Upwardly mobile?

Time is a leveller – it is how the legal profession quantifies its services.
The value of service is broken down into
a series of point-ones of an hour, rather than by output. Consequently, clients have become accustomed to being billed by the hour.
However, time counting does not capture
the value of that unit.

Value added

The value of thinking versus administration isn’t differentiated in a point-one entry on a lawyer’s timesheet. The fact that a lawyer likes a client, works more effectively to finish the case because they have been thinking about it in the bathtub the night before, and therefore resolves it faster isn’t accounted for in their charge-out because it isn’t reflected in their timesheet.

The six minutes spent photocopying is valued identically to six minutes spent articulating a case-winning strategy. A case with a small settlement payout at the end may be hugely complex and take many weeks longer than a
large corporate settlement worth millions.

Conveyancing, certain aspects of family and private client work (such as making a will), or personal injury claims, which are straightforward, can increasingly be ‘automated’ or ‘templatised’ to a degree. Yes, you could have an online calculator that tells you how much your divorce will cost and how much your maintenance may be.

You may be able to get a will made up online
that is personalised – to a degree – without ever speaking to a lawyer. You may do these things and think,‘Okay, I’m covered for now’, but not have any actual legal advice on the integrity or flimsiness
of what you have just paid for.

Competition and the opening up of the
legal sector is causing legal services to be commoditised. The fear is that this is going to force existing firms to push for greater time-based cost efficiencies and will see even more of a shift in client attitudes towards their counsel: less ‘I need your expertise’, more ‘I am paying you for a service’.

The need to provide a professional service and care for clients has not changed. These are at the core of the legal profession. But the approach you take for a particular case is bespoke.

Cutting costs

Not all efficiencies are cost efficiencies: premises, overheads, salaries, and insurance are often the greatest expenditures for a law firm each year. These factors have the largest impact on margins and profitability.

With deregulation, the pressure on firms to cut costs will increase. It is a chicken and egg situation: pressure on costs in order to be more efficient is likely to mean firms will start to deconstruct their services into bite-sized products, mostly those which are easier to commoditise.

For example, many firms already have online new client information forms, which will provide basic background to any case, so the counsel assigned will already have basic knowledge at an initial meeting, instead of a 45-minute first interview. Lawyers can think about the
case before the meeting, too, which will speed things up.

The move to open-plan seating, hot desking, and remote working is reducing rent, but changes like these make lawyers feel less like they are providing a professional service simply because their set-up is precisely that: less professional. Couple this with shifting client attitudes: ‘I’m paying you to do a job’, not ‘I need your help’. People simply want more for their money.

How this shift will affect staff training and retention is not yet known. Will more paralegals be needed to do more cursory work? Will secretaries need new qualifications and insurances to cover the increased range of
tasks they perform? Secretaries are tasked with document production, attendance notes, letters, liaising with courts, and deciphering dictation. They know the clients and are often the ones who call them to check details. There are still a handful of lawyers who have multiple secretaries, but it is increasingly common for one secretary to be shared between six or seven lawyers.

Taking legal work away from a secure workstation will always be a fundamental barrier to adopting more mobility in this sector. Emails and phone calls on the move are essential, but many in the sector feel there are many ways that client care, and the more administrative duties such as time keeping, approving and checking documents, scheduling, and delegating tasks can still be improved.

The problem is the commitment to a monstrous infrastructure needed to be fully efficient will put everyone off. Several industry-wide IT solutions already exist that integrate time keeping with broader case details and customer relationship management (CRM). The firms that sign up to these systems sign up to an entire ‘way of being’ that everyone must follow.

Internal efficiencies

The decision maker here is often led by IT, and the drive is entirely led by internal efficiencies. Opportunities still exist for solutions that cater more to medium-sized and smaller firms that don’t reap the economies of scale from these massive platforms.

Approaching innovation in your core business should be no different to the way you would approach a new case – specifically, with a clear intention of outcome. Spend time getting to know the tasks or customer experience processes that are redundant or inefficient, and start small. Senior partners need to be shown a case for scaling up.

Many senior equity partners haven’t understood the potential and capabilities of keeping up to date with technology. There is a reluctance to move away from what they know and what they know to be secure. More importantly, almost all lawyers interviewed for this piece said, ‘I did not become a lawyer to have anything to do with IT’. And yet, most seem pleased that they are now allowed to use automated spellchecking instead of forcing graduates to manually spellcheck 200-page documents.

So, start small. Ask some basic questions:
what could be easier? Why would we need
it? Who would use it most? Why would it
make a difference? Then look at the available technologies and imagine how they can come alive in your workplace by completing the sentence: ‘Imagine if we could…’.

The general mood among lawyers seems to
be that innovation is needed and shouldn’t be feared; it will offer every firm huge benefits
if approached in the right way.

Efficiency and improvements to CRM and the customer experience are all required to deliver client satisfaction and deliver returns for the new breed of legal sector investors. One lawyer put it succinctly: ‘Efficiency in a law firm shouldn’t be confused with cutting corners. People still expect the job to be well done, and rightly so.’

People may expect less personal service in
this new world, but they will still expect the
best level of service, regardless of what they
paid for it. Whether it is for efficiency or for differentiation, firms must explore ways that existing technologies can help them be more competitive in this new world. SJ

Joo Teoh is managing director at Ampersand Mobile