant changes are now emerging.

Being agile is the key to becoming more competitive and sustainable in future, according to the Agile Future Forum (AFF). Agile working is a set of working practices that allow businesses to establish an optimal workforce and provide a greater match between the resources and the demand for services, increased productivity, and improved talent management. These practices include considerations of when and where people work, the role that they play and the source of their employment contract. The top traits of an agile business include a
high-performance culture, flexibility, collaborative working relationships and rapid decision making.

A recent report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD), which was produced in collaboration
with the AFF,² revealed that more than a third of employees want to change their working arrangements in some way.
The current demand for flexible working is only the start of a major shift in employee expectations around greater choice over their working patterns, employment status and career pathways.

There is a trend towards 'independent' careers, where individuals prefer to hold multiple jobs over the course of their working life and where work has a diminishing centrality in their life. This
trend is likely to grow as the new generation challenge the assumptions of office hours, fixed working spaces, continuous career progression and prescriptive job descriptions.

For law firms, this shift has profound implications for the traditional legal career - a model in which specialisation is required upon qualification; progression is determined by post-qualification experience; work is allocated by partners; and taking a career break is considered career suicide.

Law firms will need to re-think their career model to enable lawyers to enter
the profession at different points and to
be offered more choice and variety in the work they do. Partners will also need to
be receptive to lawyers taking time out to do other things during the course of their legal career.

Clearly, some of this is already happening, with an increase in the outsourcing of legal work and the use
of temporary legal staff. But, the changes so far have been driven principally by firms wanting greater flexibility in their fixed employment costs. A truly agile organisation is one which is focused
as much on the needs and expectations
of staff as it is on its own productivity
and profitability.

 

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The ‘future normal’ for the legal market

1. Lean and agile organisations will be the market leaders

2. Networked working within and across organisations

3. Fewer offices and more smart working spaces

4. More varied and employee-driven working arrangements

5. Significant automation of repetitive knowledge work

6. High demand for emotional, creative and artificial intelligence

7. More varied and discontinuous career pathways

8. Advanced analytics used in learning and performance management

9.  A firm’s stated purpose and values will determine its reputation

10. Successful leaders will inspire others in matrix virtual organisations

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From hierarchy to wirearchy

Companies such as Netflix, Uber and Google are setting the pace in new ways of working and creating working environments that lack rigid hierarchies. A networked organisation is proving attractive to the millennial generation, who look for autonomy in their work and prefer communicating through communities of interest and knowledge, rather than respecting traditional hierarchies.

For law firms, there are implications for the degree to which associates are supported to work autonomously, and the access they will have to colleagues and partners across internal boundaries. In future, there is likely to be a shift in expectations with regard to lines of communication and levels of empowerment. The traditional patterns of supervision will come under strain and partners will need to adjust to trainees and associates collaborating, independent of the practice's chain of command.

Offices without walls

Another growing trend is for offices to be designed specifically to support collaborative working and to encourage innovation. New workspaces are being designed with a wide variety of quiet retreat and collaborative settings, with staff given the flexibility to choose a setting that is best suited to their work at any particular moment.

Students already experience collaborative working spaces as the norm while at university. On entering the workplace, they expect to work in an environment that replicates the ease of communication and learning they have grown used to, rather than working in single cells or confined spaces. Co-working space will be the new norm in organisations, recreating the coffee house concept - today's hot destination for students to get work done.

Law firms have tended to stick to a core of cellular offices and corridors of meeting rooms, with communal spaces normally reserved for social interaction rather than collaborative working. Whilst quiet time for concentrated work is clearly a necessity given the nature of legal work, there is no reason why working space could not be reconfigured to allow more flexibility and to enhance team working. Working in multifunctional spaces where a tablet and mobile phone are the only required tools
has the potential to stimulate ideas and innovative solutions to clients' issues or internal projects.

