Practice management | Adapt to survive

It is fair to say that in my experience, pre-recession, most lawyers looked to resist change at all costs. As a profession we have always been pretty good at debating change, improvements and ideas, and coming up with plenty of good arguments as to why not to do things – it’s in our make-up.

It is probably also now fair to say, that having endured a recession for the last five years, and now that we are coming to terms with the fact that this is the new ‘normal’, lawyers are more willing to consider change.

The recession has forced many firms to change the way they operate, the opening up of the legal market to non-lawyers has shown many how to change. Those firms that change will move forward – I fear many of the others will simply die off.

My firm has gone through a fair amount of change in the last decade. We have actually endured two ‘recessions’ in that period, which perhaps explains why we have been prepared to change more than most over the last few years.

?Alarm bells?

Our first ‘recession’ was almost a decade ago. It is quite risky for any firm to put so many eggs in one basket, but we were in a position where over a third of our work was coming from one client. That client turned round to us one day and told us we had to merge our entire business with one of two other firms that it had chosen for us. We had a month to do this. After four weeks that client took away all of its files beginning with the letters A and B and sent them to a third firm. The week after, all the files beginning with the letters C and D went, again to that third firm. By the end of the next week we had taken the decision not to merge with either of those two firms but to give one of them the department that serviced that client’s work and continue as a now much smaller independent firm.

Not all the people servicing that client went so we had to make some people redundant, we had a floor of our building to sub-let and we had to deal with the fact that we had lost over a third of our turnover. That is certainly what most businesses would refer to as a wake-up call.

We did wake up – it was clear that as a firm we had to change considerably, not least we had to rebuild the firm. The starting point was to sit down with the clients that we had retained and to ask them what they wanted from a mid-tier law firm. We sat down with the staff as well. A lot of firms send out questionnaires and employ third parties to survey their clients – I said I would go and visit 50 or so of them face to face and ask them the questions directly. We didn’t pick our top 50 clients, we didn’t pick those that we knew would be nice to us – we tried to get a complete cross section, some that used us for all their work, some that used us for the odd job, some that hadn’t used us for a few years and some that had complained about us.

The feedback was invaluable. It really helped us on our way to make sure that we gave our clients and staff the experience they wanted. We were keen for them to recommend us to their peers and competition, we were keen for them to keep coming back and we were keen to retain our good people and attract more.

We focused on the basics – more transparency with regard to costs (it seems like fixed fees have been around forever for us), no sitting on the fence when it comes to giving advice and no sitting in the office all the time either – spending more time out with the clients.

There was also quite a large issue that was raised by both our clients and our staff – we were coming to the end of a 25-year lease in a very old building over many floors and we were working in a pig sty. We decided that as part of our strategy we would really focus on the way we worked and endeavour to get everybody into new premises and on to one floor. We were finding that as a firm working over four floors in reality it meant four different firms operating under one name – I would dread to think what it is like at firms that have multi-sites without some clear policies and procedures in place.

The difficulty with our office relocation was our lease came to the end a year after the current recession started. We had to decide whether or not we would move or whether we would just hold over on the lease. I am pleased to say that we had the courage to do the right thing and we moved the firm despite the recession. Looking back it seems the obvious choice – even though we were open plan in our old premises we had no clear desk policy, the building was poorly laid out, it was old and tired, and it simply didn’t give the right experience to our staff or clients. If I was looking to recruit new staff I would always meet them in Starbucks as opposed to show them the old office. They got that “experience” after they had agreed to join us.

Office space?

So we changed – we moved to the eighth floor of 1 New York Street in Manchester. Everything was new. New offices, new desks and new IT. You would have thought persuading everybody to move over would be easy, right? Wrong.

As I said at the start, lawyers don’t like change – there were big concerns regarding the noise levels (we would now be completely open plan and hot desking). People were worried whether or not they would have a seat when they came in on a morning (despite the fact that we had carried out a survey at the old offices and noted that we never had more than 70 per cent of our staff in on any one day due to trips to court, trips to clients, training, holidays). People were really worried where they would put their personal pictures and their desk mascots. People were worried about hygiene – they would be sharing phones and dictating machines that one of their colleagues had been using the day before.

The key lesson I learnt from the move was that you had to involve everybody in the change process. We split up into working groups and asked people what they liked and disliked about the previous office so we would know where to make improvements and what to retain. I had a one-to-one coffee with everybody in the office. Every time we had a why not to, we had to find the why to, solution for them.

People had to see open plan offices in operation to understand how quiet they can be. More like a library than an office at times. People had to see the survey results to believe that we would never have more than 70 per cent of our people in on any one day. People still work in their teams and all on benches, so all their short term filing is right next to the benches.

We do clean desks up every night but some files, pictures and mascots can go into those drawers and be brought back out each day. As for the hygiene – the cleaners in our old building used to spend three quarters of their time lifting up files to clean underneath them. Now we have a clear desk policy, they can spend more time cleaning phones and dictating machines.

We’ve been following our strategy to give our people and our clients the best possible service and the best experience for the last decade and the premises move was just part of that, but it has had an amazing effect on the firm. We have the right people doing the right type of work.

We have an amazing team atmosphere and people are able to see who is busy ?and who’s not, share work around ?properly, supervise and mentor people better. Both productivity and cross selling have risen dramatically. In our first year after the move the firm’s turnover grew by 16 per cent.

Perhaps one of the best benefits is we now are able to work in sector teams better than ever before, focusing on our core specialisms of education, health, private tax and sport – all of which pull in people from commercial, employment, dispute resolution, property and private law teams.

One of the other bi-products of physical change, such as an office move, is it encourages a culture that is more willing to accept change and improvement.

We are now in 2013 facing a benign market place with more squeeze on our margins, more regulation, and yet more competition from lawyers and from non-lawyers.

We as a firm have an incredible amount of further change to go through and then we will find out if that is enough to survive. Quite simply our view is that if you don’t change and evolve as a legal practice these days, you will die.