Historic attitudes favouring globalisation are fundamentally changing....
| 1yr
| 1yr
Historic attitudes favouring globalisation are fundamentally changing....
Traditionally, many law firms have seen their operational support as a necessary evil, a cost to be contained rather than a value-add.
Of course, this is not true of all firms. Many see business support as an integral and fundamental part of the firm’s functioning. And across the industry, we are seeing the growth of law firm operational support into new areas, changing the definition of the value that business operations can bring to the business and changing attitudes, even in firms where support has at best been ‘tolerated’.
Let’s look at the traditional rationale for business support and see how those working on different aspects of law firm operations are making an impact in new ways.
1. What is the purpose of law firm operational support?
Put simply, law firm operations support is there to save lawyer time and improve the firm’s service to clients, to keep costs lower and help the business stay client-focused.
Operations have therefore concentrated on taking routine administrative work off the shoulders of lawyers and putting it into the hands of much cheaper people (who are not lawyers). Hence large-scale finance teams focused on billing, reporting and payroll; HR teams managing recruitment, induction and personnel management; and marketing teams handling directory submissions, preparing lawyer CVs and organising client surveys.
These benefits of operational support are increasingly seen as ‘routine’. Now, though, there are some new arguments for the value this support can offer.
2. How can operations improve service delivery?
Business support has moved on from handling administration and keeping the lights on to improving both the value and the efficiency of a firm’s service delivery, and leaving the lawyer to focus on what they are best at – the actual legal output. Examples are:
3. How can operations improve law firm financial returns?
Finance teams have moved on from sorting out the billing and managing the law firm audit trail to assisting better financial recovery by:
4. How can operations help to bring in new revenue?
Winning new work isn’t all about talented lawyers selling their services. Marketing and business development professionals can also play a direct role through:
These are all areas where dedicated non-lawyers use their experience and creativity to boost opportunities for the firm externally – and relieve some of the demands on lawyer time.
5. How can operations improve client relationships?
It’s not just lawyers who can manage the firm’s client relationships:
6. How can operations make the firm more attractive to its people and clients?
On the face of it, the idea that business operations can make a real impact on the perception of the firm seems improbable. Isn’t a firm’s attractiveness to its clients and people all about the range and depth of its expertise and the ability and experience of its lawyers? But the attractivity of the modern law firm is about much more:
7. How do we get a return on this investment in operational support?
You may be worried that all these roles suggest an exponential explosion in the numbers of non-fee-earners in your firm. There are different ways to address this concern:
It is also worth the firm asking itself whether it needs necessary manual labour next door to its lawyers. Could equivalent quality labour be sourced from lower-cost countries or lower-cost regions in the same country? If accompanied by process simplification and greater dependence on technology, potentially significant cost reductions in some types of operational support such as accounts management, client onboarding and client proposal production could be achieved if moved offshore.
8. In conclusion ....
We can see there is a case for investment in types of non-chargeable roles and why some firms have been starting that journey. And the fear that this will spawn a proliferating ‘department’ in support can be managed with other methods. Modern law firm operations should comprise high-quality expertise, drawing on experience and learning from other business environments to create value and offer solutions that neither the lawyers nor technology can readily provide.
Richard King is a partner at business consultancy Bignon de Keyser and was previously chief legal operations officer at Herbert Smith Freehills.
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