Robot legal secretaries

The way that young lawyers now work
on their own documents has fundamentally changed the role of legal secretaries
from specialist work processors to
personal assistants who organise meetings, take calls and support partners' productivity. In some respects, however, this shift has been detrimental to lawyer efficiency
and morale.

With advances in artificial intelligence, tools are being created that can undertake complex tasks and simplify the overwhelming inputs professionals receive through their PCs, phones and tablets.

Virtual assistants are already being trialled in banking, and it is easy to see how such technologies would also be highly valuable to lawyers as they struggle to keep on top of information, processes and appointments, and as they increasingly work on the move. Such technology could lead to the demise of secretaries in private practice, but it could also increase the job satisfaction of lawyers.

Enhancing performance

New trends are also pointing the way to the future of performance management and evaluation. We are seeing the emergence of advanced analytics to measure and monitor performance in fields such as sport and medicine. The measurement of activity, outputs and performance is becoming far more accurate through the development of wearable sensor technologies such
as Fitbit wristbands and the upcoming
Apple Watch.

In the field of law, wearable technologies could be used in future to improve learning and development, as well as to measure the performance of client service activities in far more accurate and efficient ways than timesheet completion.

In terms of enhancing individual performance, there is a trend in high-pressure environments for drugs such as Adderall, Ritalin and Modafinil to be used to enable people to work harder and longer, and to improve their memory. As 'smart drugs' become routinely used by university students to prepare for exams and cope with coursework, it is highly probable that they will continue to use these drugs to boost their achievements at work. It seems likely, therefore, that the acceptability of performance-enhancing drugs will increase, especially in demanding competitive workplaces such as law firms.

It remains to be seen, however, how well law firms will cope with this development - whether they will try to control the use of drugs, to ignore the issue or to embrace the possibilities for higher performance. What is clear is that, for some, work will become comparable to an extreme sport. The consequences in already highly-pressurised working environments will need to be carefully managed to protect not only the well being of staff but also the risks to the firm.

 

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How to prepare for the new world of work

• Base strategy on the employee reputation you aspire to

• Attract new recruits through flexible career pathways

• Redesign workspaces to encourage collaboration, innovation and learning

• Manage performance in an era of ‘smart’ drugs

• Embrace new technologies that improve productivity

• Introduce less rigid hierarchical working

• Provide more autonomy at junior levels

• Articulate a clear sense of purpose and live up to it

• Choose visionary new-style leaders

• Embrace change at a firmwide and individual level

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Leadership and purpose

In future, managing a diverse, heavily matrixed and virtual organisation will be a key requirement of law firm leaders. This will almost certainly require changes to the way that leaders are selected and appointed. Having an illustrious reputation and an impressive client following will no longer equip a managing partner to successfully steer a firm into the new world of work.
New leaders will be chosen for their
ability to envision the future and to
create conditions that inspire change
and innovation.

Strategically, firms will have to develop employment brands that go beyond a set of career promises. As work and life become more intertwined, the new generation of trainees will ask themselves more fundamental questions than 'do I want to be a partner?' They will be asking themselves 'what's it all about?' and 'what's it all for?' To answer these questions, law firm leaders will need a clear narrative about the purpose and values of their firm. They will also need to feel comfortable with describing to staff how they can find meaning and joy in their work and their working relationships.

Law firm leaders need to open their minds to the exciting possibilities that the changing world of work can bring, and to embrace them with enthusiasm. The law firms that will successfully win the 'war for talent' in the future will be those that are courageous enough to try out radical new ways of working, and are committed to making fundamental changes to their working practices for the benefit of their people and their clients. Creating the conditions for 21st-century learning, collaboration, networking and innovation is the new Holy Grail.

Jill King is a consultant and the former global HR director at Linklaters (www.jkinsights.co.uk)

Endnotes

1. See The Age of Unreason, Charles Handy, Harvard Business School Press, 1989 and The Empty Raincoat, Charles Handy, Hutchinson,1994

2. See HR: Getting smart about agile working, CIPD, November 2014